Today Foundation - Education Reform Series – April 2009
Reading Failure – The Facts, Figures and Research
Reading is the gateway skill all students must master if they are to succeed in school. Reading difficulties translate into poor grades, grade repetition and dropout rates.
More than 30% of Texas children cannot read a simple children's book. This is true for our 4th graders, 8th graders … even our 12th graders.
What is equally shocking is that many people have known this fact for more than four decades, yet nothing has changed.1 This is shameless!
Reading failure affects kids disproportionately
Sadly, reading failure and its devastating consequences are not equal-opportunity experiences.
True, the scourge hits some children in high-income families. However, minority and poor students suffer the most. Among Texas' 4th grade students, 49% of African American children and 42% of Hispanic children read below basic levels. That compares to just 20% of Texas' white 4th grade students.
Meanwhile, more than 45% of the 4th grade students from economically disadvantaged Texas families cannot read. Even some Texas students from high-income families who are in the 4th grade, undergo the same fate.1
Previous efforts to curb reading failure have done little
Well-intentioned efforts to close this gap have been tried. Expensive federal programs like Head Start – designed to improve the pre-reading and language skills of low-income children – are laudable. However, they've not effectively reduced the literacy gap nationally … or in Texas.
And, while NCLB has led to a small closing of the reading achievement gap in Texas, gains for minority and low income students are minimal. In fact, the literacy gap between Texas students living in high-income families compared to those living in low-income families has not appreciably changed in over 40 years.2
Most Texas children from advantage succeed in life, while children from disadvantaged homes suffer because many never learned to read well.
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