Thursday, January 24, 2008

Family Literacy...Important in Georgia?

I have spent some time this week thinking about how to initiate a family literacy program within the county that I currently teach in. As usual in education, money seems to be the largest barrier to change. I decided to begin researching other state literacy programs in order to gain a sense of all that one entails. While Georgia currently has no state policy for family literacy, some of the states surrounding us do. A family literacy initative policy is Florida is supported by The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy - http://www.barbarabushfoundation.com/. This list of other parterships in Florida goes on and on.

My question is why not then in Georgia? Why are we not making family literacy among our top proirities? We already know how our testing scores measure up to the rest of the nation. Does literacy play a role in those? Certainly. We CANNOT raise test scores until we raise the literacy rate among our population.

What then can you do to encourage family literacy in Georgia? Take the time to become a certified family literacy coach through the National Center for Family Literacy. Volunteer your time to work in your local family literacy program. Without volunteers who believe that literacy can make a difference in lives of families across Georgia, we won't see change. Volunteer today!

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Alarming Statistics

Low literacy is strongly related to crime. 70% of prisoners fall into the lowest two levels of reading proficiency (National Institute for Literacy, 1998).

Low literacy is strongly related to unemployment. More than 20% of adults read as or below a fifth grade level – far below the level needed to earn a living wage.

75% of today’s jobs require at least a ninth-grade reading level (National Institute for Literacy, 1998)

Low literacy is strongly related to poverty. 43% of those with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty. (National Institute for Literacy, 1998)

Close to 37 million people live below the federal poverty level in America, and the majority of these are women and children (1997)

In 1997, 47% of Philadelphia’s homeless were families with children who lack sufficient reading skills; 10,340 homeless children were deprived of good reading practice. (Office of Housing and Community Development)

The adult illiteracy rate in United States is 38.4
The male adult illiteracy rates is 26.1%
The female adult illiteracy rates is 50.0%

For every 1,000 people in the United States, there are:
2093 radios
805 televisions
325 personal computers
218 newspapers

Of the Gross National Product, only 5.3% is spent on public education. (2000)

More than 4 in 10 preschoolers, 5 in 10 toddlers, and 6 in 10 babies are not read to regularly. (1998)

40% of American children have difficulty reading or learning to read. (1999)

As many as 1 in 5 children will manifest a significant reading disability. (1992)

75% of kids who had oral language difficulty at age 3 will have reading difficulties in the 3rd grade. (1999)

A large survey of kindergarten teachers reported that 35 percent of children arrive at school unprepared to learn. Children who lack reading readiness are more likely to develop reading problems when formal schooling begins. (1991)

A startling 88% of children who have difficulty reading at the end of the first grade display similar difficulties at the end of fourth grade. (1988)

In our highest poverty public schools, a whopping 68 percent of fourth-graders fail to reach the Basic level of achievement. Only 1 in 10 fourth graders at these schools can read at the Proficient level. (NAEP 1998 Reading Report Card)

In fourth grade, 64% of Blacks and 60% of Hispanics read below the Basic level, compared with 27% of Whites and 31% of Asian/Pacific Islanders. (NAEP 1998 Reading Report Card)

In 1998, 10 million American school children were considered “poor readers”. (NAEP 1998 Reading Report Card)

The percentage of children who read well has not improved substantially for more than 25 years. (NAEP 1996 Trends Report)

Three-quarters of students who are poor readers in third grade will remain poor readers in high school. (1997)

The top achieving 5% read 144 times more than the lowest achieving 5%.
(Terrence Paul, Institute for Academic Excellence).

Students in private schools spend 67% more time reading than public school students. (Terrence Paul, Institute for Academic Excellence).

The typical middle-class child enters first grade with 1,000 – 1,700 hours of one-on-one picture book reading; a child from a low-income family averages just 25 hours. (M.J.Adams, Learning to Read)

The average family in Philadelphia has one book: the phone book.
(Jane Heilman, 100 Book Challenge)

One in three children in Philadelphia schools fails first grade each year.
(Jane Heilman, 100 Book Challenge)

6 in 10 children spend a substantial part of each day in the care of someone other than a parent. (1998)

In recent years, more than 20 state legislatures have passed a flurry of new child literacy laws and budgets.

In 1998, students improved 2.99 grade levels for every school year that they read 60 minutes per day. (Terrence Paul, Institute for Academic Excellence).

Excellence in Education

This blog has been created to educate the general public about a program that I have created to promote literacy in the state of Georgia. It is my desire to encourage volunteers at the local community level to become literacy volunteers.

The National Center for Family Literacy reports the following statistics:

Parental literacy is one of the single most important indicators of a child's success. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) has concluded that youngsters whose parents are functionally illiterate are twice as likely to be functionally illiterate themselves.
By age four, children who live in poor families will have heard 32 million fewer words than children living in professional families.
One in five, or 20%, of America's children five years old and under live in poverty.
Some 30 million adults in the United States have extremely limited literacy skills. If one teacher could teach 100 adults to read, we would need 300,000 adult education teachers to meet this need.
The Hispanic population is the largest minority in the United States and has the highest school dropout rate. More than two in five Hispanics living in America age 25 and older have not graduated from high school.
NCFL firmly believes that literacy and education are the cornerstones of the nation's well-being. Please join us in our efforts to eradicate the intergenerational cycle of low literacy


Join the fight in pursuing Excellence in Education by becoming a family literacy coach. Family Literacy equals Family Success. If we want our children to become educated we must involve the entire family in the process of becoming literate.

It is my firm belief that "To Teach is To Touch a Life Forever!" We can make a difference one family at a time.