Here are some hard facts presented by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in its literary report of 2003:
1) About one in 20 adults in the U.S. is not literate in English
2) 85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate
3) More than 60 percent of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate
4) One child in four grows up not learning how to read
5) 90% of welfare recipients are high school dropouts
Scary stuff, huh? That’s why I think it is so important to take whatever steps necessary you need to in order to increase your children’s likelihood of academic success early on. Phonics has been proven time and again to be a helpful reading method to teach basic reading skills to all ages. As the saying goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Use what you know works!
*Thank you to http://www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html for the statistics.
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