Introduction: The Specter of High School English

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There is a specter haunting contemporary literary studies—the specter of high school English. This specter appears most often in moments of anxiety: when college instructors lament students' inability to read long books, sustain attention, or produce interpretive prose that feels recognizably "literary"; when opinion essays ask, with a mix of incredulity and alarm, whether today's undergraduates can still read literature at all. In these moments, high school English functions less as a concrete institutional site than as a hazy explanatory figure, invoked to account for perceived decline elsewhere. This cluster begins from the premise that such invocations tell us more about the imaginative habits of literary studies — and the broader public culture in which literary scholars participate — than about the actual conditions of secondary English classrooms.

The contributors to The Specter of High School English outline how high school English is a field shaped by layered histories, institutional constraints, and competing demands—pedagogical, political, economic, and cultural—that rarely register in university and public conversations about reading, writing, and literary study. Where scholars of literary studies have posited a "failure of articulation" between secondary and postsecondary English, these essays trace how that misalignment is produced and maintained by testing regimes, curricular infrastructures, teacher working conditions, and long-standing myths about preparation, rigor, and decline.

Several contributors reconstruct what contemporary high school English actually looks like: what texts circulate, how reading is organized, what writing is assigned, and under what conditions teachers work. Xander Manshel's institutional history reminds us that much of what college instructors recognize as how students are taught to read—themes, symbols, character development, five-paragraph essays—emerges from a dense middle zone of textbooks, exams, teacher training programs, and curricular packages that have quietly standardized literary study for decades. Sarah Levine, Emma Bene, Dan Moore, and Michael Smith's account of assessment regimes extends this history into the present, showing how high-stakes testing continues to shape what counts as reading and interpretation.

Lindy Johnson and Peter Smagorinsky extend this account of curricular infrastructure into writing, where the mismatch between secondary and postsecondary English is especially easy to mistake for failure. Their essay shows how high school writing instruction is pulled among competing traditions and constraints—formalist models of correctness, formulaic genres, generative accounts of writing as a tool for learning, standardized assessments, uneven teacher preparation, and forms of digital composing intensified by GenAI. What the university often reads as inadequate preparation for college prose becomes, in their account, the product of conflicting institutional demands and a rapidly changing media ecology that has unsettled authorship, agency, originality, and evidence of learning.

At the same time, this cluster resists nostalgia for a lost golden age of secondary literary study. Drew Newman and Jonna Perillo argue that the erosion of book-centered, humanistic English instruction has less to do with recent culture wars than with longer-term shifts toward skills-based, technocratic models of literacy. In their account, censorship is real and consequential, but it often arrives after standards, platforms, and assessments have already hollowed out the conditions for sustained literary reading. Josh Coleman's essay approaches the subject of censorship through scenes of burned, bombed, and buried books, asking what it means to mourn literature lost when texts are at once materially vulnerable and digitally abundant. His meditation reframes debates about access and substitution, pressing readers to consider what kinds of loss—symbolic, civic, pedagogical—cannot be solved by technological workaround.

Several contributors focus explicitly on the handoff point between high school and college English, questioning the assumption that secondary instruction exists primarily to prepare students for postsecondary literary study. Bethany Monea's essay on writing instruction challenges linear models of preparation by showing how citation styles, genres, and composing practices shift across contexts, often in ways that leave students disoriented rather than scaffolded. Kate Marshall, in dialogue with high school teachers studying at the Bread Loaf School of English, and John Downes-Angus, writing from his own experience in the high school English classroom, complicate familiar narratives about attention, stamina, and difficulty, suggesting that changes in reading practices are inseparable from institutional pacing, text length, and the cognitive demands of excerpt-driven curricula. Together, these essays invite college educators to reconsider what they take to be deficits as artifacts of particular instructional ecologies.

These essays sometimes function as demystifications, but they are also invitations. By clearing away the caricature of high school English, they open space for a different kind of engagement — one that asks scholars of contemporary literature to take secondary classrooms seriously as sites where reading publics are formed, interpretive habits sedimented, and literary value negotiated at scale. They suggest that many of the questions currently animating debates within contemporary literary studies cannot be answered without attending to the K-12 infrastructures through which most readers first encounter literature.

In assembling this cluster, we have sought to make visible the conversations that rarely happen across institutional boundaries, despite their shared stakes. The essays collected here do not ask college instructors to lower expectations, nor do they defend every practice carried out in the name of secondary English. Instead, they argue that meaningful critique requires a clearer picture of what high school English is, what it has been asked to do, and why it so often becomes the repository for disciplinary anxiety. If there is a specter haunting English studies, these essays suggest, it may be college English's reluctance to reckon with the systems that shape reading long before students arrive on campus.

Robert Jean LeBlanc is Associate Professor of ELA/Literacy at the University of Lethbridge and Coyle Fellow at the University of Notre Dame's Center for Literacy Education. With Phil Nichols and Amy Stornaioulo, he is currently working on a book about the practice close reading in a digital age.


T. Philip Nichols is Associate Professor in the department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Moody School of Education at Baylor University. His research examines how science and technology condition the ways we practice, teach, and talk about literacy — and the implications of that conditioning for equitable public education.