Leveled Texts: A Level Playing Field?

As someone relatively new to the world of elementary education, I have only recently been exposed to the use of leveled books. On the surface, it seems like leveling systems should work. A student gets a book from  a particular basket, is given the corresponding mini-lesson, and is assessed with the appropriate test. It makes sense. But I am finding that the way actual children actually read does not easily fit into this kind of prescribed formula.

As Glasswell and Ford point out in Let's Start Leveling about Leveling, reading is a complex act that occurs at the intersection of numerous factors including the reader's motivation, subject knowledge, and vocabulary, the text's content, format, and author's purpose, and contextual factors such as physical setting and emotional climate. Leveling ignores these and many other factors, reducing these interactions to simply assessing oral reading, assigning a reading level, and giving the student a book from a basket. Is it the right book?

My most immediate concern is how leveling can actually exacerbate students' difficulties in reading, particularly those students who are assessed below their grade level and below the reading levels of their peers. As Glasswell and Ford note, if teachers follow the prescribed pacing guide for these students, they will fall increasing farther behind those students who are assessed as reading at or above grade level. While the more proficient readers benefit from the experience of reading  books with more complex language and larger word counts, the struggling readers receive less practice as they continue to read simpler and shorter books. Over time this gap widens. As I have seen, eventually these struggling students find themselves tasked with reading books that are well below there interest level. For these students, reading is no longer engaging or authentic. It becomes a chore they hope to avoid.

As Owocki and Goodman note in chapter 6 of Kidwatching, leveling can inhibit the development of effective reading strategies for students who are only given simplistic, single sentence per page books. Instead, these students may build confidence in taking risks with more complicated books beyond their reading level.

Ultimately, a teacher's judgement of what is appropriate for a particular student may be more useful than the criteria used for leveling. As Glasswell and Ford suggest, the time and effort spent assigning levels to books and students may be better spent on building rich and varied classroom libraries that can provide students with enjoyable and authentic reading experiences.