SHELF ESTEEM
Robin Ferst Marhaver was attending a party near her home in Madison, Georgia, when one of the guests, an executive at a local manufacturing plant, mentioned his struggles to find skilled workers. Applicants, he said, frequently failed the seventh grade-equivalent reading test.
“That floored me,” Marhaver recalls. “It was eye-opening to see that kids could go to a good school system and still not be prepared to read.”
A lifelong bookworm, she began talking with educators and conducting research on reading. Sixty-one percent of low-income families don’t have children’s books in their homes, she learned, and when children can’t read at grade level by the end of third grade, they’re four times as likely to drop out of
