Note: The Tattlerreceived this letter from Lauren Norkus, IHS English Department Leader, in response to Julia Kleinberg’s ’27 article “English Classes, or How to Do What You’re Told,” published in the March 2026 issue.
It is a tragic and criminal reality that, in this country of free and compulsory education, most American students do not reach high school proficiently knowing how to speak, read, and write in English. According to Samantha Perfas of The Harvard Gazette, as of September of 2025, “average reading scores for high school seniors—released by the Nation’s Report Card—fell to their lowest level since 1992. It was the first time that twelfth graders had taken the test since the COVID pandemic, and the results showed a widening gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students.” And, in an era of lowered expectations (for academics as well as behavior), combined with a generation of students who’ve become detrimentally enmeshed with technology, and are showing reduced cognitive ability for the first time in American history, education in general, and English education in particular, has become a Sisyphean attempt at educational triage. While there are multitudes of layers to the professional obligations of teachers, the most direct is that we give you the skills you need to earn a high school diploma and to be successful in your lives beyond Ithaca High School. Thus, the Tattler article entitled “English Classes, or How to Do What You’re Told” is actually a criticism of systemic failures locally and nationwide and not at all about establishing or maintaining a “stifled society” as that accusation couldn’t be further from the truth.
At IHS, the average teaching load is around 125 students. The reading ability of any year’s students ranges from actual illiteracy to those able to read at or above the college level. Another sect of our student body are those for whom English is not their first language, and those individuals possess the same range of abilities in English and often even in their first language. Thus, our students’ needs in any given school year are nuanced and complex.
Every day your teachers strive to meet the disparate needs of their students based on a conglomeration of what we ourselves, our district, and the State of New York, dictate that we ought to teach. At the very least, the State requires that we must annually lead our students to proficiency of twenty-eight learning standards based in reading, writing, speaking, and listening that culminate in the NYS Regents Exam in Language Arts in eleventh grade. According to Kleinberg, herein lies a main concern with English at IHS—too much teaching to a test (and therefore the checking of boxes). However, in our equity driven, heterogeneous (sort of, mostly, depending upon department and or grade level) classrooms, that is a means to an end that we cannot deny any of our students. To do so would be negligent.
This is why I am inclined to think that this article is less about a concern for homogeneity and a misguided mechanism to control the proverbial masses and is actually about systemic failures at IHS, the ICSD, and this nation.
Despite what would appear to have been borne mostly out of good intentions, there are myriad issues that prove either wholly damaging or at least questionable in regards to educating our students. Social promotion, grade inflation, lack of consequences, conflating hardship with trauma, and inundation with screens all play into the day to day classroom experience. Yet, the undoing of systemic issues is a laborious and slow process that is often met with resistance for a whole other myriad set of reasons. Which is not to say we should cease to try.
Every day we see in publications across this country how figuratively near sighted and literally skill deficient American students have become. The systems have failed you. And I am so very sorry. Your teachers, however, have not. They spend their professional lives alongside you fighting the good fights, trying to instill in you the means to discern what those are, and hoping against all hope that you’ll go on to do the same in your adult lives. So, yes, check the boxes that need to be checked so that we can all move on to the much bigger conversations about problematic policies and practices that matter more in the scope of humanity, the future of this country, and that of the planet.
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