The consequences of low literacy skills
(poverty, welfare, crime, generational,
business loss, etc.) in a community can be
staggering as noted in the following statistics:
Poverty
43% of adults at the lowest level of literacy proficiency live in poverty.
Among adults with strong literacy skills, only 4% live in poverty.
Adults with the lowest literacy skills earn a median income of $240 per week, compared to $681 for those with the highest skills.
In 1997, the poverty rate among children under age 6 whose best-educated parent had less than a high school degree was 62.5%.
A study on literacy (included in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Vol. 2 edited by Susan Neuman and David Dickinson) shows that while in middle income neighborhoods the ratio of books per child is 13 to 1, in low-income neighborhoods, the ratio is 1 age-appropriate book for every 300 children.
Welfare
70% of mothers on welfare have reading skills in the lowest two proficiency levels
(this is particularly alarming considering that a mother's literacy level is one of the
most significant predictors of a child's future literacy ability).
In the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), the average annual household
income for the total population was $30,824, compared to $10,138 for Aid to Families
with Dependent Children or public assistance recipients, and $9,732 for food stamp recipients.
Employment status
Adults at the lowest level of literacy proficiency work an average of 19 weeks per year, compared to 44 weeks per year for those at the highest level.
American businesses lose over $60 billion in productivity each year due to employees' lack of basic reading skills.
Crime
In America's prisons, 70% of inmates are illiterate
Almost three-fourths of those incarcerated have not graduated from high school and a
staggering 70 percent are functionally illiterate and read below a fourth grade level.
U.S. Department of Education figures show that “75% of prison inmates and 85% of juveniles in correctional facilities are functionally illiterate” (this compares to 47% of all adults in the U.S. who are functionally illiterate).
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