Readers will find activities to try out, documents to use for collecting data, and bibliographies to use to pursue topics further. The following are random bits of information culled from the books. Discussions of images like these, which are based on personal experiences, may help parents set goals and develop beliefs about literacy for themselves and their children. Parents who were not read to as children do not fully understand teachers' requests that they read to their children. Several articles address the need to model and practice specific strategies to make the read-aloud experience effective, whether the parent or the child reads.
Evaluation is the weakest aspect of family literacy programs.
However, adults show only modest improvement in literacy skills. These findings may be the result of the lack of adequate instruments designed especially to measure adult gains in family literacy settings. When elementary teachers work with family literacy programs, they develop at-home activities that involve both parent and child. However, the current rescissions and threatened cuts in federal funding for education and welfare programs and the proposed transfer of federal funds to the states in the form of block grants create new anxiety about the future of family literacy programs. Suggesting that enhanced family literacy interactions will break the cycle of poverty or compensate for problems facing the educational system only reinforces the ideology that blames poor people for their own problems and leaves social inequities intact.