First Lady Praises Reading

“Reading might be the most important thing you can do for your future,” First Lady Michelle Obama advised at a recent Summer Learning Day celebration sponsored by the National Summer Learning Association here in the District.
According to the Washington Literacy Center, 90,000 adults in the District are functionally illiterate. They are unable to fill out job applications, read menus, pay bills, or help their children with homework independently.
“When we think about education, we think about someone who’s between 5 and 18 years of age. But the impact of education is lifelong,” Terry Aglire, the executive director of the Washington Literacy Center explained.
The National Summer Learning Association (NSLA) reports that low-income youth lose more reading skills than any other group during the summer months. While their middle- and high-income counterparts make slight gains in reading over the summer, low-income students lose over two months of gained skills.
These unequal summer results significantly contribute to the class-based achievement gap, and the future outcomes can be measured almost immediately. By the summer between the third and fourth grade, four-fifths of low-income students cannot read proficiently, which makes them four times more likely to drop out of high school than proficient students.
“If you’ve got big dreams – and I know you all do – if you want to go to college, if you want to get a good job, if you want to make the most of your potential, then summer can’t just be a vacation. It’s really a time to try to get ahead,” Obama said to more than 200 youth from across the nation who gathered to attend the summer learning event.
At least five of the twelve summer programs that participated in the celebration have branches in DC, and the majority of those programs provide special services for low-income students. Aglire said she believes the summer programs can improve the literacy rates in the District. “[Children] are the people who become adults in the community.”