from, http://www.readfaster.com/education_stats.asp#readingstatistics
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33% of children in California will not finish high school. [Reference: California Department of Education]
Disadvantaged students in the first grade have a vocabulary that is approximately half that of an advantaged student. [Reference: Richard Riley, Former Secretary of Education]
It is estimated that more than $2 billion is spent each year on students who repeat a grade because they have reading problems. [Reference: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services]
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. [Reference: A Nation Still at Risk, U.S. Department of Education, 1999]
44 million adults in the U.S. can't read well enough to read a simple story to a child. [Reference: National Adult Literacy Survey [1992] NCED, U.S. Department of Education]
60 percent of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems. [Reference: U.S. Department of Education]
It is estimated that the cost of illiteracy to business and the taxpayer is $20 billion per year. [Reference: United Way, "Illiteracy: A National Crisis"]
Over one million children drop out of school each year, costing the nation over $240 billion in lost earnings, forgone tax revenues, and expenditures for social services. [Reference: McQuillan, 1998]
U.S. adults ranked 12th among 20 high income countries in composite (document, prose, and quantitative) literacy. [Reference: Educational Testing Service]
More than 20 percent of adults read at or below a fifth-grade level - far below the level needed to earn a living wage. [Reference: National Institute for Literacy, Fast Facts on Literacy, 2001]
Approximately 50 percent of the nation's unemployed youth age 16-21 are functionally illiterate, with virtually no prospects of obtaining good jobs. [Reference: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services]
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. [Reference: Washington Literacy Council]
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. [Reference: National Adult Literacy Survey [NECS] U.S. Department of Education]
Nearly half of America's adults are poor readers, or "functionally illiterate." They can't carry out simple tasks like balancing check books, reading drug labels or writing essays for a job. [Reference: National Adult Literacy Survey of 1993]
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. [Reference: Department of Justice, 1993]
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. [Reference: National Council on Teachers of English Standards for the English Language Arts]
46% of American adults cannot understand the label on their prescription medicine. [Reference: Journal of the American Medical Association]
In a class of 20 students, few if any teachers can find even 5 minutes of time in a day to devote to reading with each student. [Reference: Adams, 2002]
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. [Reference: Pinnell, et al, 1995]
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. [Reference: The National Center for Education Statistics, NCES Fast Facts, Family Reading]
50 percent of American adults are unable to read an eighth grade level book. [Reference: Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America]
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. [Reference: National Assessment of Educational Progress]
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. [Reference: Arizona Republic, September 15, 2004.]
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