Nick Kristoff’s Sunday New York Times Piece, “Profiting From a Child’s Illiteracy,” offers a gut wrenching story of poor children in rural America who are discouraged from learning to read by parents who depend on the child’s monthly disability check.
“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program…in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky.
While discussing solutions to the problem of dependence on the federal safety net, Kristoff highlights a literacy initiative of Save the Children. This program uses home visitors to bring book bags filled with high quality children’s literature into the home of young, poor mothers like Britny Hurley. Kristoff describes how this program helps parents develop high impact family reading routines with their children:
(Ms. Trent) encourages the mothers (and the fathers, if they’re around) to read to the children, tell stories, talk to them, hug them. If the parents can’t read, then Ms. Trent encourages them to flip the pages on picture books and talk about what they see.
Ms. Trent brings a few books on each visit, and takes back the ones she had left the previous time.
Sound familiar? That’s because it is. The home visiting model used by Save the Children in communities like Breathitt County, Kentucky is Raising A Reader!
Kristoff’s piece in the New York Times is not an endorsement of Raising A Reader, but rather intended to highlight the complicated issue of poverty and its impact on the youngest Americans. We agree with him when he says, “Almost anytime the question is poverty, the answer is children” because they are in fact too small to fail.
Read the entire opinion piece by Nick Kristoff in December 9th edition of the New York Times, “Profiting From a Child’s Illiteracy.”