Contrary to what some reports may imply, our nation is not full of illiterates. However, reading levels have declined. According to the 1994 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 25 percent of all 12th graders scored below a basic reading level, and 66 percent scored below a proficient level.
Other statistics indicate the same trend:
1. In 1988, 44 percent of the job applicants at Prudential Insurance in Newark, NJ, could not read on a ninth-grade level.
2. At the Motorola electronics company in Schaumburg, Ill., in 1992, officials found that 50 percent of job applicants failed to achieve seventh-grade reading levels.
3. In 1988, The New York Times reported that thirty percent of the nation’s largest companies were collectively paying $25 billion a year teaching remedial math and reading to entry-level employees.
—The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease
Also, author Mary Leonhardt reported in Parents Who Love Reading, Children Who Don’t, that the average verbal SAT scores had declined in 1991 to the lowest level in 20 years. In 1972, 116,630 students scored above 600 on the verbal SAT; in 1991 the number was down to 74,000.
During the same period the number of students scoring over 600 in math held steady — indicating that we are not seeing a drop in the intelligence or reasoning power of students, only in their verbal sophistication.
Despite these statistics: “The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; the more you like it, the more you do it. And the more you read, the more you know; and the more you know, the smarter you grow,” Trelease writes.
