Description

I’m a reader. I love books. I love comic books. I love glossy magazines, and newspapers. I’m a reader. I was lucky enough to have parents that valued reading enough to instill this love of books in me at an early age. Not everyone is so lucky.

61 percent of low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children. While low-income children have–on average–roughly four children’s books in their homes, a team of researchers recently concluded that nearly two thirds of the low-income families they studied owned no books for their children. Reading Literacy in the United States, 1996.

A typical middle class child enters first grade with approximately 1,000 hours of being read to, while the corresponding child from a low-income family averages just 25 of those hours, such differences in the availability of book resources may have unintended and pernicious consequences for low-income children’ long term success in schooling. M. Adams, Beginning to read. (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990).

Approximately 50 percent of the nation’s unemployed youth age 16-21 are functional illiterate. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Reading is Fundamental

100% of the profits from the sales of this tshirt goes to the organization Reading is Fundamental. RIF is one of the oldest and most respected literacy programs in the United States. They focus on increasing literacy in underserved children from birth to the age of 8.

Learn more about Reading Is Fundamental on their website.