By: Alia Wong<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Published by The Atlantic<\/p>\n\n\n\n
July 14, 2016<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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In many high-poverty urban neighborhoods, it\u2019s nearly impossible for a poor child to find something to read in the summer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Forty-five million. That\u2019s how many words a typical child in a white-collar family will hear<\/a> before age 4. The number is striking, not because it\u2019s a lot of words for such a small human\u2014the vast majority of a person\u2019s neural connections, after all, are formed by age 3<\/a>\u2014but because of how it stacks up against a poor kid\u2019s exposure to vocabulary. By the time she\u2019s 4, a child on welfare might only have heard 13 million words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This disparity is well-documented. It\u2019s the subject of myriad news stories<\/a> and government programs<\/a>, as well as the Clinton Foundation\u2019s \u201cToo Small to Fail\u201d initiative<\/a>, all of which send the message that low-income parents should talk and read to their children more. But these efforts to close the \u201cword gap\u201d often overlook a fundamental problem. In high-poverty neighborhoods, books\u2014the very things that could supply so many of those 30 million-plus words\u2014are hard to come by. In many poor homes, they\u2019re nonexistent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBook reading really provides the words the children need to learn,\u201d said Susan Neuman<\/a>, a childhood- and literacy-education researcher at New York University who served as the assistant education secretary under George W. Bush. \u201cFrankly, when you and I talk to our children, we\u2019re talking in a baby-talk-like way\u2014we\u2019re not using sophisticated language. But even a very low-level preschool book like a Dr. Seuss book has more sophisticated vocabulary than oral discourse. So it\u2019s really about the print gap and not the oral-word gap.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2001, Neuman co-authored a study<\/a> that found that in a middle-class community in Philadelphia, each child had access to 13 books. In a community of concentrated poverty in the same city, on the other hand, there was only a single age-appropriate book per 300 kids\u2014or about 33 titles total, all of which were coloring books. Now, she\u2019s out with a new study<\/a>, published this month in the journal Urban Education,<\/em> that helps paint a clearer picture of the nation\u2019s \u201cbook deserts,\u201d finding intense disparities in access to children\u2019s reading resources in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.\u2014even between a very poor neighborhood and a slightly-less-poor one within a given city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neuman and her co-author on the new study, Naomi Moland<\/a>, an assistant professor at Columbia University\u2019s Teachers College, walked and biked the streets of two neighborhoods in each of the aforementioned cities, meticulously combing each block for businesses selling print resources for kids of any age, including fiction and nonfiction books and newspapers. Overall, they found just 75 such stores\u2014or about 2 percent of all the businesses in those neighborhoods\u2014selling print resources for children ages 0 through 18; many of them were dollar stores. And especially after breaking down the data by neighborhood and age group, it became clear: Children\u2019s books are a rarity in high-poverty urban communities. The likelihood that a parent could find a book for purchase in these areas, Neuman and Moland write, \u201cis very slim.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take D.C.\u2019s Anacostia neighborhood, where nearly all the population is black and 61 percent of children live in poverty. When the research was conducted in the summer of 2014, it didn\u2019t have a single store selling a book for preschoolers, and there were only five books available for kids in grades K-12. In other words, 830 children would have to share a single book in the impoverished Washington neighborhood. \u201cBook stores in the U.S. are becoming a rare bird, but [in places like this], there are no bookstores at all,\u201d Neuman said. \u201cHow do you become literate when there are no available resources?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The new study adds to a growing body of research demonstrating how income-based housing segregation undermines the prospects of America\u2019s youngest citizens, with the rich leaving \u201cthe poor and the near poor to scramble for resources that would have otherwise benefited a larger share of the population,\u201d Neuman and Moland write. But it also shows the nuanced ways in which poverty shapes the country\u2019s communities\u2014how drastically access to something as basic as a book can change from one neighborhood to another just a short drive away. Neighborhoods with 40 percent or more of their residents living in poverty have grown at troubling rates in the last few decades, but so have areas known as \u201cborderline\u201d neighborhoods, in which 20 percent to 40 percent of people live in poverty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just a couple of miles north of Anacostia, for example, in the borderline Washington neighborhood known as Capitol Hill, Neuman and Moland found more than 2,000 children\u2019s print resources in stores\u2014i.e., a book for every two kids. While still equipped with relatively few reading resources, the borderline neighborhoods the researchers studied, overall, had 16 times as many books as their high-poverty counterparts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Equating access to books with access to stores that sell books is hardly perfect, but it makes a good deal of sense when considering the existing data on the book habits and day-to-day realities of low-income families. Statistically, poor families are far less likely to utilize public libraries, whether it\u2019s because they\u2019re not acclimated to using them or because they\u2019re worried about being charged late fines, or because they\u2019re skeptical of putting their name on a card associated with a government entity. Neuman has found that only 8 percent of such families report they have taken advantage of library resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, even though parents could in theory easily order books for their kids from online stores like Amazon, a perhaps surprising percentage of low-income families lack access to high-speed internet at home\u2014a little over half of those with children under 8, according to a 2013 study<\/a>. And only 61 percent of poor families with young children, according to the same study, have internet-enabled mobile devices. That means the presence of brick-and-mortar stores where books are sold can be critical, especially during the summer months when poor children aren\u2019t in school and lose many of the academic skills they developed over the previous year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with exposure to vocabulary, access to books can have both immediate and longer-term impacts on a child\u2019s academic and socioeconomic outcomes. Living in a book desert \u201cmay seriously constrain young children\u2019s opportunities to come to school \u2018ready to learn,\u2019\u201d Neuman and Moland write. A lack of access to books may help explain why, according to some research<\/a>, children from economically disadvantaged communities score 60 percent lower on kindergarten-readiness tests that assess kids\u2019 familiarity with knowledge as basic as sounds, colors, and numbers. And researchers say living in a book desert in one\u2019s early years can have psychological ripple effects: \u201cWhen there are no books, or when there are so few that choice is not an option, book reading becomes an occasion and not a routine,\u201d they write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Neuman, who, as the assistant education secretary under Bush, was in charge of implementing No Child Left Behind, the stalled achievement rates of the country\u2019s children show that more emphasis needs to be placed on what happens in their lives outside of schools. \u201cWe have seen that No Child Left Behind was an effort to really improve schools while ignoring parent education,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat we realize is that children are out of school more than they\u2019re in it.\u201d Contrary to the conventional assumption that academic interventions can only happen in school, she continued, some of the most critical factors in kids\u2019 achievement involve family and environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n