College prep shouldn't feel like catch-up class

I sent my kid to what I thought was a strong public high school, the kind that still pretends English literature is about books, argument, and writing like you mean it. Now the same class is carrying kids who cannot speak Spanish, and the whole room is being dragged toward the lowest common denominator. That is not diversity of thought. That is one class trying to do two jobs and failing at both.

I am not asking for a secret academy. I am asking for a literature class that still looks like literature. When you mix students who need language support with students who are supposed to be college-prep readers, the teacher has to slow down, repeat, and flatten. My son sits there watching the course slide from analysis toward remedial reading. The books do not get harder. The conversations do not get sharper. The bar just quietly drops so nobody looks left behind.

It snowballs. One mixed section becomes the new normal. Then the honors label is a sticker, not a standard. Parents who showed up for rigor get a watered-down period and a shrug. Kids who need language help deserve real help, in a setting built for that. Kids who can already do the work deserve a class that still asks them to do it. Cramming both into the same English period is how a college-prep school starts sounding like a catch-up shop.

I have watched this from the kitchen table, not from a podium. I hear what the assignments look like now. I hear how little stretch there is. I am tired of being told this is just how public school works, as if lowering the room is some kind of civic virtue. It is not. It is a choice about whether the class still has a purpose besides filling seats.

If you want the school to keep pretending it is college prep, you cannot outsource that to the people who already showed up once. You have to show up again. Vote. Put a body in a booth and make the people who set the classes notice that parents are done watching the standard melt. I do not care who you like. I care that you actually go.