One of the few bright spots in Washington DC’s checkered (to put it kindly) K-12 education landscape has been Alice Deal Middle school, where reading proficiency rates at 80% are double DC’s District’s abysmal 38% average.

But now, we learn Alice Deal Middle school has decided to remove all full-length novels from their eighth grade English curriculum.

The educrats behind this move claim that moving from full-length books to section readings – will better prepare students for High School.

How is it better for reading proficiency and knowledge-gathering to read excerpts from Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, not the whole book?

Why not just give the 13-year olds the cliff notes version of The Scarlet Letter?

Reading a full-length novel is now presumably too heavy a lift for an 8th grader.

This is yet another sad example of subjecting our children to the soft bigotry of low expectations in the government-run schools.

It comes at a time when poor states like Louisiana and Mississippi have returned to the basics and have seen miraculous jumps in their reading scores. They are now beating out higher-income blue states.