One of the most impactful actions that schools can take is to provide instruction that ensures every student is reading at or above their enrolled grade level. The ability to read grade level, challenging text, is essential to ensuring all students learn at a high level and graduate high school college and/or career ready.

It is a simple idea but difficult to accomplish because of the way our education is set up. It has nothing to do with the fact that students come to school with all different levels of literacy. What matters is what we educators expect of our students and the type of instruction we provide them so that they master literacy at their enrolled grade level or higher.

In my book, Equity In Our Schools: How to Ensure Marginalized Students Achieve at a High Level (Holmes, 2023), I lay out the critical necessity that all students read at or above their enrolled grade level. We have had years of collecting student reading data to show that students who start school reading in a below grade level reading group almost always matriculate through school reading at below grade level. So, if a student comes to us reading below grade level and thirteen years later graduates still reading below grade level, what have we done for them? Set them up to continue through life at a subpar level?

Students who cannot read at grade level or above, struggle not only in reading class, but in all the other content areas in which much of the learning is dependent upon the ability to grapple with difficult text such as in the sciences, economics, history, mathematics, the arts, English language arts, business courses, and technology courses.

Timothy Shanahan (2025) devotes his entire book, Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives: How Student Reading Achievement Has Been Held Back and What We Can Do About It to making the case that it is essential that all students be provided reading instruction at their enrolled grade level and above in order to ensure students are able to succeed in school.

Timothy Shanahan (2025), after reviewing the research, makes the case that the current educational system of testing students to determine their instructional level for reading and then providing instruction at that tested level does not improve student reading, especially for those reading below grade level, but rather holds them back (Morgan et al, 2000; Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; Lupo et al. 2019). Students do not learn more when taught at their instructional level and if that level is below their enrolled grade level, then they are not learning more and not closing the gap. WHAT ARE WE DOING? Shanahan describes it as malpractice (p. 43). We are teaching and reinforcing students’ different levels of reading, rather than modifying our instruction to teach all students to read at or above grade level.

The practice of teaching students at ‘their instructional reading level’ is purely based on theory and not proven by research. Rather the research points to students’ making greater reading gains when taught, with the proper supports, at their enrolled grade level or higher. Students grappling with difficult grade level text with the right instructional scaffolding make greater gains in reading than those taught below level at their ‘instructional level.’

In addition, such instruction eliminates the need for the teacher to establish multiple reading groups that only get direct reading instruction and/or support from the teacher for 20 minutes a day so that the teacher can rotate through all the reading groups. Without the shuffling of reading groups, the teacher can provide direct instruction and support to all students throughout the entire reading block.

Teaching students to read at their ‘instructional’ level rather than their enrolled grade level is a failure of the system’s practices based on theory, not evidence. Pre-service educators are taught the ‘importance’ of determining students’ instructional level and teaching each student at these varied levels during their undergraduate training and it is reinforced throughout their professional careers through publishers of reading programs (i.e. Read 180, Guided Reading, Accelerated Reader, Achieve 3000, Fountas and Pinnell, publishers leveled book sets, and so on).

We must change the system so that all students are learning to read with grade level or above text. Students must learn to successfully grapple with difficult text. We must change our expectations for how teachers teach and provide them with support to learn how to scaffold instruction so that all students can master difficult grade level text and above. Using scaffolded instruction ensures every student can grapple with grade level and/or difficult text while also insuring they have the support they need to master these texts.

References:

Holmes, G. (2023). Equity in our schools: Ensuring marginalized students achieve at a high level. Rowman and Littlefield.

Kuhn, M. R. and Stahl, S. S. (2003). Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices. Journal of Educational Psychology 95, (1), pp. 3-21.

Lupo, S. M. et al. (2019). An exploration of text difficulty and knowledge support on adolescents’ comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly 54 (4). Pp. 457-479.

Morgan, A. et al (2000). Effect of difficulty levels on second-grade delayed readers using dyad reading. Journal of Education Research 94, (2), pp.113-119.

Shannahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading leveled lives: How students’ reading achievement has been held back and what we can do about it. Harvard Education Press.

This blog is written by Dr. GwenCarol Holmes, a long-time educator and passionate advocate for all students mastering rigorous standards