Yup, had 'em when I was studying music in college. One year the prof teaching the class was really cool—lots of “behind the scenes” stuff, humor, the other was about as interesting as watching paint dry.
If you wanted to introduce music theory classes in high school, be my guest. But it would be a lot like introducing theoretical physics in high school. You have to learn a whole list of other disciplines to really appreciate it. Just like for physics you need to have a solid knowledge of at least calculus, for truly analyzing music you’d need a basis in the mathematics underlying at least one music system (there are several kinds of tuning, music notation, note values and scales, along with rhythm and note intervals) and having at least some practical knowledge of an instrument would be enormously helpful for giving the theory a grounding in reality.
In contrast with that level of undertaking, virtually everyone who knows how to read has read at least one book, and everyone has a solid grounding in language and human interactions by the time you start introducing literary criticism. In other words, everyone has already learned the basics, so you can move on to analysis without too much of a problem. All literary criticism is, is asking questions and answering them based on what you read in the work you’re analyzing. Why did that character do that? Why did the author use that particular word in that circumstance? What nuance does that event bring to later events in the book? What if the author had changed the order he/she introduced those events? Etc.
You already know what you need to know to perform that work. It’s directly applicable to real life. (News articles, for example, often reveal as much information through language use, attribution or lack thereof, and implied gaps in knowledge as they do from the bare facts you can parse from a straight reading). It gets you used to looking beneath the surface in both conversations and writing. Possibly most valuable: it teaches you how to ask questions.
Music theory, on the other hand, is a pretty abstruse area of knowledge, and isn’t as likely to be useful or practical in regular life. Would it be really interesting to learn? For some people, but most would be bored as hell. Some of you are probably entering a light trance just from having read this far 
I teach English as a foreign language at the high school level. The textbooks my school uses contain song lyrics for several lessons.
Fox News is “the most trusted name in television” and you think any teacher (even the best) wants to hear a tenth grader deconstruct Bitches Brew?
LOLz, but I don’t want to hear anybody deconstruct anything, let alone “Bitches Brew” – geez, can you imagine the amount of work that would entail for very little result (and I love tha album, having heard it a million trillion fucking times when it was big. I never know it was the cheating wife shot Andy, either.)
The eeeconnnommmyyyyyy? I’ve read where art and music classes, along with recess and PE, are being cut out of school curriculums. Not only because of the economy (giving teachers the heave-ho right and left around here) but to focus on the ‘basics’. And emphasis on tests, tests, and more tests, and drilling students in math/algebra/calculus in a desperate attempt to create engineering types. So the US can wrest all those good-paying jobs currently outsourced to Indians or Chinese. I’m glad to hear there are at least some attempts to dilute the deadly dullness of school classes with discussion of music and lyrics. I failed, abysmally, every math class I ever took, but I got straight A’s in English lit, art, and music. Back in my school days, there was no discussion of any kind of contemporary music, though I did learn a bit about classical composers and can tell the difference between a major and minor key. It would have added a lot to our enthusiasm to analyze music albums. I’m all for it.
I was picturing how much “fun” it would have been for my English teacher to have refereed all the inevitable Freebird VS. Stairway To Heaven arguments. For that matter, I don’t think it would have been any more enjoyable for my music teacher/band director. (I would pay good money to see either one, though. Even now.)
I actually think I got quite a lot from doing the kind of analysis suggested by the OP. But I don’t think it would have been as comprehensive in an academic environment as it was just doing it with my friends. It wasn’t really practical to get stoned in class. 
(Sorry, Mom.)
QFT – how many damned proficient guitarists or percussionists use that stuff? (Kidding! I’d never play a job without a guitar player and, preferably, a great drummer in my Moleskine book of names) But, yeah, the harmonic comma isn’t exactly going to come up…well…ever, nor are various temperaments. I consider myself not bad at harmonic analysis (functional and modal – whence my love for all things Wayne Shorter [I’m using modal as non-functional harmony synonym]), and I can’t remember the deeper stuff without looking at a book. Certainly never, ever comes up in actual practice – just one of my more nerdy hobbies, since I’m just a regular musician, not a musicologist. Good points
I think if we restrict ourselves to song lyrics, and ignore such topics as music theory, then the OP asks a good question. Song lyrics are like poetry, and poetry belongs in an English lit class–as I recall, every English lit class I took in high school included some time spent studying poetry.
In my case, we did study song lyrics as part of our English lit class in my last year of high school. I can’t remember exactly which songs we studied, but I do recall studying at least one by Elton John (i.e. Bernie Taupin, since he was Elton’s lyricist), and one by the Eagles. There were other songs by other artists that we studied too, but I cannot recall which.
But we did not study albums as a whole, as the OP wondered. I think that doing so would have taken us outside the study of English lit and into the study of music–it would seem to me that while the study of a novel, containing some kind of story leading to a climax and denouement, is appropriate for English class, the only albums that the same kind (or process) of fiction analysis could be applied to would be concept albums. I’m thinking here particularly of the concept albums that were popular when I was in high school–examples would include Tommy, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and Days of Future Passed–and in these, the music (not just the lyrics) plays a large role in the story. Thus, I believe that studying and analyzing these would require a certain amount of music knowledge and theory, which would put them outside an English lit class.
All IMHO, of course.
Meh. You’re right that analyzing lyrics is like analyzing poetry. The problem there is that lyrics without music are usually just shitty poetry. You get a lot more mileage out of analyzing actual poetry where language is used to create rhythm and structure rather than lyrics where the words are subservient to the music.
The music is far more important than the words in songs. That’s one of the reasons you’ll hear people say, “I love this song!” even when they don’t know the lyrics. There are whole websites about misheard lyrics, and some people will even claim they like the mistakes better than the originals. In poetry, the words take on primary importance. In songs, the music is primary. If there were no lyrics at all you would still have a piece of music, and the music itself must be compelling or even the best lyrics would be dismissed as being attached to a crap song.
Popular lyricists appear to lack the intellectual rigor that even mediocre poets possess. My first reaction to a lot of artsy rock lyrics (“Quintessence,” “Synchronicity” come to mind) is “God help us, a rock star learned a new word.” And they don’t award grant money to studies of the following:
I been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can remember your name
For there ain’t no one for to give you no pain
Or, by analogy, if you were building a brick oven in your backyard and it fell down, you could make it into a torso and inscribe “look on my work ye mighty and despair!” Same thing, innit? Still a crappy little epitaph and a broken-down statue – not the whole work.
We did some analysis of lyrics in Junior year religion class, of all places. Guy that taught it was more than a little odd. He’d entered training to become a Brother–sorta/kinda like a male nun–then left/flunked out/whatever, and still somehow got hired at a Catholic high school. He had us write papers on the “philosophy” behind songs like Come Sail Away and even Stairway to Heaven. I strongly suspect he was a stoner…
What tipped you off? And, also, did he have some good shit to sell at cost for good students?
Song lyrics are a good example of having to find meaning in the mundane. Figuring out what a song is actually about often does take the same literary analysis skills. You jsut have to find the right ones.
Then again, if you are good, you could probably find existential philosophy in Black’s “Friday.”