By Alex Alper
“The Skin I’m In” is a popular young adult fiction book with Middle Schoolers at the Urban Assembly School for Urban Environment in Brooklyn, New York. But when they want to read it, they must borrow it from a classmate, or a teacher’s classroom shelf.
The Middle School has no library, nor a librarian to manage the collection now housed on classroom shelves. When the school opened in 2005, it shared a library with a Middle School in the building. When that school was phased out in 2007, the library eventually closed, too.
Almost a third of secondary school students in New York City have no access to school libraries, even though a New York State regulation mandates they do. It’s a growing trend. Since a peak of 792 school librarians in 1998-99, New York City schools have cut library staff by almost 40 percent, to 485.
“These are tough economic times,” said Nancy Everhart, President of the American Association of School Librarians. “If something is not seen as required or directly involved in the things kids are being tested on—math, language arts and reading–it gets cut.”
Libraries and Librarians fit that category, according to Everhart and other experts, and the scarcity of libraries is felt in students’ education.
“College professors and librarians are saying that students graduating from high school are not prepared to do research at the college level, which is taught to them by the high school librarian,” said Michael Borges, director of the New York Library Association. If schools continue to shed librarians, he says, “you are going to get a lower number of [High School] graduates and less [academic] success.”
The decline of libraries in the city is much more drastic than in the rest of the state, where only two percent of high school and middle school students lack access to school libraries and librarians, according to NYSED data.
Nationally, school library staff was cut by about two or three percent in 2007, the last year for which there is data. The number of school libraries declined by less than 1% that year also, to 81,920, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
New York “at least has a [librarian] mandate at the secondary level,” Everhart said. Many states, she says, don’t even have that requirement.
The statistics are self-reported by school principals, so NYSED officials say it is not as accurate as other data they collect. He also says schools may have an incentive to say they don’t have a library, because they know schools are put on a non-compliance list if they have a library and lack a certified librarian. Nothing happens if they lack a library, though both are illegal.
The data, however, suggests a slow increase in the number of school libraries and a large dip in the number of school librarians.
The findings are “shocking,” according to Ruth Small, a professor and the Director of the Center for Digital Literacy at Syracuse University. “I knew they had very few certified people at the elementary level but to see this number at the secondary level is upsetting,” she said.
Staffing and collection ratios for secondary school libraries have remained virtually unchanged since the Commissioner’s regulation provisions was established in 1928. In the fiscal crisis of the mid ‘70’s, newly decentralized school districts cut librarians. When the economy improved by the ‘80’s, the state and city began giving grants to build school library collections, but not personnel.
Though data on secondary school librarians is only available since 1998, one NYSED insider says he suspects the major drop in school librarians in due to cost cutting and a push to make sure librarians are certified.
“It’s a delicate issue,” he said. “Its important that you have a qualified individual teaching students. But if the effect of you verifying that they are certified means they are going to close libraries, [that is bad].”
Other experts say the problem is due to New York City’s own inefficiencies.
“New York City chooses to ignore the regulations and laws regarding school libraries and librarians,” said Borges. He attributes the problem to a lack of buy-in by the Board of Education, lack of space, limited funding, and New York’s extensive public library system, which some would argue decreases the need for school libraries.
The New York Public library system is the fourth largest in the country, with 87 branches and over 15 million volumes. Several Brooklyn secondary school administrators without libraries report taking students to Public Libraries located only a few blocks away.
But most agreed that fiscally stressed schools often cut a librarian first, because research skills don’t appear on state tests and —are deemphasized.
“When kids are struggling with math and [English Language Arts] you have to make a decision of whether to spend your money on someone who directly influences their learning or not,” said one school principal in Brooklyn, who declined to be named. “Schools are rated on how they do on math and not the way they do the library research,” she says.
“It bothers me,” said the principal. “I do think that in some ways we are providing a disservice, but when I think about long term its more important to me that they can multiply than that they can take out a book they probably can’t read.”
Some argue that the secondary school library mandate is outdated. Dr. Marc F. Bernstein, Superintendent of the Valley Stream Central High School District in Nassau County says now that most research is done online, teachers can easily be trained to teach the online research skills that librarians typically provide. He added that English teachers could easily take on the librarians role: they already teach research skills, and since they are evaluated based in part on their students’ achievement on the English Language Arts exam, they are accustomed to being held accountable for student skill development, unlike librarians.
Bernstein says secondary schools should be allowed to choose whether to have a library and librarian. “If money were unlimited everything would be fine in schools but that is not the real world,” he said.
Small is unconvinced that the internet is a substitute for library research. “When a student Googles a topic and gets thousands of hits, it is the librarian that helps him learn how to sift through all of that information, to identify the most credible, current, accurate, and complete information to answer his questions,” she said. “Most teachers do not know how to do this; often they don’t even know this is important.”
Borges also disagreed with Bernstein, arguing that the Internet makes librarians more important. “We are suffering from information overload and students are susceptible for getting the wrong information and posting the wrong information online,” he says.
In the City, librarians are becoming scarcer even in schools with libraries. About half of New York City schools with libraries lacked certified librarians from 2006 through 2009. This year the figure jumped to over 66 percent.
“I don’t call a room of books a library if a librarian is not there,” said Everhart. “You wouldn’t want to go to a hospital and have no doctors there. School librarians have a masters degree in library science–they are professionals that teach.”
Keith Curry Lance, the former Director of Library Research Service of the Colorado
State Library and the University of Denver, conducted studies from 1999 through 2003, on the impact of school libraries on student academic success in Alaska, Oregon, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania. He found that student achievement on standardized tests is positively correlated with the size of the library staff, the existence of full-time certified school librarians, and the frequency of library-centered instruction, among other things.
“If you look at the tests very closely, a lot of these things that we call ‘information literacy skills,’ they are in a lot of the state tests,” said Evenhart.
But the pressures are very real.
Salaries of librarians are roughly the same as teachers’, averaging about $78,000 per year in New York City.
Currently 77 percent of New York City school librarians are certified—53 percent at the elementary school level and 93 percent at the secondary school level. That is a significant increase over 1998, when only 49 percent of school librarians were certified.
That trend is in line with the main policy focus of the librarians association, according to Borges, who says the NYLA’s main effort goes to advocating for a law requiring librarians in elementary schools.
Principals sense that compliance with the library mandate is not a high priority.
“When there is really a mandate, the state puts money in your budget to make sure that it can happen,” she said, citing “special educator programs” and “parent coordinators” as examples. “There is no special allocation for a librarian.”
Leave a Reply