Background on Problem

Adolescent Literacy: A National Reading Crisis by Ernest B. Fleishman, Ed.D. Download Paper (PDF)

Current Literacy Crisis
According to a recent report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Alliance for Excellent Education, "approximately 8 million young people between fourth and twelfth grade struggle to read at grade level. Some 70 percent of older readers require some form of remediation" (2004). The 2003 statistics on reading achievement from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) also revealed:

• 37% of fourth graders were reading at below basic levels.
• Reading problems affected students in almost every social, cultural, and ethnic group. According to the results, 25% of Caucasians, 60% of African Americans, 56% of Hispanics, 30% of Asian Americans, and 53% of Native Americans were reading at below basic levels in the fourth grade.

Students who do not have strong literacy skills find themselves at a serious disadvantage in social settings, as civil participants, and in the working world. A recent call for workplace preparedness from high school graduates, with an emphasis on creating quantifiable measures of strong analytical and reasoning skills, intensifies the importance of remediating and nurturing students’ reading abilities. Reading interventions must help these students achieve sufficient gains in reading ability so they can attain the literacy skills needed to succeed in school and in life.

Research on adolescent literacy shows that successful reading programs for older readers incorporate approaches that meet the particular needs of these readers. Struggling adolescent readers have a range of literacy needs; for example, most can read words accurately, but they do not comprehend what they read for a variety of reasons. For some, the problem is that they do not yet read words with enough fluency to facilitate comprehension (Carnegie, 2004). In addition, these readers need to be engaged and given incentive to learn to read. The needs of English-Language Learners and students with learning disabilities also need to be taken into account.

SOLUTION FOR STRUGGLING READERS
Today, over 500,000 students are finding success with an innovative, research-based reading intervention program, READ 180. The program directly addresses individual needs through adaptive and instructional software, high-interest literature, and direct instruction in reading skills.

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