Nearly 40 percent of fourth-graders in Los Angeles can’t read at grade level. At the age of nine, children come to a fork in the road. Research indicates that if a child can’t read at grade level by that age, chances are that the child will be illiterate.
The state of California has one of the lowest children’s reading scores in the nation. California has gone from the Golden State to a tarnished shape.
What are the ramifications? We are fueling an economy with workers who can barely read and write. According to the 2004 LA Workforce Literacy Project, L.A. has the highest rate of undereducated adults in the nation 53 percent have low literacy skills.
You may think that this problem doesn’t affect you. But it affects all of us. As a consultant, I’m hard-pressed to find good employees who can write a cover letter or a resume that’s grammatically correct. A recent cover letter describing the applicant’s commitment to excellence was filled with misspelled words. Our workforce pool is comprised of people with low literacy skills.
When people can’t get good jobs, they turn to crime, and that affects us all. We can’t operate a successful economy on the backbone of an illiterate workforce.
What can we do? We need to help educate the children who are in school, because if we don’t, it will affect our society, our businesses and our neighborhoods. Education begins with reading.
Promoting literacy
That’s why I’m involved with Reading Is Fundamental, the largest non-profit children’s literacy organization. It was founded in 1966 and six years later the Los Angeles chapter was formed. Our mission is to promote literacy by motivating children to read and inspiring them to become life long readers.
Today we distribute over 135,000 free new books of choice to nearly 45,000 children, pre-kindergarten to sixth grade, in 163 schools, hospitals and homeless centers in the Los Angeles area. Our 1,000 volunteers read to children and then the children select their own books. For many children, this book is their first in their home ever!
Reading Is Fundamental of Southern California, or RifSoCal, is dedicated to building home libraries for children. A recent Harvard University study showed that the number one factor that affects children’s reading is having books in their homes.
RifSoCal is not the only children’s literacy program in the Los Angeles area. BookEnds collects used books, which are donated to needy schools that build classroom libraries; Reach Out and Read donates new books to pediatric exam clinics for children under 5 years old; and Everybody Wins! supplies volunteers who read to children.
We need to change the statistic that 40 percent of children can’t read at grade level in Los Angeles. The commitment of the Los Angeles business community is critical in making this happen. We can’t stand idly by and think that someone else is going to do this. We all need to help, because our future economy depends on it.
Barbara Lewis, who has been a board member of Reading is Fundamental of Southern California for10 years, is founder and president of Centurion Consulting Group and MarQuant Analytics.
