Educators confuse me.
I have a memory of third grade, where our teacher was reading us "Swiss Family Robinson"--the original version with the odd vocabulary (like "tempest" and "pis-aller") and we were transfixed. I couldn't wait to get a copy of my own (eight years old.)
Tell me that reading such a book, way beyond most of our reading levels, wasn't educational? We discussed what the new words meant, what was going on in the book, the struggles, the attitudes of the family. That was a half a century ago and I can remember the classes vividly.
Personally, having worked with some professional educators years ago when I taught some classes in college, I was convinced they make stuff up as they go along and they do it in language (or shall we say, jargon) to obfuscate the meaning and make it seem more advanced than it is. A simple answer would have been "Of course it's educational but it depends on the content and the context and how the material is presented." If these guys knew anything, they'd be teaching kids to read better than they did in our day. But...they're not. I know, I know, discipline in the classroom is down because kids are not obedient anymore but still, after all the psychology we've learned, and all the technology we have, you'd think they could do a much better job than we did.