On June 15th in the Marketplace section of the WSJ *www.wsj.com* there was an article on reading and it made me stop and think. It said that low income homes have about 25 hours a week of shared reading times with their kids and that medium incom homes have between 1000-1700 hours of shared reading time with their kids. I actually could not fathom how these numbers worked. Can you? Well intrepid readers of this blog, lets delve further shall we?

These numbers are from a book from 1990 titled "Beginning to Read: Thinking and learning about Print" The low income stats come from 24 children in 22 low income families. For the middle income figures she extrapolated from the experience a single child, the authors son. Can someone say ASKEW????? The author laid out their own calculations and sources carefully over the five pages, attempting to be anecdotale about the differences.

Since that time groups like: United Way, Kids in Common and Everybody Wins have used those 5 pages into a singe sentence such as: "Low income kids don't read".

The rest of the article boils down to this statement: "In even the 'best' of families, 'shared reading time' occupies very little of a child's time." "Income is a weak predictor of a parental-child chatter, the author adds, "So any statement about middle class and low income might be a little to glib."

The author of the article can be reached at: numbersguy@wsj.com

I have to agree with him, that article just scares me that anyone would use that as a basis of fact when only a total of 25 children were used at the test group.