This is very off-the-cuff, but I just had a notion: I think we need to change the structure of teaching English in America.
Currently, the study of "English" lumps together many, many different elements, including: phonics, reading, spelling, vocabulary, grammar/syntax, composition, functional literacy, text analysis, literary discourse, and more.
The problem is that students, being lumped together by age, are expected to progress in the mechanics at the same time as they are expected to progress at comprehension and analysis. While this may work in communities where students are surrounded by well-read adults who speak in more-or-less standard English, and therefore provide models of reinforcement for skills. However, that does not describe the bulk of America's public education culture.
I'm thinking that English education needs to be broken up into two separate elements: Literacy and Reading Seminar.
"Literacy" would include all of the mechanics of the language, including everything from phonics through complex verb tenses and advanced sentence structure issues. In order to achieve any sort of functional literacy, students must have these skills. However, students should be able to progress through the different literacy levels at their own paces, depending on their demonstration of skills. Here is where standardized testing would absolutely apply. Further, students who achieve the highest level of literacy offered at the secondary level would be exempt from further literacy instruction.
Clearly, the "Literacy" teacher would have to be one who specializes in the mechanics of the language. I've seen far too many newer teachers who don't have a clue what pronoun-antecedent agreement is, nor how to teach it to their students.
As to the other element of English instruction, the "Reading Seminar," this is where the literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) comes in. These items are getting squeezed out of the curriculum (regardless of what the people who wrote the Common Core claim) in a panic to improve functional literacy at inner-city districts. However, literature is an essential element of becoming a fully functional member of our society. The Common Core advocates a "deep and narrow" approach to literature, reading only a few pieces but reading them "closely." As a result, I've gone from a yearly curriculum that featured six novels, eighteen short stories, twenty non-fiction pieces, and at least twenty-four poems to a year long curriculum with only two plays, perhaps ten non-fiction pieces, and a handful of poems. Instead of breadth, we have narrow depth.
This is fine as far as it goes. However, literature is where humans have the opportunity to explore the ideas of people unlike themselves, to examine and wonder at how others think, to have the opportunity to say, "Hm, I never thought of it that way." In short, literature is where we learn compassion, and without compassion there is no hope for our society. If all we understand is our own thoughts and the thoughts of our family and friends, then our cognition gets inbred, and our ability to understand others becomes twisted and crippled. If we have exposure to a small amount of literature, we will have only a limited range of alternate opinions to explore.
So this "Reading Seminar" would be full of reading, and responding to reading. And because students would move through this part of English instruction with their grade-level cohort (regardless of literacy level, so students with lower reading skills would need scaffolded versions or audio recordings of more difficult texts), they would have a wide range of voices in the classroom with whom to explore a wide range of ideas.
In this way, we would have far better cognitively developed students at all grade levels, rather than having those with lower mechanical skills being denied an opportunity for voice that is found in today's "honors" classes. We would not have the inbred nature of "honors" classes that assumes that students in grade-level classes must be stupid.
The culture of English instruction must change. We must divorce ourselves from an all-in-one structure that allows people to treat those who cannot spell as if they cannot comprehend.
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