DisruptED TV Magazine

End Book Deserts

By Dr. Molly Ness

One of the end goals of schooling today is for our students to embrace reading as a lifelong pursuit, turning to books to inform, delight, and entertain. This ambitious goal is only possible, however, if children have access to high-quality, inclusive texts. Sadly, too many children today live in book deserts — high-poverty geographic areas that lack reading material. The term ‘book desert’ was coined in 2010 by Unite for Literacy, who point out the lack of book access as an issue of social justice and inequity.

The issue of book deserts has been highlighted in research, most notably by Professor Susan Neuman. In her 2019 exploration of urban areas, she found significant disparities in the availability of books between high-income and low-income neighborhoods, even within the same city. Dr. Neuman — former Assistant Secretary of Education — points out that in a high-poverty area of Washington, DC (with poverty levels above 60%) 833 children would have to share one book. In a 2015 article, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten providing these staggering statistics:

· Forty-five percent of our nation’s children live in neighborhoods that lack public libraries and stores that sell books, or in homes where books are not present.

· Two-thirds of schools in our nation’s lowest-income neighborhoods can’t afford to purchase books at retail prices.