Kramer: Whole new lifestyle! Jerry: What are you doing? Kramer: Levels.

According to Kath Glasswell and Michael Ford's recent interactions with elementary classroom teachers, there is a frenzy underway among educators to use strict systems of leveled texts for young readers.  But while assigning levels to texts is, at heart, a sound idea, the authors note that educators rely too much and too rigidly on these systems at the expense of using their professional judgement.

In considering matching texts to readers, Glasswell and Ford examine one curriculum planning guide issued by The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction in 1986.  The guide suggests that teachers consider five text characteristics: content, format, concepts, organization, and author's purpose.  And certainly any leveled reading program will probably take these factors into consideration when assigning a a level to a text, but what about assigning a leveled text to a reader?  That same document suggests we also consider five additional factors about the child (motivation, subject knowledge, background experience, vocabulary, and purpose) as well as four factors about the learning environment (physical setting, activity, outcome, and emotional climate) for a total of 5 x 5 x 4 = 100 combinations of factors.  What has happened since 1986?  We seem to have retained only the textual considerations, and by only considering a text's assigned level when helping a child choose a book we are ignoring the bulk of considerations that should go into a good match.

Even more disturbingly, because these leveled text systems often deny a motivated reader the opportunity to read longer and more complex text, the students who need the most practice often end up reading the least.  Furthermore, the authors note this means that although below-level readers may progress, more advanced readers progress much more due to more practice with more advanced texts, and the gap between these two groups actually widens.  In a school that uses leveled texts year on year, these gaps accumulate year on year.

At the heart of all this is a fairly obvious problem:  Teachers rely on leveled text curricula too strictly.  They seem to believe in the power of leveled text systems more than in the power of their own professional discretion.  And it is professionalism that is the issue here, as with the implementation of so many other educational frameworks.  Teachers respond to ingrained cultural assumptions that they are not professionals, that they are not to be trusted to implement their own understandings, by falling back on systems like leveled reading which they perceive to be professionally beyond reproach.  Needless to say, blindly implementing these types of programs without a strong enough understanding of the underlying reasoning to know when they cease to be useful is not very professional.  As educational trends come and go, professional teachers cannot place their faith in acronyms or proprietary curricula.  To do so is to acknowledge what many people already feel about them: teachers' methods should be standardized and interchangeable because teachers simply can't be trusted to do their jobs properly on their own.