The statistics are staggering:
• 42 million American adults cannot read at all; another 50 million read at the level of a fourth or fifth grader.
• The number of functionally illiterate adults increases by 2.25 million every year.
• 20% of high school seniors are functionally illiterate at graduation.
• 70% of prisoners in both the federal and state systems are classified as illiterate.
• 85% of all juvenile offenders rate as functionally or marginally illiterate.
• 43% of those who literacy skills are lowest live in poverty.
As an author such statistics cannot be ignored. For that reason when Literacy Instruction for Texas (LIFT) contacted me about promoting the importance of literacy I was more than happy to oblige. Leslie Clay, Director of Community Development says, “We are very proud of the fact that more than 7,000 adults learned to read at LIFT this year. When you factor in children whose parents learned how to read to them through our Family Literacy program, the number of lives LIFT touched is closer to 10,000. It is both an amazing and sad fact that 49% of Dallas county cannot read better than a 4th grader and Texas now holds the distinction of being the #1 state in the nation with regards to the number of high school dropouts.”
I also developed a LIFT page on Squidoo that highlights the topic of literacy as well as the Annual Champions of Literacy Luncheon sponsored by LIFT on September 17, 2009. The page include resources on literacy, illiteracy statistics, and other Squidoo Pages dedicated to this increasingly important topic.
Friday, June 26, 2009
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