Is the school to prison pipeline for real? It was for Milton Rucker. He wasn’t a good reader when he was a kid. He dropped out of high school and chose a life of crime. In this video, Milton talks about the consequences of choosing "criminal thinking" over school. But things changed for him as he embraced literacy in prison. ​

​https://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/books-and-literature/it-s-a-crisis-advocates-make-new-push-to-boost-literacy-in-st-louis-area/article_c42f86cf-83ea-553c-b37e-cb6879bf6f9c.html

Jane Henderson 
​No one is marching in the streets to protest one of St. Louis’ biggest problems — even though the area’s crime rate, employee pool and health outcomes are all affected.
But it’s a hard truth: St. Louis schools struggle to teach kids, especially Black kids, to read. In some city schools, fewer than 10% of third-graders test proficient in reading.
But it’s not just schools in poor neighborhoods.

​Read more..

Literacy StatisticsCurated from www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html
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According to the literacy fast facts from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), literacy is defined as "using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential."
"One measure of literacy is the percentage of adults who perform at four achievement levels: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate, and Proficient. In each type of literacy, 13 percent of adults were at or above Proficient (indicating they possess the skills necessary to perform complex and challenging literacy activities) in 2003. Twenty-two percent of adults were Below Basic (indicating they possess no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills) in quantitative literacy, compared with 14 percent in prose literacy and 12 percent in document literacy."
Literacy statistics worldwide

• According to UNICEF, "Nearly a billion people will enter the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names and two thirds of them are women."

Literacy statistics and juvenile court

• 85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate.
• More than 60 percent of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate.
• Penal institution records show that inmates have a 16% chance of returning to prison if they receive literacy help, as opposed to 70% who receive no help. This equates to taxpayer costs of $25,000 per year per inmate and nearly double that amount for juvenile offenders.
• Illiteracy and crime are closely related. The Department of Justice states, "The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure." Over 70% of inmates in America's prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level.

Many of the USA ills are directly related to illiteracy. Just a few statistics:

• Literacy is learned. Illiteracy is passed along by parents who cannot read or write.
• One child in four grows up not knowing how to read.
• 43% of adults at Level 1 literacy skills live in poverty compared to only 4% of those at Level 5
• 3 out of 4 food stamp recipients perform in the lowest 2 literacy levels
• 90% of welfare recipients are high school dropouts
• 16 to 19 year old girls at the poverty level and below, with below average skills, are 6 times more likely to have out-of-wedlock children than their reading counterparts.
• Low literary costs $73 million per year in terms of direct health care costs. A recent study by Pfizer put the cost much higher.

Teaching reading skills is one of the best ways to save an aging brain"Carlson is running a study called the Experience Corps Trial, in which older men and women volunteer to teach reading skills to kindergarten through third graders in Baltimore city schools. Using brain-imaging studies, Carlson and her colleagues have shown that after just a few months, people who volunteer show beneficial changes in their brains similar to those that other research teams have seen with exercise."

The Five Pillars of Family Literacy are evidence-based statements about literacy that have been curated from a school principal, poverty expert, renowned reading expert, economists and a social mobility study. The Metro East Literacy Project activities are based on these pillars. Let's look at Pillar Four.

 Pillar Four
​What seems to be more important than involvement and coming to school by parents is whether parents provide insistence, expectations, and support at home. Perhaps we need to rethink the focus of parent training. --Ruby K. Payne, Ph.D., author of A Framework for Understanding Poverty (aha! Process, Inc.)

The recipe for educating a child contains many ingredients to be successful. Parent training is one of them. Parent training is making the parents aware of the supports they can provide at home to help the child succeed in school. I listed some of those in the last article on Pillar Number Three about home-based inputs. Click the link here to read.

When I was a parent educator doing home visits, I found one thing to be true: parents love their children. To the best of their ability, they want to do what is best to help their kids thrive. If I told a parent to put their newborn baby on their back for safe sleep, the parents were now aware and happy to comply. If I told a parent to remove certain foods, toys, and other small objects from toddlers to prevent choking hazards, the parents were now aware and happy to comply. Parents did not resist the advice and resources I provided, because they had reached out and asked for help from my organization. They sought the training.

Education works best when we all help each other. Teachers can help the children. Parents can help the children and the teachers. Administrators can help the school run smoothly. And children can and do help each other. It all works in a healthy symbiotic relationship that avoids blaming one another. When parents accept their responsibility in the cycle of education, that's not blame: that's empowerment. They may advocate for their children at school, but they have the most power at home, the original training center. I think that's what poverty expert Dr. Ruby Payne meant when she said to focus on parent training.

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