Dr. Tim Shanahan Blog on Text Difficulty

Common Core Standards Versus Guided Reading, Part 1 (June 29, 2011)
Common Core discourages the widely accepted view that students make the greatest gains if taught from books that are at students' instructional level (the level that falls between independent and frustration). This blog post certainly peaked my interest, because I am very familiar with the idea of teaching students at their instructional level.  I remember this was a key focus in our Reading First training. The following blogs explained why the common core is taking this approach to reading.

Common Core Standards Versus Guided Reading, Part II (July 5, 2011)
 The common core used the data from the report, "Reading: Between the Lines", published by American College Testing (2006).  ACT reported that anayzing student performance by question type (literal or inferential) and then trying to teach the specific skills required to answer these types of questions simply does not work.  ACT asserts that test performance is driven by text, rather than question types.  Therefore, since question types do not distinguish reading performance but text does, then standards should focus on the ability to interpret hard texts.  At every grade level, common core standards have a standard written like this...by the end of the year, students will be able to independently read and comprehend texts written at a specified text difficulty level.  .... Dr. Shanahan quotes ACT in the conclusion... "performance on complex texts is the clearest differentiator in reading between students who are likely to be ready for college and those who are not"

More Evidence Supporting Hard Text (July 11, 2011)
Common core emphasizes the need to teach students at lexile levels that match their grade, not their personal reading level.  Marilyn Adams synthesized various studies and wrote about the results in an article last year.  She states that textbook difficulty levels have become easier in terms of readability since 1919.  She further asserts that there is a relationshiop between the decrease in text difficulty of textbooks and SAT passages and students' decreasing SAT scores.  It was further stated that high school texts were easier to read than the reading people must do after high school...and that people made more reading gains after high school than during high school.  These are strong statements that completely contradict the instructional level theory. I am wondering about students' frustration level leading to a lack of motivation and engagement. Hopefully, his next blog will address this.

Rejecting Instructional Level Theory (August 21, 2011)
Dr. Shanahan discusses the inconsistency and variance in pinpointing a student's reading level.  He discusses Powell's suggestion that educators use 85%word reading accuracy rather than the 95% word reading accuracy, which places students in more challenging texts.  He further asserts that the most important factors in learning to read is the guidance, support, and scaffolding provided by teachers.  I am needing to process this a little more, but I totally agree with Dr. Shanahan's idea of the most important factors in learning to read!  As for text difficulty, I am going to continue to read more in this area.
My concern is now less about the text difficulty but more in the consistency of students receiving the appropriate guidance, support, and scaffolding.