Here we go again

I suppose it's useful that some things are entirely predictable, returning in a cyclical way. Case in point: To Kill a Mockingbird is in the headlines again.
Last time this was because Harper Lee had died and her heirs were playing sillybuggers with her reputation. Before that it was some school in one of the benighted parts of the southern USA which had banished the book from consideration in English classrooms because (and I don't suppose my recollection here is literally accurate) the word “nigger” appeared in it no fewer than nineteen times and besides, it didn't paint a very nice picture of poor white people.
This time it's because “Poleen Grewal, associate director of instructional and equity support services at Peel District School Board” has written a memo on behalf of her Board:
“The use of racist texts as entry points into discussions about racism is hardly for the benefit of Black students who already experience racism. This should give us pause — who does the use of these texts centre? Who does it serve? Why do we continue to teach them?”
and furthermore
“White writers write from their own schemas, their own perspectives and white supremacist frameworks that reflect the specificity of their culture and history on racialized peoples.”
Now I'm quite prepared to believe that Ms Grewal is expert in detecting racism and even that her opinions on the subject have some basis in reality, but my experience tells me she has either no idea about, or has forgotten the realities of, teaching English to students in Grade 9 or 10, when this novel is usually taught.
As any thinking person might expect, there are reasons why the book is as widely taught as it is. The most important of these reasons is, of course, that it has featured on English curricula for a very long time, and therefore there are many copies in the bookroom. I believe BC classrooms were first exposed to it in the late '60s, when all textbooks were sourced from (and incidentally, paid for by) the Ministry, which ran an enormous warehouse for textbooks. The downside of this scheme was of course that only Ministry textbooks filled the book rooms of the province's high schools; the upside was that teachers knew that the books they used were already Ministry approved and that they almost always could obtain enough for their classes.
Aside: My esteemed colleague, Deane Hutchinson was nonetheless once hauled up in front of the Board in Campbell River to explain why he had had the audacity to use Thomas Hardy's “The Mayor of Casterbridge” (yes, originally procured from the Ministry's own warehouse!) in his Grade 12 English class. Did Mr Hutchinson not understand that in it a woman was sold? And that this was totally inappropriate? asked the trustee from Sayward.
Of course books that were sourced in this way filled the bookrooms of high schools long after the Ministry had outsourced the purchase of books to the schools and school districts. And the results were entirely predictable: “An entire, usable set of a novel appropriate for use in Grade 10? Of course I'll use it!”
Another aside: In several of my schools I was the de-facto co-ordinator of the English teachers. As such I winnowed the unused books in at least three English Resource Rooms. The most memorable of these was when I taught at Phoenix Middle School, which for some reason had inherited all the books from the original school on that site, Campbell River Secondary School. So it was my pleasure to consign to the recycling bins some 250 copies of an inadequately-translated version of “The Illiad” which, near as I could tell, had never been opened.
The second reason for the book's apparent popularity among English teachers: it's a relatively easy read. This fact should not be underestimated in the age of the integrated high school classroom, because

the reading abilities of the students in it capable of reading a novel at all might easily go from university-ready to Grade 6.
And then there's “What will we talk about? What will the students write about? Will it hold their attention?” Suffice it to say the story in Mockingbird checks all the boxes.
Of course, what the entire brouhaha misses is the point of “teaching novels” in the English curriculum. Just after I retired I wrote a pamphlet dealing with some of my English teaching beliefs while providing some practical advice. Here's what I wrote on the subject of the secondary reading program:

So here’s the “vision statement” for the reading part of the English program: we want our students to understand how

writing works, and how a good writer manipulates his readers. We want our students to be receptive to everything the

writer does, so that the communication between writer and reader is as complete as possible. In short, we want our students to be truly sophisticated readers. 

Notice that there's nothing there about “teaching about racism” or “focus on aboriginal (feminist, Canadian, Great, etc.) writers”. The materials you uses with your students as an English teacher are not very important; teaching English is about developing the literacy skills of all your students, and anything that works against that, I believe passionately, should be discouraged as counter-productive.
The corollary of that statement, equally valid, is that everything that works towards the end of improved literacy should be accepted and encouraged.
Consequently, here's my totally-unsolicited advice for Ms Grewal and the Peel Board: if the Board has done its job, the English teachers you hired are highly-educated and trained professionals. Provide them with adequate resources, then let them do the job.