Alton Frailey, Superintendent Katy Independent School District 6301 South Stadium Lane Katy, TX, 77494 December

13, 2012 Dear Mr. Frailey, As organizations devoted to advancing education and the freedom to read, we are writing in response to recent amendments to the Advanced Placement English curriculum in the Katy School District. It is our understanding that Fight Club by Chuck Palaniuk (W.W. Norton), A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (Knopf) and Hills Like White Elephants a story by Ernest Hemingway, were removed from the AP curriculum at Seven Lakes High School in response to complaints about their content. We are extremely sympathetic to the plight of teachers and school administrators confronted with such complaints, which is why we think it is essential to protect them from pressures to remove educationally valuable materials from the syllabus solely to avoid criticism and controversy. As we understand it, a few parents raised concerns about A Thousand Acres, which was part of a summer reading assignment. They then scrutinzed the rest of the AP English curriculum, searching for other content the deemed objectionable. They rejected the offer of an alternate assignment instead of Fight Club because the in-class group assignment for this book would have made an alternate assignment logistically difficult. Fight Club, A Thousand Acres and Hills Like White Elephants are critically acclaimed literary works that are frequently taught in advanced high school courses. A Thousand Acres, a contemporary retelling of Shakespeares tragedy King Lear, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Chuck Palaniuk is considered one of the most inventive young fiction writers writing today, and Fight Club won both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association and Oregon Book Awards and Last year, the book was taught at another campus in the Katy ISD without incident. As parents are aware, advanced placement classes are designed to introduce students to more mature topics; indeed, their very aim is to prepare qualified college-bound students for college-level material. What better way can there be for students to engage with culturally relevant and challenging texts than to do so in a supportive environment with the guidance of a skilled educator? It is educationally irresponsible and constitutionally questionable to remove curricular materials that are pedagogically suitable because some parents disagree with or are offended by their ideas or content. Students whose parents object to such material may request alternative assignments for their children, but they have no right to insist that the curriculum be altered to

reflect their views. The practical effect of acceding to any parents request to censor materials will be to invite more challenges, and to leave school officials vulnerable to multiple, possibly conflicting demands. We commend the educators and administrators for working to revisit policies to address the kind of situation that arose here. However, we urge you not to sacrifice the quality of education for all students in the district to appease specific concerns of individuals, whose focus may be more on the inculcation of certain values than educational standards or college readiness. We urge you to develop policies that render it unlikely or impossible that otherwise educationally worthy books will be removed because some people object to their content, or find them offensive. The attached Guideline on Censorship by the National Council of Teachers of English, in particular, Strategies for the Classroom Teacher in Dealing with Censors, offers practical suggestions about avoiding and responding to complaints about curricular materials. Please also see the National Coalition Against Censorships Guide to the First Amendment in Schools (http://ncac.org/First-Amendment-Schools/avoidingcensorship), as well as its Book Censorship Toolkit (attached). If you would like more information about book challenges and related issues in public schools, do not hesitate to contact the NCACs Kids Right to Read Project. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance in this issue. Sincerely

Joan Bertin Executive Director National Coalition Against Censorship Judith Platt Director, Free Expression Advocacy Association of American Publishers Charles Brownstein Executive Director Comic Book Legal Defense Fund

Chris Finan President American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression

Kent Williamson Executive Director National Council of Teachers of English

CC: Alene Lindley, Director, Advanced Academic Curriculum and Instruction BJ Alvarez, Assistant to the Superintendent