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I n late 2008, federal largesse to Wall Street and a push for a second economic stimulus package spurred higher education, tourism, alternative energy, construction, and nearly every industry imaginable (including my own—libraries) to lobby for megamillions to accelerate their contribution to economic recovery. Everett Dirksen’s “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” has never been truer.
If higher education were isolated from society, its requests for increased financial aid for students, energy research, capital projects, medical research, and more would form an exemplary agenda. But since it exists in a larger social context, this is too narrow an agenda. A more comprehensive one would focus on the collaboration between schools and colleges in educating the nation’s next generation.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) put the spotlight on K-12 education and outcomes assessment. But faculty who teach introductory college courses also conduct outcomes assessment every year. They perennially conclude that our K-12 system fails to prepare many students to meet professors’ reasonable academic performance expectations, as the ubiquity of remedial education makes clear.
College librarians are also in a unique position to assess new students’ college readiness. It doesn’t matter whether they work in an elite liberal arts institution, a community college, or a major research university—librarians also observe students’ lack of the knowledge and skills they need to succeed, in particular their lack of information-retrieval and information-evaluation skills.
For example, most students, confident Google users, fail to realize that Google searches only part of the free Web, missing specialized resources the library licenses and faculty expect students to use. Many have only the vaguest notions about the mechanics of attribution and citation of others’ work; few understand the underlying ethics and culture of using the intellectual property of others. Creating a bibliographic citation, so habitual as to be almost instinctive for faculty, is in fact an unnatural act—students need to be taught its hows and whys. In short, whether it is reading comprehension, math, or understanding the need to think critically about and evaluate information sources, too many students enter college with remedial needs.
As Congress works on reauthorization of NCLB, K-12 and higher education advocates should form a vocal alliance to add a provision that will address multiple remediation issues: they should urge Congress to include, among others, a requirement that all schools have a library managed by a state-certified school library media specialist. This will make a significant difference in students’ abilities to conduct research when they reach college.
Even before NCLB, studies in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Iowa demonstrated that professional school librarians and school libraries make irreplaceable contributions to student achievement (School Libraries Work!, 2008). These replicated studies show that schools with libraries operated by a state-certified school librarian report better learning outcomes and meet state-established NCLB achievement criteria at significantly higher rates than students in schools lacking this basic service.
Librarians are teachers just as much as those assigned to classrooms (indeed, 90 percent of a school librarian’s day is spent teaching children), and they collaborate with other teachers to give students rich learning experiences. Other teachers, hard-pressed to meet their own responsibilities, cannot keep up with all of the books, videos, and Websites that would be beneficial to students. They depend on their school’s librarian to expose children to good information and to ensure that high-school graduates are information literate—and so, in turn, do college professors and librarians.
Today’s children have an incredible array of choices in educational and entertainment media: television, radio, the Internet, books, DVDs, MP3s, and more. School librarians play a large role in teaching children to evaluate these and use the best and most appropriate of them. The librarian also chooses which books, videos, and commercial online databases the library should purchase. Without good library services, teachers don’t teach as well and students don’t learn as well. Effective library learning experiences are vital preparation for college.
Like the other industries the United States once dominated, higher education here is facing increasing global competition. Any strengthening of K-12 education will strengthen higher education in turn. As they lobby for increased funding for research and more, higher education advocates should also urge Congress to include school libraries and librarians in NCLB. Living on too much borrowed money brought about economic collapse. Enrolling ill-prepared students year after year puts higher education at an analogous risk. We can minimize that risk by assuring that all K-12 students are served by certified school librarians in strong school libraries.
Our school, public, and academic libraries form a unique integrated info-ecosystem that offers universally accessible lifelong learning opportunities. As in any ecosystem, weakness anywhere in the system threatens the whole. Omission of school librarians from the No Child Left Behind Act puts our entire educational ecosystem in jeopardy.
Resources
American Association of School Librarians, a division of the American Library Association: http://www.aasl.org; http://www.aasl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/aaslissues/SKILLS_Act.cfm.
American Library Association’s Washington Office: http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/wo/index.cfm.
Schacter, R. (2008, December). Remedial Nation. Retrieved December 27, 2008, from University Business: http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1180
School Libraries Work! (2008). Retrieved December 27, 2008, from http://www2.scholastic.com/content/collateral_resources/pdf/s/slw3_2008.pdf.
Jim Rettig is president of the American Library Association and university librarian at the University of Richmond in Virginia.