As part of the #edublogclub year-long challenge to blog on education. While the official club has ended, they have shared posts to continue the journey through 2017. This week’s prompt was to share a statistic and my interpretation of it.
The word gap.
That students in low socioeconomic households hear 30 million fewer words by age five than their peers in higher-income households as documented in articles like this one from The Atlantic in 2014. Initiatives were created, more interventions thought up, and a push for a flood of information so that all kids in their formative years could be ready to learn. The deprivation of words was only one factor but it contributed to an inability to function in grade school, led to higher dropout rates by high school, and earning less as adults.
This literacy crisis is not something that will solve itself nor will it go away. Society must work hard to engage young children in face-to-face activities. Read aloud, read to a dog, read to me. Read on a bus, on a train, on the couch before bed. Read, read, read. It’s like Dr. Seuss said
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
And the best place to start is at your local library. Let’s close the word gap.
Readers Be Advised 