Why Do So Many Have Low Literacy Skills?
 

One or More of these Factors can Place a Child or Adult at-Risk for Low Literacy
 

Schools that:

• provide less than adequate reading curriculum/teaching methods when identified with a learning/reading disability**
• do not identify learning/reading disabilities
• promote students without required reading skills

Home environment:

• where parents' reading levels are low
• that does not encourage learning or reading
• that did not provide pre-literacy skills for children before kindergarten
• that is troubled due to domestic violence, child abuse, alcohol/drug abuse, etc.
• that is living in poverty

Students who dropped out of school:

• out of need to support the family
• due to lack of progress/interest in education or other factors

Students with special needs:

• English is not their native language
• Low intelligence
• Speech and hearing impairments

**Until recently, many educators did not agree on how to teach children to read or how to specifically address the variety of challenges facing individual learners.  Learning to read well does not occur without instruction.  About 20 percent of the population has some kind of learning disability and most with a learning disability have a reading disability (National Institute of Child Health and Development).

Techniques of reading instruction that are scientifically based have only recently become widely accepted within the education community.  Few schools of education have curricula that align with the research findings.  As a result, there are many children and adults that have not learned how to read proficiently because neither their teachers nor anyone else knew how to instruct them.

The Impact of Low Literacy
 

Impact on the Workforce:

• Over $60 billion lost in productivity each year by American businesses due to employees' lack of basic skills (National Institute for Literacy).
• 38% of job applicants tested for basic reading and math skills in 1999 were deficient in those skills, up from 22% in 1997 (American Management Association 2001).
• About 20% of America's workers have low basic skills and 75 % of unemployed adults have reading or writing difficulties (National Institute for Literacy).

Impact on Health Care:

• $73 billion annually is the burden on the national health care system due to low health literacy (American Medical Association).
• Approximately 90 million Americans experience difficulties in accessing the healthcare system and healthcare information (Pfizer Health Literacy Initiative).
• Most health care materials are written above the 10th grade level, even though one out of five American adults reads at the 5th grade level or below, and the average American reads at the 8th to 9th grade level (Pfizer Health Literacy Initiative).
• Only about 50% of all patients take medications as directed. Problems with patient compliance and medical errors may be based on poor understanding of health care information (Pfizer Health Literacy Initiative).

Impact on the Corrections System:

• 70% of prisoners function at the bottom two of five literacy levels; that is they read below a seventh grade reading level (National Adult Literacy Survey).
• More than one-third of all juvenile offenders confined to correctional facilities read below the fourth grade level (Open Society Institute: Criminal Justice Initiative).
• approximately 40% of youth held in detention facilities have some form of learning disability (Open Society Institute: Criminal Justice Initiative).

Impact on Voting/Community Involvement:

• Only 55% of adults with low literacy levels voted in the past five years, while 89% at the highest levels of literacy voted (National Adult Literacy Survey).
• In the 1998 congressional elections, college graduates, ages 25-44, were 77% more likely than high school graduates of the same group to vote. High school dropouts in the same age range were 52% less likely than high school graduates to vote (U.S. Department of Education, The Condition of Education, 2000).

Impact on the Welfare System:

• 43% of people with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty, 17% recieve food stamps, and 70% have no job or a part time job.
• Welfare recipients ages 17-21 read, on average, at the sixth grade level.
• Welfare recipients with low education skills stay on welfare the longest; those with stronger education skills become self-sufficient more quickly.
• Almost 50% of adults on welfare do not have a high school diploma or GED.