Education researchers and literacy specialists have responded to declining reading scores among high school students by calling on teachers across subject areas to teach "disciplinary literacy," which introduces students to the ways discipline-specific knowledge is produced and communicated and teaches students to apply different reading strategies depending on the discipline from which a text originates. Disciplinary literacy programs have the potential to raise reading achievement among high school students, but they put English Language Arts (ELA) teachers in a paradoxical position: on the one hand, ELA teachers are discouraged from teaching general reading strategies that fail to account for discipline-specific text features, but on the other hand, ELA teachers are discouraged from teaching the discourse conventions of math, science, history, and social studies because they lack the specialized knowledge of teachers in those subjects. This paper proposes that "rhetorical reading," a construct that sparked a flurry of CAC studies some twenty years ago but that never influenced high school instruction, could be the solution to this impasse. Rhetorical reading is a strategy common to all academic disciplines but by its very nature demands discipline-specific adaptations when applied to specific subject areas.