Rebekah Jacobs remembers the magic of reading “Romeo and Juliet” for the first time.

She delivered the nurse’s monologue to her freshman classmates, wrote a sonnet inspired by the play’s famous opening lines and felt that crushing sadness, that deep-rooted sense of unfairness, as she reached the end of Shakespeare’s most famous love story.

When Jacobs’ son told her he was studying the play at school, she was excited to experience it again through his 14-year-old eyes. But she never saw her son curled on the couch with a highlighter or noticed dog-eared pages poking out of his backpack.

That’s because he wasn’t reading “Romeo and Juliet,” her son explained to a disappointed Jacobs. He was watching scenes from the movie in his ninth-grade English class.

Parents across Maryland, and the country, are wading into what could be the next big fight over books in schools. They worry their kids aren’t exposed to enough literature, much less that they are reading it cover to cover. They fear the erosion of attention spans, empathy and a shared language.

“There is real movement among parents, because they are recognizing this as a problem and they want to do something about it,” said Trish Brennan-Gac, director of Maryland READS.

In the highly regarded Montgomery County Public Schools, Jacobs and other like-minded parents are pushing for a change. At a recent school board meeting, a mother implored district leaders to adopt a curriculum for high school English full of more rigorous titles.

A 2024 survey of English teachers found educators assigned an average of 2.7 whole books in a year, according to research by professors Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman.

“We’re in a moment of just seismic, unprecedented change in terms of the role of literature in the English language arts classroom,” Perrillo said.

Many have debated what’s driving it, pointing to the influence of social media and AI, censorship threats, an emphasis on standardized testing and digital lesson plans built off text excerpts.

Only about half of Maryland public school students are proficient in English, standardized tests show.

Jeremy Stelzner, a longtime Montgomery County teacher, points to a national movement away from teaching full books in English class. That’s happening as teachers confront kids who are struggling to read and uninterested in becoming readers.

About 31% of 13-year-olds say they never or hardly ever read for fun, according to the most recent federal data, while 14% say they do so almost every day. In 2004, those figures were essentially flipped.

But Stelzner said he’s not one to give up on broadening students’ minds with great literature just because it’s hard.

“We should try harder to give them books that are engaging,” Stelzner said.

Perrillo said her research shows children’s exposure to books depends on where they go to school.

Jacobs said that exposure can vary markedly even within school districts, by campus and classroom teacher. Some kids get a Mr. Stelzner, and some get teachers who don’t push them to read more.

This undermines the district’s commitment to equity, Jacobs said.

She’s asking for greater standardization across Montgomery County’s 25 high schools, where about one-third of students aren’t proficient on the 10th grade English test.

School leaders say they’re more focused on guaranteeing each student gets a meaningful reading experience than they are on mandating a specific number of set titles.

They’re thinking about the quality of the text options and the depth of the analysis, and they’re building students’ ability to think critically, said Jackie Lightsey, who oversees the district’s secondary English language arts work.

“What we’ve been trying to do is balance texts that are engaging, that students want to pick up and read, with the need for grade-level rigor,” she said.

‘A balanced diet’

Members of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs have been digging into what their kids learn in English class.

They worry about what they see.

At the start of ninth grade, teachers have three choices for the “anchor text” they use to ground their lessons: “All American Boys,” a 2015 young adult book about police brutality and racism; “The Magic Fish,” a 2020 graphic novel about a Vietnamese American boy coming out as gay; and “A Separate Peace,” a 1959 coming-of-age classic set at a boarding school during World War II.

An informal survey of teachers who piloted the curriculum found “All American Boys” was the most commonly chosen, followed by “The Magic Fish.”

“A Separate Peace” — which is rated as the most challenging option based on its Lexile score — was by far the least popular choice.

(Lexile scores are a commonly used tool to assess a text’s difficulty. Lightsey says the district considers several factors when evaluating a book’s rigor.)

During the second marking period for ninth-graders, teachers then choose between “Of Mice and Men” and “March,” a graphic novel about the Civil Rights Movement co-written by Rep. John Lewis, an icon of the time.

Hypothetically, that means “an Honors English class can end up covering only graphic novels for the entire first semester,” said Susanna Montezemolo, a PTA leader.

“Graphic novels can play a valuable role in a secondary English program,” she added. “However, they should not serve as the sole anchor text for a marking period.”

Stelzner, the MCPS teacher, said people shouldn’t assume a graphic novel isn’t academically rigorous because it’s full of pictures. Kids need to be exposed to stories that “light their hair on fire” if they’re going to become passionate readers.

“Part of it is giving teachers the authority to choose, to know where their kids are, to know what their kids might be into,” he said. “You can have kids in the classroom who are reading at third-grade levels, and you can have kids in the classroom who are reading two grades over level. You need options.”

Jacobs, who teaches English at Montgomery College, said she wants kids getting “a balanced diet” of highly accessible books and those considered classics.

The texts she sees used in high schools are “very high interest, very current,” she said. “No one is saying that’s a bad thing, but it can’t be the only thing.”

In MCPS, teenagers also choose from a wide range of other texts to read during the semester as part of “literature circles,” which are akin to student book clubs within English classes. Options for ninth-grade companion texts include “When I Was Puerto Rican,” “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” “Ender’s Game” and “Twelfth Night.”

Montezemolo questioned how much students get out of literature circles, because their experiences could vary widely by classroom. She called it “an unreliable means of ensuring access to appropriately challenging texts.”

Crafting lessons

Montgomery County district officials built their own high school English curriculum, a departure from their approach in elementary and middle schools.

In the lower grades, the district set aside millions of dollars to purchase an externally vetted curriculum.

That move followed a 2018 audit by Johns Hopkins, which found half of readings were below grade level. The audit didn’t extend to high school.

Montezemolo pointed to the fact that sixth-graders are learning adapted passages from “The Odyssey” and eighth-graders study “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.”

“Unfortunately, this trajectory of high-quality, grade-level English instruction ends abruptly in eighth grade,” Montezemolo said. “The homegrown ninth-grade curriculum — both in its text selections and the rigor of its tasks — falls short.”

Lightsey said the district gives educators latitude to choose what their students read.

Stelzner is grateful for that, as a teacher who values autonomy and as the father of three young MCPS students who learn from the purchased curriculums.

He’s disappointed in those lessons’ rigidity and reliance on online work.

“It feels like a gray learning experience,” Stelzner said.

Book debates

The question of whether kids are reading enough is perhaps the least fiery of the book-centered debates that have roiled public schools in recent years.

Districts across the country have banned titles with themes of racism and sexuality.

Even in deep-blue Montgomery County, the school district faced a lawsuit over storybooks that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. The suing parents — who sought to opt their children out of reading books with LGBTQIA+ themes in conflict with their religious beliefs — won a $1.5 million payout.

At the same time, the district heard impassioned calls from other parents to diversify the characters and authors that students learn in class.

Nationally, the most commonly taught titles have remained relatively stagnant for decades, a National Council of Teachers of English survey found, with Shakespeare plays, “The Great Gatsby” and “Fahrenheit 451” standing out as popular options.

All of the top 10 books were written by white authors, most of them men.

Perrillo said schools can accomplish multiple things at once: increasing diversity and interest while pushing children to read more books, particularly challenging ones.

Jacobs knows kids are used to thumbing through short video clips. But she wants students reading books, under the guidance of a teacher who helps them struggle through new language and explore universal themes.

She wants teenagers to develop their imaginations and put themselves in other peoples’ shoes.

Now isn’t the time, she said, to give kids fewer tools for building empathy.