Where Books
Are All But Nonexistent
In many high-poverty urban neighborhoods, it’s nearly
impossible for a poor child to find something to read in the summer.
L JulIA WONG JUL
14, 2016 www.thr atlantic.com
Forty-five million. That’s how many
words a typical child in a white-collar familywill hear before
age 4. The number is striking, not because it’s a lot of words for such a small
human—the vast majority of a person’s neural connections, after all,are formed by
age 3—but because of how it stacks up against a poor kid’s exposure
to vocabulary. By the time she’s 4, a child on welfare might only have heard 13
million words.
This disparity is well-documented.
It’s the subject of myriad news stories andgovernment
programs, as well as the Clinton Foundation’s “Too Small to
Fail” initiative, all of which send the message that low-income
parents should talk and read to their children more. But these efforts to close
the “word gap” often overlook a fundamental problem. In high-poverty
neighborhoods, books—the very things that could supply so many of those 30
million-plus words—are hard to come by. In many poor homes, they’re
nonexistent.
“Book reading really provides the
words the children need to learn,” said Susan Neuman, a childhood-
and literacy-education researcher at New York University who served as the
assistant education secretary under George W. Bush. “Frankly, when you and I
talk to our children, we’re talking in a baby-talk-like way—we’re 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’s
really about the print gap and not the oral-word gap.”
In 2001, Neuman co-authored a study 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—or about
33 titles total, all of which were coloring books. Now, she’s out with a new study,
published this month in the journal Urban Education, that
helps paint a clearer picture of the nation’s “book deserts,” finding intense
disparities in access to children’s reading resources in Detroit, Los Angeles,
and Washington, D.C.—even between a very poor neighborhood and a
slightly-less-poor one within a given city.
Neuman and her co-author on the new
study, Naomi Moland,
an assistant professor at Columbia University’s 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—or about 2 percent of all the businesses in
those neighborhoods—selling 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’s 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, “is very slim.”
“How do you become literate when
there are no available resources?”
Take D.C.’s 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’t 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. “Book stores
in the U.S. are becoming a rare bird, but [in places like this], there are no
bookstores at all,” Neuman said. “How do you become literate when there are no
available resources?”
The new study adds to a growing body
of research demonstrating how income-based housing segregation undermines the
prospects of America’s youngest citizens, with the rich leaving “the poor and
the near poor to scramble for resources that would have otherwise benefited a
larger share of the population,” Neuman and Moland write. But it also shows the
nuanced ways in which poverty shapes the country’s communities—how 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 “borderline” neighborhoods, in which 20
percent to 40 percent of people live in poverty.
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’s print
resources in stores—i.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.
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’s because they’re not acclimated to using
them or because they’re worried about being charged late fines, or because
they’re 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.
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—a little over half of those with children under 8, according
to a 2013 study.
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’t in school and lose many of the
academic skills they developed over the previous year.
As with exposure to vocabulary,
access to books can have both immediate and longer-term impacts on a child’s
academic and socioeconomic outcomes. Living in a book desert “may seriously
constrain young children’s opportunities to come to school ‘ready to learn,’”
Neuman and Moland write. A lack of access to books may help explain why,
according to some research,
children from economically disadvantaged communities score 60 percent lower on
kindergarten-readiness tests that assess kids’ familiarity with knowledge as
basic as sounds, colors, and numbers. And researchers say living in a book
desert in one’s early years can have psychological ripple effects: “When 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,” they write.
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’s children show
that more emphasis needs to be placed on what happens in their lives outside of
schools. “We have seen that No Child Left Behind was an effort to really
improve schools while ignoring parent education,” she said. “What we realize is
that children are out of school more than they’re in it.” Contrary to the
conventional assumption that academic interventions can only happen in school,
she continued, some of the most critical factors in kids’ achievement involve
family and environment.
Ultimately, giving kids access to
books may be one of the most overlooked solutions to helping ensure kids attend
school with the tools they need to succeed. As an experiment, Neuman and her
team—with funding from JetBlue, which also helped fund her latest research—set up a vending machine in a busy
area in Anacostia last summer where kids could pick up books for free. Within
six weeks, according to Neuman, 27,000 books were given away. “It’s designed to
say to people, ‘strike down that notion that these people don’t care about
their children’—they deeply care,” she said. “What they lack are the resources
to enable their children to be successful.”
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