Sorry to go a little off topic, but I have been following this thread and it made me wonder ... I grew up in Europe, with what seems like a totally different system and aside from about 10 mandatory books we had to read every year and write reports on, we were free to read anything we wanted to. Just had to read a certain number of books / pages if I remember correctly, but nobody every cared about any reading levels and such. There was no numbering system, no testing, you either could read and moved up in classes or couldn't read at the end of 1st grade and stayed in 1st grade for another year.
One possible difference here is due to the language. If I remember correctly, it's much more common in English than in (most?) other languages for a native speaker to have difficulty learning to read. I don't recall the exact statistics or where I saw them, but the difference in the percentage of children who still had difficulty reading at various grade levels was striking.
I find that easy to believe, but fwiw, here in the UK I haven't come across DRA, children having to do quizzes on what they've read, etc., either. It's common that children in the first two years of school (ages 4-6, we start younger than in the US) will be on a "reading scheme" i.e. reading books specifically written for teaching reading and carefully graded. Once a child can read, though (so in DS's case, immediately on starting school except that his teacher had him read a few scheme books so that he'd know who the standard characters were when it came up in class discussion), they are described as a "free reader" and would, indeed, normally choose school reading books freely. (With some restrictions sometimes, but these relate to subject matter rather than reading level. E.g., the school library at DS's school has fiction shelved under "junior fiction" (mostly for the under 10s) "senior fiction" (for those up to 13) and "scholarship fiction" (things considered challenging for 12-13yos) - this is guidance rather than rule, though.)
There is "guided reading" in which a small group of children reads the same book with an adult, e.g., taking it in turns to read pages aloud and discussing in the group what's going on, what the characters are like, what might happen next, features of the language, and all that jazz. But this is quite separate from what they read for their reading practice, and indeed, they are not allowed to read the guided reading book on their own because they are not supposed to know in advance what will happen next!
