Bogie makes an excellent point about the Hardy Boys. Like my mom always used to say, "I don't care what they're reading, just as long as they're reading." Unfortunately, most class syllabi aren't constructed around that idea--like Bogie also said, you get what's "good for you." Somewhere around being assigned the fiftieth book on Black issues, that idea gets pretty damn grating, especially when important classics like Invisible Man and well-written contemporaries like Kaffir Boy get lumped in with "semester fillers" like Passing and The Color of Water. If you ask me, more high school English courses need to be centered around short-story anthologies. Throw everything out there and see what sticks, instead of assigning five books a semester and hoping the kids actually read them instead of downloading the studynotes.
Cheating is rampant, especially at the honors level, where most kids are taking the course just to look better on their college aps, regardless of personal interest or ability. One of my favorite memories was in my eighth grade honors course where our teacher gave us a one question quiz on the Odyssey chapter he had assigned for that day. The question he picked was incredibly easy if you actually read the chapter, but it wasn't covered in the Cliff's Notes at all. Over half the class got a zero.
Really, English courses in American high schools are deeply flawed--books assigned fall into four categories: Black Issues, The Odyssey, Shakespeare, and Other. I got through every honors and AP english course offered, half a dozen electives (by senior year I had at least two or three English classes every day) and I still managed to get to college with an incredibly flawed background in non-Shakespearian British Literature (only thing assigned: Tale of Two Cities), American Literature (one each of Hemmingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner), Russian Literature (I can't even remember any being assigned, but there had to be one in there somewhere, I hope), and French Literature (Camus.) I was assigned and read plenty of contemporary novels and "hot topic" novels, but I came out of high school never having read even *Mark Twain.* There's something seriously wrong with that.
Reading's another form of entertainment, but when we look at the books we make kids read, it's no surprise they're not reading voluntarily outside of school. If the only movie you were allowed to watch for your most formative years was an endless replay of Crash, you would probably not be watching movies in your spare time, either.