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It's Not Rocket Science: Literacy Tumbles When School Libraries Close
Ohanian Comment: Read this for all the shameful parallels between Canada and the U. S. Read it all the way through--Hume is an excellent writer--and there's a funny-awful story toward the end. Read it all the way through for his reminder: We should all be ashamed of ourselves for permitting it.
Here we are, once again trumpeting the importance of developing a literacy strategy because one in four school kids in British Columbia can't read properly. We do this while the school library system on which literacy depends plunges toward crisis.
Why can't we see the connection between the devaluing of school libraries -- the one tool that is absolutely imperative for success
in an information-based economy -- and the steepening decline in reading scores?
It's not as though the connection is a mystery. University of B.C. researcher Ken Laycock lays it out with withering simplicity in a major study of what he describes as a growing crisis of neglect that reaches from Ontario to B.C.
Yet while the World Bank, the European Union, the United States and the East Asia Bank are all investing in school libraries and
teacher-librarians, here in B.C. we charge in the opposite direction, divesting ourselves of our vital literacy assets.
Up to this year, more than 162 positions for teacher-librarians -- that's 17.6 per cent of the total labour roll for specialists trained
in developing literacy skills -- had been eliminated. At the same time, in a city where about half the population was born elsewhere,
one in five positions for teaching English as a second language was eliminated.
This is a strategy for increasing reading skills? Spare me.
Yeah, I know, the premier has just announced a $350,000 literacy initiative for schools. Hey, let's close more than 90 school libraries across B.C., let's cut the paltry $150 grant libraries got, let's fire a slew of teacher-librarians, let's reduce acquisitions to a trickle -- and then let's spend a fraction of the money we save on a literacy campaign!
I don't understand why parents are so passive about what's happening to their kids' school libraries. As our national librarian, Roche
Carrier, observes, they comprise the heart of our schools. The library is absolutely central both to the learning process and to the school as a community of scholars in the world of ideas.
Where are kids supposed to improve their reading skills if the library is not available? Reading the self-congratulatory bumph on
one of the government's bloated but mostly useless websites?
Kids develop literacy skills by reading books. And they learn by reading books that engage them, books that are appropriate to their
emotional maturity, books to which they can be guided by a librarian who knows them as individuals and understands what they need.
It's in the library that kids really learn to think, observes Mary Locke, the teacher-librarian at General Gordon Elementary in
Vancouver. She also heads up the B.C. Teacher-Librarians Association, a thankless and desultory task for book lovers in these wretched times.
I interrupted her in the middle of consultations with two Grade 7 teachers planning a library-based classroom unit on Egypt. Waiting in line were teachers planning a novel study that would rearrange the kids from two separate classes. They needed advice to make sure that those who needed special attention could get it.
"We are teachers of literacy," Locke told me. "We motivate children to read. We lead them to the worlds that are available to them in
books. The importance of what we do in this capacity cannot be overstated. But we also teach them (the technology of) print -- how
to research, how to assess the information that's in front of them and decide what's appropriate to their needs."
But she wearily confirms the bitter laments I hear from school librarians who consider themselves an endangered species.
"We don't have the statistics for this year yet," she says. "But we're diminishing, year by year."
Why are we going down this path? It's not as if other jurisdictions haven't been down it and come staggering back crying, "Don't go there, it's a swamp you don't want to visit!"
All across the U.S., states that allowed the ideologically-based erosion of library services find themselves desperately trying to reinvent what they had. Just look at the train wreck that public education's become in California, where the state will have to spend billions just to fix what the bean counters broke.
In California, they thought they could hack away at school libraries to save money. Kids' reading scores plummeted. Today, California has
achieved the dubious distinction of hitting bottom for the U.S. Trying to restore literacy is now the state's top educational priority.
Which begs an obvious question: What's the point of even having a school if the library is crippled and the teacher-librarians who
specialize in books and literacy are devalued and rendered dysfunctional by insulting and ridiculous work conditions?
Please, no more of this claptrap about the importance of literacy when we've twiddled our thumbs while the politicians closed scores of
school libraries and eliminated teacher-librarians from one end of the province to the other.
Make a few phone calls and you find nightmarish scenarios almost everywhere.
There's the school librarian in the Interior who has to run back and forth between schools because the budget only allows for one-third of
her regular shift in each one.
There's the school where the librarian was reassigned to classroom duties to relieve another teacher who needed prep time. Except that the teacher doing prep could no longer access the library resources required for the next lesson because the librarian was absent --
taking charge of his classroom so he'd have time to go to the library
and prep.
This might make a hilarious skit for Monty Python, but as a model for teaching it's a ludicrous state of affairs. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for permitting it.
— Stephen Hume
Vancouver Sun
2003-10-11
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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