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It makes sense that for kids to learn, they should be gradually eased into more challenging material.

But how gradual is too gradual?

In a powerful new book, researcher Tim Shanahan argues that America’s classroom literacy practices move far too slowly. In , he contends that protecting students from difficult texts puts them on a treadmill with no exit.

Shanahan is a former director of reading at Chicago Public Schools, served on the National Reading Panel and writes the blog. In his new book, he walks through a number of problems with the leveled reading approach:

Kids can鈥檛 learn much from texts they can already read well

Shanahan dedicates his first chapter to a long history of how kids have been taught to read in the United States. From family Bibles in the 1700s to the McGuffey鈥檚 Readers used in one-room schoolhouses in the 1800s to the 鈥渕odern鈥� grade-level configurations beginning in the early  1900s, the texts given to students learning to read have gotten progressively easier. Beginning in the 1950s, the dominant idea became that of 鈥渓eveled readers,鈥� which attempted to match children with texts appropriate for their instructional level. Made infamous in recent years by Emily Hanford鈥檚 Sold a Story , the most popular version was the Fountas and Pinnell program, which sorted kids (and books) into an A-to-Z continuum.

Shanahan鈥檚 concerns start with how students are placed into these levels. Teachers listen to kids read aloud and count how many words they read correctly. Afterward, they ask questions to make sure the students understood what they read. These first steps make sense, but the issue comes with the false precision and subsequent placement decisions. Depending on the assessment and program being used, students may be placed in levels where they can already read 90% to 95% of the words in the assigned texts and understand 75% of the content.

Shanahan insists that being overly focused on readability in this way at the beginning of a lesson undermines learning. He writes, 鈥淎ssigning students to challenging texts and making them successful 鈥� that is, making sure they can read and understand the text by the end of the lesson 鈥� is the key to raising reading achievement.鈥�  

‘Just right’ reading levels are instructionally meaningless

Most teachers will be familiar with the idea of using 鈥溾�� to slowly introduce new concepts that are in the student鈥檚 鈥�.鈥� These frameworks strongly imply that learning can take place only when the material is neither too hard nor too easy.

But these break down once you start getting into practicalities. For example, when someone says a book is 鈥渏ust right鈥� for a student, what does that mean exactly? Students鈥� ability to understand a passage will be tied to their background knowledge in the subject, their interest in it and how the passage is written in terms of vocabulary, sentence length or word repetition.

This presents a measurement problem when it comes to the classroom. For example, researcher Matt Burns found that the widely used Benchmark Assessment System was in identifying struggling readers. Shanahan notes that many commercial assessments have very large measurement errors, meaning a fourth grader may be assigned to reading levels ranging from grades 2 to 6. That鈥檚 too wide a range to be instructionally useful.

Instead, teachers should work with grade-level texts

Shanahan argues that leveled-reading advocates are missing the forest for the trees. By being so consumed with trying to determine what level a child is at, they assume selecting an easier text is the only appropriate way to help that student learn. But there are other, better options. To help students stay on grade-level material, teachers can pre-teach some key terms, slice the text into manageable chunks or use re-reading to make sure kids eventually understand. In short, the difficulty of a text is relevant to the amount of help students might need, but they shouldn’t avoid the challenge.

Moreover, having children work hard to read a text reinforces good literacy skills. Shanahan notes that 鈥渏ust right鈥� texts eliminate the responsibility readers have to make important decisions and adjustments as they go along. When good readers confront challenging text, they slow down, re-read, make inferences, break words down into their component parts or look up words they don鈥檛 recognize. Grade-level texts require kids to practice these skills; leveled-reading materials do not.

Leveled books are well-meaning but wrong-headed

Leveled-reading advocates are very concerned about student motivation. They fear that children who face too difficult of a task will tune out or even start to question their own abilities.

But Shanahan points to a body of research suggesting that motivation can be driven by a number of factors, including the novelty of a text, how relevant it feels to a student and, yes, its level of rigor and challenge. Kids can even feel a sense of accomplishment after they鈥檝e mastered a challenging text. Shanahan suggests that, rather than starting a lesson with material that students can already read, it would be better to begin with a more difficult passage and then work until students can read it fluently. The goal should be achievement and progress, not the mere act of reading.

More kids deserve grade-level texts

Shanahan argues that assigning students to instructional-level text 鈥� as opposed to text tied to their actual grade level 鈥� is essentially a backdoor way of holding  students back without doing the paperwork or alerting their parents. When I spoke with him, he made clear this wasn鈥檛 any type of judgment on the text itself. Books are neither good nor bad. The problem comes when fifth graders are stuck reading third grade texts.  

This can also make it impossible for kids to catch up once they fall behind. As Shanahan writes, it will be hard for those students to ever read more challenging books, 鈥渨ithout exposure to the more advanced content, vocabulary, grammar, and the discourse and structure that more advantaged kids are experiencing.鈥� Giving struggling readers shorter, simpler texts in effect deprives them of the very practice they need to improve.

 Shanahan is not na茂ve in assuming these instructional changes will be easy to implement. In fact, he spends a good amount of time offering advice for teachers about how to incorporate more grade-level texts in their classrooms. Nor is he sanguine about policymakers solving these problems. He notes that the Common Core attempted to do in policy what he鈥檚 encouraging in the book 鈥� make sure more students have access to grade-level texts. Those efforts ultimately backfired as teachers became even to resort to easier instruction-level texts. To me, that suggests the root of the issue may be cultural norms in schools and schools of education. To combat that, more educators would need to embrace the challenge of providing grade-level texts to all kids.

Ultimately, Shanahan emphasizes that leveled-reading advocates have confused the goal and focused too much on reading as an isolated skill. But literacy is not a subject matter on its own, like math, science or history. It is a tool for learning about the world. It鈥檚 a good one, for sure, but the goal should be to teach kids to read so they can read to learn new things. That requires introducing more challenge than kids today are getting.

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