Can’t Read? Go Directly to Jail. Do Not Pass Go.

What if I told you we have it in our power to do the one thing that would put prisons out of business, stop kids from falling into a life of crime, and dramatically reduce the number of people on welfare?

Teach kids to read. ALL kids.

Pipeline to Prison

If a child doesn’t achieve success at reading in the early grades, he will not even want to attempt it, because failure is painful. Self-esteem starts to erode.

The non-reader feels shame. He doesn’t want anyone to know he can’t read. So he refocuses the attention. He begins to misbehave. It is better to get in trouble for misbehaving than to risk other kids knowing you can’t read. The misbehavior becomes a pattern and escalates into crime.

Okay, I realize this is extreme oversimplification. But the truth of it is there.

They are sad facts:

• 85% of all juveniles in the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate.
• 70% of inmates in America’s prisons can’t read beyond a fourth grade level.
• 2/3 of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of 4th grade will end up in jail or on welfare.

These are not just numbers.

These are the struggling learners that get passed from grade to grade without the right help, until they drop out of school and get into trouble.

These are the dyslexic kids that learn differently and don’t get the help they need. Almost half (48%) of the prison population has some form of dyslexia.

And these are the kids that move a lot, miss a lot, and fall through the cracks of an education system that doesn’t catch every child before they fall.

A Necessary Skill for Living

Reading. Writing. Many of us take these for granted, but there’s no mistaking it. Being literate represents freedom to choose the life you were meant to live.

Despite many programs and initiatives, the literacy rate in America hasn’t budged even a percentage point in the last ten years. Today, 32 million American adults are considered illiterate. (Wow, that’s almost incomprehensible!)

When we change our education policies to make literacy for everyone a priority, we will succeed.

How Can We Make Everyone Literate?

Here, I offer a proposal that places literacy for all kids as a priority.

These three actions are not wildly new ideas. They aren’t all that difficult to implement, if given the needed resources. We already have the tools and techniques to accomplish them.

What’s different is that they will give every parent and family the resources they need to help their children become literate. ALL parents want that for their kids.

What’s different is that instead of being available only to the families that can afford to pay private tutors, they will be offered to ALL kids.

Will it take a lot of people and a lot of money? YES.

But if we spend the money early, we will save it later. And we’ll be saving more than money; we’ll be saving kids.

Even the Odds for Early Learning

Before they are ready to learn to read, children must acquire pre-reading skills. Being able to rhyme words, knowing letters and letter sounds, understanding the structure of stories, and being able to separate the individual sounds in words are some of these skills.

Rich language experiences contribute to these skills. A famous research study by Hart and Risley showed that children from low-income families hear 30 million fewer words than children from higher-income families by the time they are 4 years old. So before some kids even step foot into Kindergarten, they are already far behind in readiness.

Parent and Community Outreach programs for parents of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers can provide resources and knowledge so parents can provide language experiences that foster pre-reading skills in their children.

Let’s place as much emphasis on language development and brain health as we do on physical health.

Let’s hire educational advocates in every health center in low-income areas, to give out children’s books and learning games, and to demonstrate fun learning activities for parents to play with their babies and toddlers.

Let’s convince parents of the importance of these early skills for their children. And, for those parents who cannot read themselves, let’s offer adult reading instruction so they can improve their lives and, consequently, their children’s lives.

Fill in the Gap in Teacher Training

Most elementary teacher preparation programs in colleges and universities prepare students to teach reading to “typical” children. They do not provide the training needed to teach reading to the 1 in 5 children who are dyslexic. These children usually have strong skills in many areas except for reading and writing.

Dyslexic children are often overlooked. They have difficulty reading but often do not qualify for special education services. Even if they do, many special educators do not have the training to treat dyslexia.

Teacher prep programs for ALL elementary educators must include a course in phonics, to include how to recognize the signs of dyslexia in their students and the strategies to meet their needs. While one course won’t make them specialists, it will allow them to reach those children with mild dyslexia and to refer the others to specialists right away before those children meet failure.

Provide Intensive Intervention When Needed

It is well established what the dyslexic reader needs. She needs multisensory, explicit, phonics-based intervention, with Orton-Gillingham (O-G) being the gold standard. One-on-one services work best, or small groups if everyone in the group is at the same level.

Without getting into the weeds too much on this, dyslexics (even highly intelligent individuals) have differently-wired brains that make learning to read difficult. O-G (or a program based on the O-G approach) creates new neural connections in the reading and writing centers of the brain. This takes time, and it takes highly trained teachers.

This is where public school systems fail many dyslexic readers. They either don’t have teachers trained in O-G, or they don’t provide services with enough intensity or consistency.

So what happens to these struggling readers?

If they happen to have parents who can afford a private O-G tutor or a specialized private school, they get the help they need.

That leaves the majority of dyslexic kids still struggling.

There are now dyslexia laws being passed in many states, and there is slow progress being made. Parents still have to fight school districts that don’t have enough trained teachers or enough funding to provide tutoring.

Our public school systems must make early intervention for dyslexics a priority.

Misplaced Priorities

The U.S. spends an average of $13,000 per child per year in the public schools. Compare that to the average of $32,000 per inmate per year in prison (and up to $60,000 in some states).

It seems to me that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in this case.

Over the past 30 years, spending for prisons has increased at three times the rate of spending for education.

“Budgets reflect our values, and the trends revealed in this analysis are a reflection of our nation’s priorities that should be revisited,” — — former U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King, Jr.

The Department of Justice states, “The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure.”

Not Just a Pipedream

So if we reverse reading failure, what happens?

Lois Davis and colleagues conducted an analysis of prison education programs and found that “inmates who participated in correctional education programs had 43 percent lower odds of recidivating than those who did not.”

This speaks volumes to me of the incredible power of literacy. By adulthood, life patterns are pretty hard to break. If learning to read in adulthood can change criminal patterns, imagine how childhood literacy can impact our society!

Conduits for Change. It Starts With You.

You may read this and think I have my head in the clouds, but I’m telling you, we can do this.

Every child CAN and MUST learn to read, and we must provide resources to ensure that happens. When every parent, teacher, and child believes this with conviction, then the train will have left the station. That train will pick up speed, gradually at first, then gain a momentum that will be unstoppable.

We will raise a generation of literate citizens. They will live their lives to the fullest, with dignity and respect. They will have good jobs and do great things.

And we will have done this by changing one thing — teaching every child to read.