It's a question of commitment to making the right investments. CLI, with it professional development for current teachers, its creation of model effective practices classrooms for student interns, and its endowment of quality books for students at home and in school, is such an investment. CLI's sense of urgency comes from knowing what we can do and how to proceed, and a desire to improve the welfare of America's most needed children immediately. The evidence is strong that young people who are not fluent readers and writers by the end of third grade may never catch up to their peers. The governor of Indiana has stated that determining the number of new prisons to build is based, in part, on the number of second graders not reading at second-grade level.
Low literacy is the socio-economic factor prison inmates have most in common.
Studies show that children entering Kindergarten may have as much of a vocabulary gap as eight years - even before they begin school. The average middle income child has 1200 hours of being read aloud to, compared to 25 hours for low income children. These include concepts such as reading left to right, reading the left page before the right page, understanding punctuation and capitalization, and knowing that the printed text and not the picture is being decoded. It is clear from the research on emergent literacy that important experiences related to reading begin very early in life. For every dollar you put down now, you'll get seven back over the next several decades.