Poet X hasn't replaced Shakespeare -- yet -- in English classes

Students still read Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird in middle and high school English classes, according to a survey by the National Council of Teachers of English.

Of the top 10 most commonly assigned books in middle and high school, all "were written more than 60 years ago —all by white authors," writes Sarah Schwartz in Education Week. To the apparent horror of the NCTE, three Shakespeare plays, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet, make the list.

“We are reading the same books that our parents and grandparents read,” said Tonya B. Perry, the president of NCTE. "It's encouraging that teachers want to honor students’ right to access outstanding literature that reflects their rich and varied experiences and sparks critical thinking around the complexities of the human experience. These survey results suggest, however, that diverse texts are still on the sidelines of the curriculum.” 

Ninety-three percent of teachers say they assign diverse literature, which appears to mean contemporary books by non-white authors, but "most say it makes up 50 percent or less of their course curriculum," writes Schartz. Nearly all said they wanted to use more diverse literature.

NCTE compared the 2025 list to an 1989 list compiled by researcher Arthur Applebee. (I read all the books on Applebee's list in school in the late 1960's. Our teachers did not assign The Crucible, Night, Fahrenheit 451 or Frankenstein in school.)

NCTE 2025 list	Applebee 1989 list
Romeo and Juliet	Romeo and Juliet
The Great Gatsby	Macbeth
The Crucible	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Macbeth	Julius Caesar
Of Mice and Men	To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird	The Scarlet Letter
Night	Of Mice and Men
Hamlet	Hamlet
Fahrenheit 451	The Great Gatsby
Frankenstein	Lord of the Flies

“Teachers know that diversifying the text that they put in front of students leads to the development of a lot of different literacy skills — critical thinking, perspective-taking, other human skills like empathy,” said Rex Ovalle, the chair of NCTE’s secondary section, and a high school English teacher in Oak Park, Ill.

Janet Harrison, a 9th grade English teacher in Fort Worth, said students need to read some of the classics "to understand the allusions," as well as contemporary books "to ensure that our students are seeing themselves in these works.”

Some teachers combine classics with contemporary literature on the same theme, such as a Nebraska teacher who pairs Romeo and Juliet with a young-adult novel in verse, Long Way Down, by Jason Reynolds. Her ninth-graders are "all about falling in love," she says. They can compare the warring families in the play to rival gangs in the novel.

If teenagers can identify with Romeo and Juliet as teenagers in love, I wonder why they need a modern young-adult book. Do we really think that a young-adult book written a few years ago is more likely to "spark critical thinking around the complexities of the human experience" than classic literature?

Forty-four percent of teachers said their school or district had limited what books they could assign, typically for "LGBTQ+ representation and sexual content," less often for content related to race and/or racism. I see Mockingbird, canceled for having a white savior, and Huckleberry Finn, which stars Enslaved Person Jim, make the most-censored list.

"Teachers also expressed less interest in assigning books about the LGBTQ+ community than in other diverse literature, such as books about people of color or people with disabilities," writes Schwartz.