Nationally about 40% of children entering kindergarten will have difficulty learning to read. 25% will have serious difficulties. 15% will read but only poorly, at best probably at marginal literacy levels. Until the sputnik era illiteracy was no barrier to employment because manual labor paid enough to have a family. In the information age, however, inability to read a service manual or decipher a pay stub represents serious limits on employability and total inability to rise above poverty levels of employment.
Should we blame illiteracy on teaching failures? No. Until the sputnik era nobody cared because illiteracy was no barrier to employment. Today we are acutely aware of illiteracy because it's expensive to support people who can't get work because of it. Fortunately for us who must deal with it, while the remediation illiteracy is almost impossibly hard and horribly expensive, preventing illiteracy is quite simple and very inexpensive. We now know the differences between children who learn to read quickly and those who don't are the differences between kids who were read to as infants and those who weren't. That's right! Read to babies 20 minutes a day until they are of school age and they're ready to learn reading so they can then learn everything else. Fail to read to them and they enter school dangerously behind the curve and few ever catch up to it! The painful future for these children is described in pages 4-6 of THE 90% READING GOAL on the LAMPLIGHTERS shelf in the Lewiston, Michigan library.
So where does the teaching rubber really hit the learning road? Answer: Exactly at the point where the child learns to be good reader. If a child cannot read well by the end of third grade, education will remain beyond reach. Think about it. Education is delivered on the printed page. It's absorbed by the reading skill. No reading skill means no education and an empty future.
LAMPLIGHTERS have gathered information from school districts around the country about successful programs that resolve educations ever new, ever changing problems. We hope to present one or two success stories --with appropriate documentation --every month as models for communities to consider who seek better education outcomes. In general, these programs will reflect successes in education improvement that can be adapted by any community for educating its children.
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Read Part 1:
What Are The Roots Of Illiteracy
