In Teaching the New Basic

Skills: Principles for Educating Children to Thrive in a

Changing Economy, authors Richard Murname and Frank Levy point out, “In this world you go to war every day, and short of becoming a millionaire, a very good education is your best armor” (p. 4).

What does this mean to you? What will you do about this?

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33% of children in California will not finish high school.

The average student learns about 3,000 words per year in the early school years (8 words per day).

Five to six year olds have a vocabulary of 2,500-5,000 words.

Disadvantaged students in the first grade have a vocabulary that is approximately half that of an advantaged student (2,900 and 5,800 respectively).

It is estimated that more than $2 billion is spent each year on students who repeat a grade because they have reading problems.

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The educational careers of 25 to 40 percent of American children are imperiled because they don't read well enough, quickly enough, or easily enough.

The educational careers of 25 to 40 percent of American children are imperiled because they don't read well enough, quickly enough, or easily enough.

Since 1983, more than 10 million Americans reached the 12th grade without having learned to read at a basic level. In the same period, more than 6 million Americans dropped out of high school altogether.

 Literacy Statistics

Over 50% of NASA employees are dyslexic. They are deliberately sought after because they have superb problem solving skills and excellent 3D and spatial awareness. It is estimated that as many as 15 percent of American students may be dyslexic.

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44 million adults in the U.S. can't read well enough to read a simple story to a child.

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60 percent of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems.

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U.S. adults ranked 12th among 20 high income countries in composite (document, prose, and quantitative) literacy.

Nearly half of America's adults are poor readers, or "functionally illiterate." They can't carry out simply tasks like balancing check books, reading drug labels or writing essays for a job.

More than 20 percent of adults read at or below a fifth-grade level - far below the level needed to earn a living wage.

Approximately 50 percent of the nation's unemployed youth age 16-21 are functional illiterate, with virtually no prospects of obtaining good jobs.

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More than three out of four of those on welfare, 85% of unwed mothers and 68% of those arrested are illiterate. About three in five of America's prison inmates are illiterate.

Children who have not developed some basic literacy skills by the time they enter school are 3 - 4 times more likely to drop out in later years.

21 million Americans can't read at all, 45 million are marginally illiterate and one-fifth of high school graduates can't read their diplomas.

To participate fully in society and the workplace in 2020, citizens will need powerful literacy abilities that until now have been achieved by only a small percentage of the population.

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Out-of-school reading habits of students has shown that even 15 minutes a day of independent reading can expose students to more than a million words of text in a

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year.

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There are almost half a million words in our English Reading Statistics Language - the largest language on earth, incidentally reading the most. Some 70 percent of middle school students read more than 10 books a year, compared with only 49 percent of high school students.

Good readers in 5th grade may read 10 times as many words as poor readers over a school year.

words.

46% of American adults cannot understand the label on their prescription medicine.

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Students who reported having all four types of reading materials (books, magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias) in their home scored, on average, higher than those who reported having fewer reading materials.

15% of all 4th graders read no faster than 74 words per minute, a pace at which it would be difficult to keep track of ideas as they are developing within the sentence and across the page.

In 1999, only 53 percent of children aged 3 to 5 were read to daily by a family member. Children in families with incomes below the poverty line are less likely to be read aloud to everyday than are children in families with incomes at or above the poverty line.

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When the State of Arizona projects how many prison beds it will need, it factors in the number of kids who read well in fourth grade.

According to the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 37 percent of fourth graders and 26 percent of eighth graders cannot read at the basic level; and on the 2002 NAEP 26 percent of twelfth graders cannot read at the basic level. That is, when reading grade appropriate text these students cannot extract the general meaning or make obvious connections between the text and their own experiences or make simple inferences from the text. In other words, they cannot understand what they have read.

Total percentage of American adults who did not read a book in the past 5 years = 70%.