Researcher Calls Out Dumbed-Down Method of Teaching Reading

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 Leveled Reading: Leveled Lives, 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 Shanahan on Literacy blog. In his new book, he walks through a number of problems with the leveled reading approach:

Kids can't learn 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’s Readers used in one-room schoolhouses in the 1800s to the “modern” 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 “leveled readers,” which attempted to match children with texts appropriate for their instructional level. Made infamous in recent years by Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast, the most popular version was the Fountas and Pinnell Guided Reading program, which sorted kids (and books) into an A-to-Z continuum.