Low Literacy in Houston

Prompt: Choose to address economic, social, or environmental sustainability at the city, state, or country level.  Whether you are a city mayor, a state governor, or a country president, write policy that you would enact to address the category of sustainability that you chose. 

      Reading is a universal skill, it just is. Reading is taught and used all around the world to all ages, it is an essential part of life. In the city of Houston, there are tens of thousands of children, and 38% of all kids under the age of 5 live in poverty. That is 204,000 kids just under the age of 5 living in poverty. Living in poverty means not as much access to education, which means a higher chance of low literacy or even illiteracy.
     Third grade is the most important milestone in a child’s reading skills because that is the year when students are to transfer from learning how to read to reading to learn. If a kid is falling behind, they have a 1 in 8 chance of ever catching up and are 4 times more likely to drop out of school during their junior high or high school. Dropping out of school unfortunately leads to things like not being able to find a job, poverty, and sometimes incarceration.

    This addresses multiple social sustainability issues: Poverty, lack of education, incarceration, and children’s rights. Being able to read is something I would not be able to live without, so if I were a city mayor I would propose a policy that requires organizations such as libraries, schools and non-profit organizations to use some of their funding on tutor volunteers to help kids struggling in schools with reading and writing. They would provide free tutoring at schools or libraries in areas with more poverty or lower amounts of literacy.



Fried, Anne. “Literacy Presentaion.” Edited by Sydney Ying and Emory Ying, Google Slides, Google, docs.google.com/presentation/d/10FVLYChORizk1zes1sYKnUdcdmDclDrad8JSNgGmkT0/edit#slide=id.p7.

Comments

Mr. Roddy said…
Interesting! I wonder what poverty has to do with a lack of reading education. Is this something a city mayor could on with the state in some way through the public school system?
September 26, 2018 at 1:42 PM
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