Toward a Balanced Diet of Reading: Hard vs. Easy

While reading chapter 4 of Subjects Matter, I came across the "Hard vs. Easy" portion of the chapter. This peaked my interest because it's such a subjective thing, hard and easy. What is easy for me may be impossible for others, for instance, I can easily explain the difference between indicative and subjunctive moods, but others may not, in the same was that I can't do Shakespeare, but English majors could do it in their sleep. In this part of the chapter, the concept of students needing to read text that they understand is mentioned, and this for me was obvious, but then I realized that it doesn't always happen. Students with reading disabilities for example are sometimes given the same text as the other students, at which point they may sit there and stare at the text without even trying because it's too hard. It's understandable that teachers may not think that a student can learn from a very basic text, but once again the chapter explains this, it says that in order to get good at reading, sometimes a student has to read a lot of easy text to build up their skills. This reminded me of weightlifting, you can't go into a gym and start with 50 pound weights. You usually start with 10, then 15, then 20, and so on and so forth, so why isn't this method utilized in High School? This is one of the reasons that I enjoy reading this book, because it gives us obvious yet not so obvious information and advice. The link below leads to a website describing strategies for helping students with learning disabilities. The other link is a cool chart that I couldn't use as a picture but that shows when certain reading objectives are explored in schools.
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/33084/
http://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/english/2010/progression_charts/reading_skills_by_grade.pdf