The story that took place in Washington’s Mukilteo School District first came to my attention a couple weekends ago when I noticed posts on social media claiming that book bans are not the sole province of the right using this as its prime example. Naturally, as one who is opposed to book banning, I was intrigued and chased the story down.

Executive summary: this is not a case of book banning, whereby ideologically-motivated activists demand that schools remove books they don’t like from public schools. Rather, it is a case study about how a school district goes about choosing curriculum for students.

In the Mukilteo School District, the Harper Lee classic was a mandatory part of the curriculum, a novel that all 9th grade students must read as a part of their English Language Arts classes. The book (TKAM) was long a part of freshman studies in the district. Yet, students of color began sharing with some of their teachers that they didn’t like the book.

Here we must draw the first distinction between the usual book drama that takes place at your local monthly school board meeting. Student voice is important, but has to be heard with discretion. Did the students object because of an emotional response or did they have reasons? They didn’t say they found the book painful to read because of its topic or the feelings they felt. Their objection was that the book did not represent their voices, that it presented a white-centered viewpoint of how Black people were treated in the 1930s. It didn’t speak for them. They asked that it be replaced with a book that featured a Black-centered point of view, one that didn’t put the Black characters to the side but featured them as the central characters whose experiences the author was writing about and whose experiences they were studying.

That’s a reasonable ask.

Before going further into the story, let’s remember that this was not about removing the book from the school, but replacing it in the curriculum. Even with that caveat, I’m afraid many readers are already rising in revolt because they loved the book and, for them, that settles the issue.

I ran into this a few years ago when a Black teacher shared why she believed Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) was inappropriate as the freshman novel. I agreed with her reasoning and shared her post. Immediately, an ELA teacher in the district roared back about what a great book it was (despite Steinbeck’s casual racism that was prevalent in the 1930s when he wrote it) and she knew Black parents who approved the teaching.

While things have changed in the last few years, it’s still instructive to consider how ELA curriculum used to be organized: one quarter poetry, one quarter fiction, one quarter nonfiction, one quarter drama. Many other districts will be different, but the point is that students can’t read and study everything. Choices have to be made. At best, only one novel a year can be read in full if these other areas are to be covered.

So … if students can only read one novel each year, what novel should it be?

At one school (Kamiak High School,) the teachers agreed with the students and asked administration to be excused from teaching this mandatory text. The administration agreed, but advised the teachers that it did not have the authority to do more than grant a request for one year.

The teachers wanted more. They wanted the book removed from the curriculum for the entire district and for teachers to be forbidden to teach the book in their classes. Again, this differs from a book ban in that they did not ask for the book to be removed from libraries and made unavailable to students. They didn’t want it taught in classrooms.

We don’t have an attempt to ban a book in this district. What we do have is an unfolding curriculum battle about what book to mandate that all 9th grade students study.

The Kamiak teachers were told the next step would have to be a book challenge if they wanted a curriculum change. They decided to do it and that’s when all Hades broke loose. The district curriculum committee convened and the fight was brutal.

In the end, the committee crafted a recommendation for the school board: that the book be removed as mandatory, but that any teacher wishing to use it in her classes be given the option to do so.

The Kamiak teachers were disappointed, but realized this was the best they could get. The school board adopted the recommendation and, in the aftermath, only one teacher in the district continued to assign the book to her students.

During the heated curriculum meetings, many spoke for and against the book. Students asked to address the committee, but the district did not allow them to do so. To gain a sense of the debate, here are two quotes:

“We profoundly question why we should read a book by a White author, in which Black characters are secondary, voiceless, meek, and two-dimensional,” Kuzmany of Kamiak said, according to a copy of her prepared remarks.

“I am standing against taking books out of the hands of our students for any reason,” Freemon of Mariner said, according to a copy of her prepared remarks. “There is not one novel that we teach at the high school that is not offensive to someone, in some capacity.”

In the end, more change came to the district. They held training for teachers to help them with the teaching of controversial materials, they affirmed the right of teachers to choose supplemental materials for their classrooms without needing the approval of the district, and they added two students to their curriculum committee so that student voice would be a part of the adoption decisions.

Was Mockingbird killed? Was it a partially successful book banning? No, it was not. What happened was a particularly difficult moment of making curriculum decisions, decisions that every school district has to make.

Overall, the district made good decisions. If you disagree, what would you change in the process?

PS: if you want to read WaPo’s story for yourself, here’s the link. It is behind a paywall.