The Reading Crisis ? Why Poor Children Fall Behind (Paper) : Harvard University Press : 9780674748859 : 0674748859 : 07 Oct 1991 : How severe is the literacy gap in our schools? Why does the nine-year-old child from a culturally disadvantaged background so often fall victim to the fourth-grade slump? Although the cognitive abilities of these ?children at risk? may be consistent with the norm, their literacy development lags far behind that of other children. In The Reading Crisis, the renowned reading specialist Jeanne Chall and her colleagues examine the causes of this disparity and suggest some remedies. Using Chall's widely applied model of reading development, the authors examine the strengths and weaknesses in the reading, writing, and language development of children from low-income families in an attempt to identify the onset of their difficulties. They show how, in the transition from learning the medium to understanding the message, the demands on children's reading skills b