Also, reading "easy" books is not a waste of time; It may be that the "lighter" reading we are denying readers contains text that could be meaningful and important to the reader. Kathleen Sespaukas has pointed out to me that "easy" books may contain sections well above their indicated level, i.e. a book considered to be at the fourth grade level may contain quite a bit of material at the fifth and sixth grade level. Reading level is an average and this average does not apply to every sentence. In addition, easy reading may help readers to get started in an unfamiliar topic or genre. Carter (2000) points out that librarians frequently suggest that adults read books written for younger readers when dealing with unfamiliar material. This builds background knowledge that makes subsequent reading more comprehensible.

We don't have to worry that readers will languish at lower levels of reading material: students who do plenty of self-selected reading gradually expand their reading interests as they get older (LaBrant, 1937) and there is evidence that light reading, such as comic book reading, serves as a conduit to heavier reading. Ujiee and Krashen (1996) reported that seventh grade boys who reported more comic book reading also reported more pleasure reading in general, greater reading enjoyment and tended to do more book reading (see Krashen, 1993, for case histories).

The Lexile Framework claims other goals, such as helping teachers select the right texts for read alouds, recommending that teachers select books slightly harder than the students' lexile levels. Such precision is completely unnecessary. Students' interest and attention will tell teachers when a book is at the right level, and not every book need be precisely at the edge of the students' competence.

Potentially Harmful: A Waste of Money

The real problem in the "literacy crisis" remains access to reading material (Krashen, 1993; McQuillan, 1998). Many children simply have little or no access to reading material (Feitelson and Goldstein, 1986; Smith, Constantino and Krashen, 1997; Di Loreto and Tse, 1999). When books are supplied to school and classroom libraries in areas where they were not plentiful, the increase in reading test scores is dramatic (Elley, 1998).

We seem willing to devote time and money to nearly any other "solution" than simply supplying good books and a comfortable place to read them. The research cost of the Lexile Framework was approximately two million dollars and the research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Metametrics, no date). This money would have been much better invested in our school and classroom libraries. While prices are not mentioned in the literature I have seen, the full kit comes with the Lexile Framework Map, "with examples of books, magazines, tests, and educational levels," software (the Lexile Analyzer), and "an item bank for measuring reading performance, conversion formulas for commonly used reading texts, and a technology for linking existing reading tests to the Lexile Framework." In addition to the cost of this material, one must also consider the time invested in making sure all texts have a lexile rating and making sure that we know at every moment each student's lexile rating!

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