Perhaps the problem is the desire/need/obsession to quantify everything. Every student must read 12 books, so let's give them 12 teeny 4-year-old picture books and have them plow through them in September. Then, all the kids will have fulfilled their reading requirement, and we can forget about that and move on to something else.
The point is that the kids read, right? What happened to assigning the occasional book report? The stories in the class's English book? The dioramas? What about country reports and King Tut projects that required the students to do a little "research" reading? (Too busy prepping for standardized tests?)
P.S. That King Tut book was coooooooooool.