GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT LITERACY AND READING

The issue of Literacy and Functional Literacy is far more important than the attention it gets. When children enter High School unable to function at grade level they are destined for lowered confidence, truant behavior and failure at testing and evaluation. It is a fact that all examinations have a component which requires reading, understanding, thinking, and responding. It is therefore imperative that all students have the ability to read and understand at grade level. It is time to reform curriculum to first address the issue of literacy then gradually add content making connections between the fundamentals of reading and the understanding of material being read.Without a foundation on which to scaffold we are wasting time in education as our focus is always on the pass rate in terms of how we word the assessment but we know what we really focus on is the percentage of failure based on the number of students who would have written the exams.