About "Meeting Students Where They Are"

It was a simple line in a speech about education, but it packed a wallop:

"... the soft bigotry of low expectations."

That line, written by Michael Gerson and delivered by President George W. Bush in a speech promoting the No Child Left Behind Act, addressed low academic expectations casually, sometimes unconsciously, or worse intentionally, put upon predominantly poor and minority students and directly influencing lower academic achievement. For roughly a quarter century now, ideas about standards and expectations have driven countless reforms in education designed to improve achievement. Much of it has been ineffective.

There are endless bromides and slogans and cliches about best practices and what works for kids, notably the idea that students "rise to the level of expectations." On the other hand, critics might reasonably argue that the idea of "meeting kids where they are," acknowledging individual students' abilities and needs as opposed to more rigid ideas about "how kids are supposed to be" has led to a lowering of expectations. Basically, this might boil down to an assumption and resignation that "kids don't read" and kids won't read an entire novel, or kids can't write a multi-paragraph essay, so schools, classes, teachers simply stopped assigning them.

Clearly that sounds terrible. However, I will not immediately dismiss the idea of being "a responsive educator." By that I mean, approaching each class and lesson with acknowledgement of the actual humans in the classroom, as opposed to simply teaching a curriculum or unit or lesson. Educators must be attentive to the specific knowledge, skills, and needs of the actual students in the classroom or much time can be wasted. That might be from assuming kids simply know something and thus don't need instruction, or even a reminder, which can compromise and almost guarantee glitches in learning if not failure. However, it can also mean assuming kids don't know something, which leads to wasting time with redundancy.

So, it's complicated, to say the least. An interesting and compelling take on the issue, one that has ignited some genuine debate and discussion online and in schools is the advice, even admonition, from Case Western English Professor Walt Hunter in an essay for The Atlantic:  "Stop Meeting Students Where They Are."

At some point over the past 15 years, kids stopped reading. Or at least their teachers stopped asking them to read the way they once did. We live in the age of the reel, the story, the sample, the clip. The age of the excerpt. And even in old-fashioned literature classes, assignments have been abbreviated so dramatically that high-school English teachers are, according to one recent survey, assigning fewer than three books a year.

I’ve seen the effects of this change up close, having taught English in college classrooms since 2007, and I’ve witnessed the slow erosion of attention firsthand, too: students on computers in the back of lecture halls, then on phones throughout the classroom, then outsourcing their education to artificial intelligence. We know that tech companies supply the means of distraction. But somehow the blame falls on the young reader. Whole novels aren’t possible to teach, we are told, because students won’t (or can’t) read them. So why assign them?

When I walked into my American-literature class at Case Western Reserve University last fall, I looked at 32 college students, mostly science majors, and expected an uphill battle. As my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, “Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.” One-third of the high-school seniors tested in 2024 were found not to have basic reading skills.

Yet by the end of the semester, as we read the last sentence of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I regretted ever doubting my students. I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day—and that teachers of literature are wrong to give up assigning the books we loved ourselves. There may be plenty of good reasons to despair over the present. The literature classroom should not be one of them.