ABSTRACT
Acorrelation between social class and reading failure seems to be indisputable: On the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), “students from lower-income homes lagged behind their more affluent peers” in reading despite schools’ efforts to close that gap (The Washington Post, June 20, 2003, p. A12). On the 2003 NAEP test of reading, the higher the level of poverty in a school, the lower the test scores in Grades 4 and 8 (the only grades for which data were available; https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2005/section2/indicator09/.asp, retrieved January 10, 2006). We infer from this pattern that the likelihood of developing reading problems is increased if a person is a member of a vernacular English-speaking population because vernacular speakers tend to cluster in the lower socio-economic classes.
