Out of circulation: School librarians are in short supply
By:
Pamela MartineauFall 2009
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SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT (publ. 01/27/10) This article has been updated to correct the initial amount and the authorized purpose of the state budget allocation that then- Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin secured for school libraries in 1998.
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Forget the stereotype of a school librarian who sits behind the circulation desk checking out books with an ink stamp. In the new millennium, school librarians are more likely to be found sitting behind a computer as they update the library Web page or create a wiki on genetically modified organisms. Or they might be seen holed up in the library computer lab as they lead students through tutorials on annotated bibliographies or Google docs.
If adequately supported, school librarians—or teacher librarians, as they are called in California—are vital educational leaders on campus who update educators’ and students’ research skills in an era of ever-changing technology. But many education policymakers don’t actually know what good teacher librarians do, school library advocates claim, so library programs are especially vulnerable to budget cuts when the state backs cash-strapped schools into tight fiscal corners such as the ones they’re in now.
Already, California ranks last in the nation for its teacher librarian-to-student ratio, according to the National Center for Education statistics. The national average ratio of librarians to students is 1 to 916. In California, the ratio is one librarian per 5,124 students. Only one in every eight California schools employs a credentialed teacher librarian. And with the chronic state budget crisis, that scarcity is likely to worsen.
“My fear is there are too many teacher librarians disappearing,” says Connie Williams, president of the California School Library Association and a teacher librarian at Petaluma High School, in the Petaluma Joint Union High School District. “They are being replaced with paraprofessionals or volunteers, or they are not being replaced at all and the libraries are closing.
“We’re at a tipping point where there are more administrators who are younger who have never worked in an environment where a teacher librarian has been,” adds Williams. “They don’t know what they are missing.”
Indexing achievement and library access
Doug Achterman, a teacher librarian at San Benito High School in Hollister, wrote his doctoral dissertation on the link between strong library programs and student scores on California’s Standardized Testing and Reporting Program.
“Our research shows that the strongest relationship between school libraries and STAR test scores occurs at the high school level,” a summary of Achterman’s 2008 thesis, “Haves, Halves and Have-Nots: School Libraries and Student Achievement,” states.
“The school library program is a better predictor of scores on the high school English Language Arts STAR test than other school variables such as teacher experience and teacher salary. On the U.S. History test, the library program is a better predictor of scores than both school variables and community variables, including parent education, poverty, ethnicity, and percentage of English language learners. Nearly every element of a high school library program positively correlates with STAR test scores, including all of the elements listed above, as well as:
- teacher librarian staffing levels
- total staffing levels
- budget
- collection size
“In elementary, middle school and high school libraries, teacher librarian staffing and total staffing are strongly related to the level of services provided. What’s more, increases in library services are related to higher STAR test scores. Staffing is key in creating strong school libraries.”
The boost to student achievement from strong library programs at the high school level apparently carries over into college. Topsey N. Smalley, an instruction librarian at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz County, conducted a study of incoming freshmen and found that students from high schools with teacher librarians fared significantly better academically at college than their peers from high schools without teacher librarians.
“In today’s Information Age, information literacy skills form a core set of complex competencies that are necessary for success in academia and in the work world,” Smalley wrote in her 2004 report, “College Success: High School Librarians Make the Difference.”
“Within the last decade, research has provided solid evidence that school library programs—ones with credentialed librarians, where librarians partner with school faculty, and whose school libraries have sufficient staffing and collections—contribute to student achievement. These studies have controlled for community and school differences and the possible interfering effects of such variables as student socioeconomic status.”
School libraries in the digital age
On any given day, Marie Slim, teacher librarian at the Fullerton Joint Union High School District’s Troy High School, might be found delivering a lesson to students on the new Modern Language Association citation guidelines, teaching other students ways to evaluate the bias of a particular Web site or helping a math teacher craft a lesson plan using Google docs.
“I did a collaborative unit with a special education teacher. The students researched earthquakes, and they needed to learn how to present the information orally,” says Slim, citing one example. “So we had them create earthquake picture books [on the computer] for third graders.”
Teacher librarians in the digital age are campus leaders in teaching students—and often other educators—an array of digital literacy skills. In addition to teaching students and teachers how to use library resources such as online research databases, school librarians also are teaching kids source analysis skills such as the difference between a “dot-org,” “dot-com” and a “dot-edu.” A dot-edu—a Web site sponsored by an educational organization—might be more trustworthy than a dot-org, which is sponsored by an organization with a potential bias. A dot-com—a commercial site—is generally out to make money.
“We always assume that students actually know more than they do [about the Internet] because they have used the Internet for a long time,” says Williams. “But no one may have pointed out that the title of the Web site is not the URL.
Barbara Jeffus, a school library consultant for the California Department of Education, says that the school librarian’s role on campus has become even more critical in the information and digital age. In addition to promoting literacy among students and ordering books and overseeing the library collection, teacher librarians are increasingly acting as professional development providers of digital literacy skills. Often the teacher librarian is on the cutting edge of new digital research and education technologies and steps up to share that knowledge with other educators.
“They train teachers,” says Jeffus. “That becomes one of their major hats. Not only do they do staff development, but they provide a buddy with every teacher they are collaborating with. That’s pretty rare on a campus, to have someone willing to walk hand-in-hand with you down a topic.”
For instance, this summer Slim is communicating via Facebook with an English teacher at her school who is teaching a new course in the fall. Slim is providing Web sites to the other educator that might assist her in teaching writing in the active voice or that might provide good background research on a novel the teacher plans to include in her curriculum.
“Now, with the Internet, there is so much information that the task becomes paring it down, evaluating the information and putting it into practice and using it ethically,” says Slim.
Talks on plagiarism also are an integral part of teacher librarians’ curriculum. The librarians introduce both educators and students to plagiarism-spotting programs such as www.turnitin.com.
Maintaining a robust library Web site is one of the many key jobs a school librarian performs. These days, automated circulation accessed via a library Web site allows students and educators to check what hard-copy books are available and to place a hold on them at any time of day or night. Many school libraries also maintain a collection of electronic books that can be accessed at the school’s library Web site at any time.
“You want a strong Web presence, with a library page that is easy to get to from a classroom, home or a handheld device,” says the CDE’s Jeffus.
“I advertise my e-mail prominently [on our library Web site] so students can reach me at night with a question if I’m on my computer,” says Williams, the school library association president in Petaluma.
Jeffus adds that now more than ever in this economic downturn, readily available library Internet resources are critical, both in school libraries and public libraries. For the first time in over a decade, Internet connectivity is declining in American households—presumably due to economics—while library use is increasing.
“It’s an essential element for a democracy,” Jeffus says of libraries. “People need to have access to information that’s reliable, trustworthy and open for them. That makes for an informed electorate.”
“During the industrial age people needed to learn to use new tools,” adds Jeffus. “In an information age, people need to learn to use the tools, but the tools are different.”
Strong libraries
It may sound counter-intuitive, but if a school board member should walk into a library and see a credentialed teacher librarian shelving books, that school board member might justifiably question whether the district is getting its money’s worth from that librarian, claims Jeffus. A good teacher librarian should spend large amounts of time teaching students, maintaining the library Web site and collaborating with teachers. And the only way to do that is with support staff who take over the day-to-day operations of the library, librarians report.
“I’m in a school district where we have a full-time teacher librarian and a full-time clerical assistant, and that makes all the difference in the world,” says Williams. “I’ve been a teacher librarian without an assistant and a teacher librarian with an assistant, and it’s like night and day.”
Good libraries are the hubs of schools. Students buzz in and out of them all day long, checking out books, using the computers, doing homework, picking up new textbooks. Staying abreast of that hubbub of activity is itself a full-time job, leaving little time for trained teacher librarians to teach and work collaboratively with other educators. That’s why the best school libraries are supported by full-time technical staff, library boosters report.
Library techs can check books in and out, run the textbook room and oversee the audiovisual materials—all while making sure kids don’t drink Gatorade as they stroll through the library aisles or stick gum under library tables.
A teacher librarian who operates without such support has little time to share her research skills and training with students and teachers on campus. Unfortunately, in this era of budget cutting, library technicians are getting hit hard with layoffs. Exact numbers are not available, but anecdotally, Williams and other library advocates hear that many library technicians or library assistants have been pink-slipped.
“We have no idea how all of our March 15 [potential layoff] notices have played out,” said Jeffus, speaking over the summer. “For the first time we’ve been fielding questions like, ‘Can we just close our libraries?’”
Jeffus says the California Education Code requires that schools provide for library services, but it does not require a credentialed teacher librarian at each school or even a library. Contracting with a public library would be acceptable—at least under the Ed Code.
Remember, though, that California is already at the bottom rung of all the states for its teacher librarian ratio per student. According to Bernard “Barney” Bricmont, a CSBA Subregion 9-A delegate and strong public school library advocate, many states require a certificated librarian for each 600 to 700 students. California has roughly one certificated librarian per 5,000 students—and even that’s not mandated.
To illustrate his point, Bricmont points to a school district near him that doesn’t have a single teacher librarian to serve its nearly 20,000 K-12 students. Its libraries are run by library technicians, and many of those received layoff notices this year. In some ways, Bricmont blames a lack of awareness about the role of librarians for librarians’ vulnerability to cuts.
“Our administrators, when they are trained in school and when they go to work, have little or no contact with what a librarian does,” says Bricmont. “The school board members themselves sometimes don’t understand the need for librarians. They concentrate on keeping teachers in the classroom and say we have to keep our cuts away from the classroom,” says Bricmont. “[Librarians] have gotten cut just like nurses and counselors.”
The glory days
Library boosters such as Richard Moore—a retired school librarian from Torrance and a former Orange County Department of Education school librarian—cite the years 1998 through about 2001 as the glory days for school library funding. In 1998, when state coffers were flush, strong advocates for libraries such as then-state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin lobbied successfully for a dedicated line item for school libraries in the state budget. At the time, it was $158.5 million, which came out to about $28 per student, to be used for materials. But when bad budget times hit, the library funding kept getting hit too. By midyear 2003-04, that annual outlay had dwindled to about $4 million. Jeffus says the result was a dip in teacher librarians from a high of about 1,200 statewide to about 900.
“The only people who know what librarians do these days are people who come here from out of state,” says Moore.
Moore said most states have state standards for school libraries and/or regional accreditation standards for school libraries. California and the state’s school accrediting association, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, have neither—at least for now. The school library association is developing a proposal for state standards and hopes to present them to the State Board of Education in January.
“I’m optimistic that someday [teacher librarians] will be mandated,” says Williams, the CSLA president. “At some point, if we can convince legislators, if we can get the school boards of the state to arise and say … ‘this is a classroom position that needs to be mandated, just as much as the science teacher does.’” Williams and other library supporters are quick to point out that when one considers all of the staff development, student training and one-on-one collaboration with other educators that a good school librarian does—schools are actually getting a big bang for the buck when they fund school librarians.
Pamela Martineau is a freelance writer and teacher.
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