Purpose: This paper aims to report on a study investigating how young people and teachers interpreted reading proficiency and difficulty across different tracks of English language arts in the sole high school serving a culturally diverse city. Design/methodology/approach: For six months, the researchers observed in three hierarchically tracked English classes. Participants were three teachers and 15 focal youths. The researchers also conducted semi-structured and open-ended interviews and collected classroom artifacts and students' records. Findings: Despite adoption of the Common Core State Standards and a school-designed common English curriculum, both of which were to contribute to shared literacy objectives, students and teachers built highly contextualized understandings of reading proficiency, which diverged across tracks and mediated instruction. Across tracks, however, deficit discourses about reading struggle persisted, and students and teachers attributed difficulty to students' attitudes and behaviors. Young people never described themselves in negative terms, which suggests they resisted the deficit labels tracking systems can generate. Originality/value: Findings extend research by showing how literacy-related tracking contributed to exclusionary contexts through which students were unproductively positioned at odds. Findings suggest a need for renewed rigor in the examination of tracking practices, particularly how notions of reading difficulty/proficiency position youths and mediate literacy instruction. Despite deficit conceptions of "struggling readers" across the school, youths never described themselves negatively and accepted reading difficulty as normal; how youths achieved such resourceful stances can be further investigated. These research directions will support the creation of English contexts that invite all youths into inquisitive, critical and agentive interactions with texts and each other.