; sense of Congress (a) Findings Congress finds the following: (1) More than 30,000,000 adults in the United States are not able to read or write above a third-grade level. (2) Of adults in the United States who live in poverty, nearly half have low levels of literacy. (3) Children whose parents have low levels of literacy are more than 70 percent more likely to also have low levels of literacy and are more likely to get poor grades, display behavioral problems, have high absentee rates, repeat school years, or drop out. (4) The 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress 4th Grade Reading Level Assessment showed the national average reading score for 2019 was lower than 2017. (5) More than 70 percent of State prison inmates have low levels of literacy. (6) Low levels of literacy are connected to over $230,000,000,000 a year in health care costs in the United States. (7) Dyslexia is thought to be the most common neurocognitive disorder, affecting about 10 percent of children in school. (8) In 1997, Congress asked the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health, in consultation with the Secretary of Education, to convene a national panel, the National Reading Panel, to assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read. The report, released in 2000, documented overwhelming evidence that instruction in phonics enhances all students’ success in learning to read. (9) In 2014, in response to the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s passage of Act 69 of 2014, the Pennsylvania Department of Education developed the Dyslexia Screening and Early Literacy Intervention Pilot Program, which established a three-year early literacy intervention and dyslexia pilot program using evidence-based screening and then evidence-based instruction and intervention for students found to be at risk for future reading difficulties. Such Program identified students in kindergarten who were deemed at risk