Just be careful. NEWSELA is a great site for short informational articles for students to read. The  content is usually worthy of student-led discussions and writing about in response. The beauty of NEWSELA is that the same article is available at different Lexile levels. (When you click on an article, check out the blue bar that appears on the right hand side of the screen.) So if you have students reading at a range of levels, you can access or print out the article at a level that meets their needs. My caution is that sometimes when the editors (or the algorithm) attempt to lower the Lexile level, they actually make the content harder to comprehend. They cut or revise details that might actually help a student understand the article better. This is also the case with publishers who include leveled books with their textbooks (e.g. the leveled books that come with McGraw-Hill’s Wonders).

An example – with one NEWSELA article I used recently, the editors substituted “a government group” in the lower Lexile versions for “the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service” which was in the higher Lexile versions. I thought “government group” was too vague given that the article also discussed the Marines and an environmentalist group’s upholding of a federal environmental law. Students might be confused. So when I downloaded the article, I reinserted the proper noun. So my advice is to watch out for vague language and important details that need to be included.

TIP. When I use NEWSELA articles, I read the version of the article at the highest Lexile level first. Then I quickly read the lower Lexile versions I want to use to make sure important details I just learned from the higher level version are still in the lower versions. Not all details are important. Just keep your readers in mind. Then I either edit OR I make sure to highlight details that were in the higher version when I introduce the lower version(s) of the article to students. 

Hope this helps.

S