How Poverty Impacts Reading and Overall Academic Achievement

The book “Teaching with Poverty in Mind” by Eric Jensen gives us the risk factors on how poverty impacts reading and overall academic achievement. Before even hearing what they are, though, most of us know, when we think about it, how poverty can’t help but be detrimental to a child’s learning.

We intuitively know, for instance, that a child who comes to school hungry is going to have a difficult time focusing. Or if a child comes to school without warm enough clothing on, he or she could get sick. The list goes on and on, and no doubt about it, child poverty is hard.

Essentially, kids who come from poverty-stricken homes have to adapt to conditions that are far from ideal and that are going to inhibit learning how to read and acquiring other academic skills. The largest risk factors that kids raised in poverty have to deal with, according to Jensen are:

social and emotional issues
chronic and acute stressors
cognitive delays
safety and health concerns

The British Columbia teachers’ magazine, BCTF, reported on the findings of a teachers’ action committee in various different school districts. The educators first expressed their concern about the wide learning gap between children from low-income areas and those from higher-income neighborhoods. They noted as well that kids from impoverished areas were often not prepared for kindergarten and needed additional to adjust to the classroom setting. Other kids, along with their parents, from these same communities faced the extra challenge of language barriers and that has high as 40 percent spoke a different language at home. Simply put, poverty is radically slowing down the reading, writing and learning process for far too many kids around the world.

The Read On, Get On Campaign states that having a strong foundation in reading is vitally important in breaking the cycle of academic inequalities and to improving the opportunities for the most disadvantaged, poorest children. Finding educational programs that support ELL students’ first language, such as The Latino Family Literacy Project, can make an enormous difference on their overall academic and language acquisition success of kids by working with their parents in a family reading program. Parents are happy to attend, learn and graduate with a new habit of reading with their children and building strong vocabulary with their kids.