The Number of Children Growing Up with Low Literacy Skills is a National Problem.

• More than 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.
  
  
• 61% of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children. As a result, direct access to books is extremely limited for these children - a fact that significantly impacts their educational growth and development, as well as their sense of creativity and imagination.
  
  
• Among adults at the lowest level of literacy proficiency, 43% 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.
  
  
• For many children, the home environment is the place they are introduced to books and reading. Children who have been exposed to a number of reading experiences at an early age are given the chance to learn to love books and stories -- a love that they often take into adulthood.
  
  

Access to Books is Essential to Reading Development

• Studies show that having access to a wide variety of reading materials is essential if a child is to develop into a strong reader. In fact, the only behavioral measure that correlates significantly with reading scores is the number of books in the home.
• Children who are read to frequently are nearly twice as likely as other children to show three or more skills associated with emerging literacy.
• The more types of reading materials there are in the home, the higher students are in reading proficiency.
• Students who do more reading at home are better readers and have higher math scores.

Children in Poverty are the Most at Risk

• 35.6 million Americans -- 40% of them children -- are currently living below the poverty line.
• Children from low-income families enter school at a disadvantage. The gap between children from low and high-income families on reading comprehension scores is more than 40 points.
• On average low-income children have far fewer literacy and language experiences at home than their classmates. Low-income children are 50% more likely than children from high-income families to be seven years old or older and still in the first grade.
• Children from low-income families are less likely to attend pre-kindergarten programs, more likely to have trouble with their schoolwork and more likely to repeat grades in school.
• A team of researchers recently concluded that nearly two thirds of the low-income families they studied owned no books for their children.

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