That may sound reasonable, but Shanahan says it helps no one and can even lead to teachers giving up on reading altogether. “In social studies and science, and even in English classes these days,” he said in an interview, “teachers either don’t assign any reading material or read the text to students.” Struggling readers don’t have the opportunity or tools to process complex material on their own.
Instead, Shanahan believes all students should read grade-level texts together, with teachers providing more support to those who need it.
“What I recommend is differentiated instruction,” he said during our interview. “Everyone will have the same teaching goal – we will all learn to read a fourth-grade text. I might teach the whole class and then have some kids continue to work independently while others get more help. Maybe those who don’t get it, read the text again with my support. By the end, more students will have met the learning goal – and tomorrow the class can study another text.”
27 different ways
Shanahan’s approach doesn’t mean leaving kids in trouble without help. His book outlines a toolbox of strategies for solving difficult texts, such as looking up unfamiliar vocabulary, rereading confusing passages, or breaking up long sentences. “You can read successfully in 27 different ways,” he said. He hopes future researchers will discover more.
He is skeptical about training students in skills such as identifying main ideas or making inferences. “We view test questions as skills,” he said. “That won’t work.”
There is widespread dismay over the deterioration of reading scores in the United States, especially among middle school students. (Thirty-nine percent of eighth-graders fail to reach the lowest of three achievement levels on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, called “basic.”) But there is little agreement among reading advocates on how to fix the problem. Some believe that what children primarily need is more knowledge to grasp unfamiliar ideas in new reading passages, but Shanahan believes that background knowledge is insufficient or not as powerful as explicit comprehension guidance. Other reading experts agree. Nonie Lesaux, dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, whose academic work specializes in literacy, endorsed Shanahan’s views in an October 2025 online discussion of the new book.
Shanahan’s most telling point is that there is no strong experimental evidence that reading scores improve more when students read individual-level texts. By contrast, a 2024 analysis found that the most effective schools were those that kept instruction at grade level. Still, Shanahan acknowledged that more research is needed to determine which comprehension strategies work best for which students and in which situations.
Misunderstanding Vygotsky
Teachers often cite Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” to argue that giving students books is neither too easy nor too difficult. But Shanahan says this is a misunderstanding of Vygotsky’s work.
Vygotsky believed that teachers should guide students to learn challenging things that they could not do on their own, he said.
He gave the analogy of a mother teaching her child to tie his shoes. First, she demonstrated and explained the steps out loud. Then the child takes one step and she completes the remaining steps. As time goes by, the mother gradually loosens control and the child ties the bow on his own. “Graded reading,” Shanahan said, “is like saying, ‘Why don’t we just use Velcro?'” It’s about real-world teaching. “Boys and girls, you don’t know how to ride this bike yet, but when we’re done, I’m going to make sure you do.”
Shanahan’s criticism of reading instruction applies primarily after second grade, after children learn how to read and focus on understanding what they read. In kindergarten and first grade, when children are still learning phonics and how to decode words on the page, the research evidence against using different levels of text for small-group instruction is not as strong, he said.
It’s important to first learn to read – to decode. Shanahan said there are exceptions to teaching children at all grade levels in rare circumstances.
“If a fifth-grade student still can’t read,” Shanahan said, “I wouldn’t let that child read a fifth-grade text.” The child may need individual instruction from a reading specialist.
Shanahan, meanwhile, suggests that advanced readers can be challenged in other ways, through independent reading time, skipping to higher-grade reading courses, or exploring complex ideas in grade-level texts.
Artificial Intelligence and the Role of Parents
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to rewrite text at different difficulty levels. Shanahan is skeptical of the approach. He believes that simpler texts, whether written by humans or generated by artificial intelligence, will not teach students to improve their reading skills.
Still, he’s intrigued by the idea of using artificial intelligence to help students “climb the stairs” by immediately modifying a single text to a range of reading levels, such as third, fifth and seventh grade levels, and having students read it in rapid succession. Whether this improves comprehension remains unknown and needs to be studied.
Shanahan suspects that AI may be most helpful to teachers, helping pinpoint sentences or paragraphs that tend to confuse or stumble students. Teachers can then address these common difficulties in the classroom.
Shanahan worries about what’s happening outside of school: kids just aren’t reading.
He urges parents to let their children read whatever book they like—whether it’s above or below their level—but to set consistent expectations. “Nagging may not be effective,” he said. “But you could be specific and say: ‘Thursday after dinner, read the first chapter. When you’re done, we’ll talk about it, and then you can play a computer game or play on your phone.'”
Parents often withdraw when their children resist, he said. “They’re kids. We’re adults,” Shanahan said. “We have a responsibility. Let’s step up and do the right thing for them.”
