My Reading Program: It's Not Rocket Science

I'm sure I've probably mentioned how much I loathe the basal reader my students have. It's full to the brim with the most boring and tiresome tokenism- among other things.

So this week I started a new reading program: Read what you like to read. The first day was today, and I am already predicting a great success. Students are taking great interest in reading their books. My only requirement is that they submit a small book report on each book, just as proof that they read it.And because of course I need a massive, constant stream of grades to prove that I was doing...grading? Seriously, I'm tired of this mentality that everythingmust be assessed.)
We'll break things down into a short mini-lesson, and then some one on one reading remediation with each student. Just a quick way to counsel with them to see how they are progressing.
I really want this to work well. I can tell my cooperating teacher is highly suspicious. She favors the assessment-heavy approach of breaking reading down into tiny bits of skill to assess individually. I can see the logic in that- if I were designing a standardized test. But I want reading to be a "whole" skill that my students have. They could ace most of the standardized material if they could just read and think critically.