Education Week - April 23, 2014 - 8

For Challenged Readers,
Custom-Tailored Texts
By Christina A. Samuels
School librarian K.C. Boyd has
long been a cheerleader for "street
lit"-gritty urban dramas with
themes such as gang life or homelessness-as
a way to engage the
students she works with in a Chicago
high school.
Her job, she says, is to get students
reading comfortably, then to
lead them to more complex works.
As part of that goal, she has turned
to what is known in library circles
as "high interest, low readability"
books, such as a series of books by
author P.J. Gray, written at a 2nd
grade level and featuring teen protagonists
and their struggles.
"It has been a big success for me
as a librarian," said Ms. Boyd, who
works at 560-student Wendell Phillips
Academy High School in the
Chicago South Side neighborhood of
Bronzeville. "I have finally been able
to identify materials I can present
to my students. I can meet my students
where they're at, and they've
progressed up to reading other materials."

Saddleback Educational Publish-
ing, the Costa Mesa, Calif.-based
company that publishes the book series,
has just started offering books
for readers at even lower levels of
fluency. Its "Teen Emergent Reader
Library," launched this year, offers
books written at a kindergarten
level for adolescents.
Engaging Students
Reading experts say such books
have been particularly useful for
students with reading disabilities
and those who are still mastering
English, who might otherwise avoid
leisure reading altogether. "It's great
across the board," Ms. Boyd said.
But such books have prompted
educators to ask how they fit into
the Common Core State Standards,
which place a premium on students'
mastering complex literary and informational
texts. These are works,
for example, that may feature a historical
tale about the Underground
Railroad or a biography of pop
singer Rihanna, but be written with
vocabulary and sentence lengths appropriate
for a student just starting
elementary school.
The challenge is to work out a
balance of engaging older readers
while leading them to books that
will stretch their skills, said Troy
Fresch, the assistant principal of
2,200-student Tustin High School in
the Los Angeles area, another school
that uses these "high-low" books.
"When [students] can discuss a
book and they have comprehended it,
it really just boosts their self-esteem,"
Mr. Fresch said. "And it allows them
to get full credit for their assignments."

Barbara Stripling, the president
of the American Library Association,
based in Chicago, said that
"picking books that appeal to an
older audience and use lower-level
vocabulary is a really sound concept
for teen readers. They don't
want to be reading about
dogs and cats, they want to
be reading about Beyoncé."
Ms. Stripling, a professor
of practice in library science
at Syracuse University, has
also worked with school librarians
in New York City to
implement common-core professional
development for the
district's school librarians.
"A lot of kids, they learn to
read by reading, not so much by
the instruction in the classroom,"
Ms. Stripling said. "The more we
can provide in the library that can
appeal to their interests, the more
we are contributing to reading instruction."

Questions of Complexity
But do the books offer enough
to move students to more complex
works? They're only useful if they
are coupled with appropriate instruction
in grade-level literacy,
said Michael L. Kamil, a professor
of education at Stanford University
and the chairman of a federally
created panel that examined interventions
for struggling adolescent
readers.
The problem, Mr. Kamil said, is
that students are not just expected
to read fiction. They have to grapple
with reading in mathematics,
science, history, and other subjects,
and books for emergent readers
don't have the vocabulary students
need to understand information
written in those subjects. The common
core expects that 70 percent
of the texts a student reads will be
informational.
"It's almost a thought that everything
on a topic is good, and that's
just not true," Mr. Kamil said. "It's
got to be something that moves
students beyond their own knowledge
to a more sophisticated level
of knowledge."
And with struggling teen read-
ers, it's important to move quickly,
simply because instructors don't
have very much time, Mr. Kamil
said. "This isn't Band-Aid care, it's
trauma care," he said. Students
reading at a very low grade level in
high school "are not gong to make
that up in any kind of normal or
easy way. The older the student is,
the more critical it is that we get in
there and do something that's actually
targeted to the difficulty they're
having."
Specific Strategies
The panel that Mr. Kamil led
produced a practice guide for teachers
in 2008, "Improving Adolescent
Literacy: Effective Classroom and
Intervention Practices." Its suggestions
included offering explicit vocabulary
instruction, directing instruction
in reading-comprehension
strategies, and extending opportunities
for discussing a text.
8 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 23, 2014 | www.edweek.org
EMERGENT
READING
Catherine E. Snow, a literacy expert
and professor at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education who
served on the validation committee
for the common standards, said that
such books provide useful practice
for students.
"Kids do get better at reading
from reading, and they don't read
much if the texts are way too hard,"
Ms. Snow said. "Of course, such
texts do not by themselves solve
the problem of bringing kids up to
grade level. That takes well-planned
instruction," including figuring why
the students aren't reading well,
and offering scaffolds that allow
them to work with harder books,
she said.
But teachers need to be careful
about how hard students must
be made to struggle. One concern
Ms. Snow mentioned is the common
core's focus on "close reading,"
a teaching approach that requires
students to derive meaning from
text by careful examination of language.
Close reading is being turned
into a thought that students need
to work hard to comprehend a text,
she said.
"The new lesson plans and the
new curriculum guidelines often
run the risk of overemphasizing the
need for kids to struggle and underemphasize
the need for adaptation,"
Ms. Snow said.
Steppingstones
STRIKING A BALANCE
Publishing companies have for years created
"high interest, low readability" books intended to
engage adolescents who struggle with literacy.
The book above, published by Saddleback Educational
Publishing of Costa Mesa, Calif., is intended for a
teen audience but is written at a level appropriate
for beginning readers. In contrast, the creators of the
Common Core State Standards in English/language
arts say The Great Gatsby is an example of a book that
has the complexity, range, and depth appropriate
for high school students.
Sophisticated knowledge does
not always have to come with long
words and complex sentence structure,
teachers say. Many books that
are considered literary classics are
thought so not because of their
highly complex language, but because
of their deeper themes, said
Teri S. Lesesne, a professor at Sam
Houston State University in Huntsville,
Texas, and a former middle
school teacher.
For example, Soldier's Heart, a
book by Gary Paulsen about the
devastating effects of the Civil War
on a young Union soldier, is appropriate
for middle school students
but uses language at a 2nd grade
level of mastery, Ms. Lesesne said.
Night, Elie Wiesel's autobiographical
account of the horrors of a Nazi
death camp, is written at a 5th
grade level, she said.
Books by Saddleback and other
publishers that deal in "high-low"
content, such as Custer, Wash.based
Orca Soundings and the
Townsend Press in Berlin, N.J., are
good books to start with, Ms. Lesesne
said.
GRADE-LEVEL
READING
"I think they're incredible tools.
Our job is to say OK, we're ready
for the next step. The next step
might be a Gary Paulsen novel, or a
graphic novel. That's my job, to kind
of move them along," she said.
Tim McHugh, the vice president of
sales and marketing for Saddleback,
said the 32-year-old company started
out offering books geared toward middle
school students who were three or
four grade levels behind in their reading.
But teachers said that reading
level was still too high for some students.
The company's newest offerings
are the first offered for teens at such a
low reading level, he said.
"We've got to get that kid to read
their first book," Mr. McHugh said.
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Education Week - April 23, 2014

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