Why Now?

Rock for Reading and its volunteers are working to inspire literacy through the power of rock because reading rates have faltered not only in Illinois but throughout the United States.
* Literacy in Illinois and Chicago ranks Illinois 34 out of 50 states based on literacy rates.
* The United Nations ranks the United States 12th in reading when compared to other countries.

The problem is real.

Forty-three percent of U.S. residents with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty, and most people, 70 percent, have no full or part-time job, according to the National Institute for Literacy.
Additionally, only one in 18 seventeen-year-old people can read and gain information from specialized texts, such as the science section of a newspaper, reports the institute.

Illinois Statistics
* Roughly 2 million people in Illinois cannot read above a fifth-grade level.
* More than 660,000 Cook County residents aged 18 and older have less than eight years of education.
* Chicago ranks 34 on a list of literate U.S. cities, behind New York (24), Boston (8), Atlanta (6) and Washington, D.C. (3), according to the 2008 list from America’s Most Literate Cities. http://www.ccsu.edu/Amlc/
* Nearly one-half, 47 percent, of Chicago third graders are below their grade level in reading, according to the 2007 Illinois Standards Achievement Test.
* More than one-half, 65 percent, of Chicago eleventh graders are below their grade level in reading, according to the 2007 Prairie State Achievement Examination.

National Statistics
* Only 10 percent of the nation’s population uses a local library.
* Forty percent of the nation’s population never reads.

National Endowment for the Arts 2008 Report
The National Endowment for the Arts 2008 report, Reading on the Rise (PDF), documents a significant turning point in recent U.S. cultural history. For the first time in more than a quarter century, literacy reading has risen among U.S. adults.
Adult men and women across multiple races, age groups and education levels have shown growth in their reading rates. Combined with general population growth, these higher reading rates have expanded literary readership by 16.6 million.

National Endowment for the Arts Statistics
* For the first time in the history of the NEA survey, the overall adult-literary reading rate rose from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in 2008.
* More than one-half of the U.S. adult population-113 million Americans-did literary reading in the 12 months prior to the survey.
* There were 16.6 million new adult readers of literature in 2008.
* In the previous survey, the number of adult literary readers had dropped by 4.1 million, despite a substantial rise in the total U.S. population.

National Endowment for the Arts Additional Reports
2007 To Read or Not to Read (PDF)
2004 Reading at Risk (PDF)