Whether you were planning on making a New Years resolution for your school or not (which you probably weren’t), I have taken it upon myself to pick one for you: improving your school’s reading intervention program. However, saying it in such simple terms does not give justice to the importance of the goal. Sure, you know that it is crucial that your students learn to read. But it’s so much bigger than simply being able to read.
Reading doesn’t just enhance the learning process, in many ways it can determine one’s entire potential. In 2010, this statistic changed the way I look at the importance of literacy skills:
50-90% of inmates struggle with their literacy skills.*
Not to say that every struggling reader is going to become a criminal, but the link between criminal behavior and an individual struggling with reading is startling. And even though struggling readers are not all going to become prisoners, the toll that lacking the ability to read can have on a person’s self-esteem, opportunities to learn, and the ability to communicate, is reason enough to make reading intervention an urgent concern of every school throughout the United States.
To provide every teacher with the tools they need to help a struggling reader of any age, Reading Horizons offers an Online Teacher Training. The training helps teachers learn how to teach the unique and effective methodology that has been used for over 25 years in schools across the nation as reading instruction for beginning and struggling readers. The training can be accessed for free for 30 days and runs for only a few hours (leaving the remainder of the 30 days to reinforce and review the concepts).
Sign up for Reading Horizons Online Teacher Training >
*This statistic first caught my attention on this article: "Preventing Violence by Teaching Literacy"
Since reading the article, I have found the same statistic with varying percentages on several different sites, all the sources say at least 50% but the percentage is often higher, some saying up to 90%