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No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002) used only test scores to measure student
learning, but then the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; 2015) used accountability
that included more than just test scores for evaluations of school districts, teachers,
and student learning. Unfortunately, school districts, teachers, and students are still
being set up for failure as an important piece in the learning process is missing—that
of readable textbooks. Thus, accountability should also extend to publishers of both
textbooks and of various support reading materials provided to schools for students
to learn.
Because publishers were not and are not held accountable for what they print,
they have not gone to the trouble and expense to change procedures. Thus, it is
important that the classroom teacher be knowledgeable both in content concepts and
in pedagogy so students can be successful in learning necessary content knowledge
when the textbooks and other various materials are written at frustrational levels.

Classroom Implications
Every child deserves a qualified teacher (Darling-Hammond & Baratz-Snowden,
2005), and, because past and current studies have shown that the textbooks for
students at most grade levels are written at a frustrational level, teachers need to
address reading issues in their content instruction to ensure that content learning is
taking place. Thus, we make a few general suggestions that may help.
• Teachers need to be caring and have high expectations for all students.
• Teachers need to be knowledgeable about their content and how to teach it
and be able to explain why and/or how students would use this information in the
future.
• Teachers who prepare candidates to teach content areas need to work with
colleagues in reading so that they can learn to infuse reading strategies—such as
KWL or SQ3R for comprehension and Frayer model for vocabulary—into their
methods courses. These strategies can be found on the Internet.
• Teachers must not put the hard, frustrational book on the shelf and spoon-
feed students with lectures but should show students how to read the difficult
textbook. Lectures should add new and different knowledge to a topic rather than
just repeating the textbook.
• Teachers should read passages with new words, especially content-specific
words. Students need to hear the words being said correctly before they can read
them. Additionally, it would help students if a teacher can point out syllables in jargon
words that do not follow decoding rules. For example, when looking at the syllables
in sed-i-men-tary, all the syllables follow the decoding rules except the i-syllable,
as when a vowel is at the end of the syllable the letter should be pronounced as
having a long sound. Teachers need to be comfortable with their jargon vocabulary
as vocabulary knowledge is important for comprehension of content.
• Teachers should use the interactive read-alouds approach, reading difficult
text to the students but stopping at the end of each paragraph and/or section to talk
about what was heard and how it relates to other concepts. Close reading of text is
another approach that teachers can use to help students learn to read difficult text.
Both approaches can be found via the Internet.
• Teachers should never use round-robin or popcorn reading when a book is
written at frustrational level for most students. In round-robin reading, the teacher
calls on individual students to read out loud a part of the text; popcorn reading has
the last student who read call on another student to continue to read out loud. Both

Educators’ Choice 31