Creative Commons
A child reads a book in a library.
As public schools across the United States welcome students back to in-person learning, an estimated seven million children will find themselves in a school without a professionally trained school librarian.
Indeed, according to the American Library Association (ALA), only 61 percent of K-12 schools currently have full-time librarians on staff. “When budgets get tight, librarians are often cut, with administrators saying that in an increasingly digital world, children can access resources online in lieu of a librarian,” the ALA reports.
Cutting school libraries also means increasing racial and class achievement gaps.
Sadly, this isn’t a new issue. While school library budgets have been eroding since the early 2000s, the 2007-2008 recession and emergence of COVID-19 have left many scrambling. As a result, many state and local governments—the entities that provide more than 90 percent of the funding that keeps public schools operating—have cut their overall allocation for public education. Not surprisingly, this has led to increasingly large funding disparities, with low-income areas, largely populated by people of color, bearing the brunt of the inequity.
School libraries in these communities have taken an enormous hit.
Take Philadelphia, where just 16 percent of the city’s 326 public schools have a professional librarian on staff, down from sixty-five in 2011. This impacts more than 200,000 students, 73 percent of whom are Black or Latinx; nearly half live in households with incomes below the poverty line. Similarly, every school in largely-poor Essex County, New Jersey, has eliminated its librarian.
COVID-19, of course, has made everything worse, exacerbating already tight school budgets.
The upshot is that since schools were shuttered in March 2020, 38 percent of school librarians have seen a decrease in library funding, with money shifted into distance learning resources and the purchase of janitorial services, cleaning supplies, and personal protective equipment.
The consequences bode badly.
By all accounts, student learning outcomes increase when they have access to resources, whether those resources are books, magazines, or digital materials. Personal attention also matters, and having a knowledgeable librarian—rather than a well-meaning parent, grandparent, or community volunteer—listen to a child’s ideas is crucial since librarians can steer students towards the right database or suggest a direction for their science or history project. These one-on-one interactions, library advocates say, can make a tremendous difference in how students feel about school, learning, and their own potential.
In fact, more than sixty studies have shown that when school libraries are well-funded and professionally staffed, academic achievement goes up, and drop-out rates go down.
“School libraries offer a safe and nurturing environment during, before, and after school hours,” the ALA reports, “and are often the only place open to all students, where a school librarian can support them across grade levels and subject matter.”
Additionally, libraries serve as learning hubs for homework help, and librarians regularly partner with teachers to develop materials to enhance critical thinking skills, boost research abilities, increase confidence in reading, and help students develop the skills for self-directed inquiry into subjects that interest them. The ALA further stresses that students attending schools with high poverty rates are “nearly twice as likely to graduate when the school library has a certified school librarian.”
Patrick Sweeney is the political director of Every Library, a book industry-funded political action committee that works to build nationwide support for public and school libraries. One of the biggest problems facing library advocates, he tells The Progressive, is that Boards of Education are not mandated to fund school libraries or ensure that they are staffed by qualified professionals or trained literacy specialists.
Even more bizarre, he says, “there’s actually no consensus around what a school library should be or do. Is a classroom with a box of books in the corner or a room with a few computers sitting on desks a library?” he asks.
Professionalism, Sweeney stresses, is also critically important. “In states like Michigan, only eight percent of school libraries have someone with a Masters in Library [and Information] Science (MILS) on staff,” he says.
“The results have been dire. Since that state began cutting back on funding for school libraries twenty or so years ago, state literacy rates have fallen. This has also happened in many other places,” Sweeney adds.
Norah Piehl, executive director of the Boston Book Festival, spoke at a town meeting in Belmont, Massachusetts, in June and further laid out the stakes: “The students who will be disproportionately affected by the lack of library staffing are the most at-risk learners. Licensed school librarians are trained to provide individualized instruction for young readers, to recommend books and resources that challenge and enrich reading lives and the learning of students at all levels . . . regardless of their parents financial means, English fluency, or available time.”
Sweeney agrees, and also puts the issue into a broader political context.
“Cuts to school libraries are part of the larger movement to defund public education more generally,” he says. “Most people are not paying attention to what is happening in school libraries, which is why districts can get away with these cuts.”
Nonetheless, he notes that there has been some resistance: “In Chicago, when a beloved high school librarian was threatened with job loss, the students sat-in and protested, saving her position for a few years. Similarly, elementary school students have held rallies in Oakland, California, and West Orange, New Jersey, to keep their school libraries open and staffed. But these kinds of actions are few and far between.”
What’s more, Sweeney says, cutting school libraries also means increasing racial and class achievement gaps.
Wealthy districts, he explains, typically hold donor drives to raise money when their school libraries are threatened with a reduction in services—as well as for extracurricular activities, trips, and sports programs—something that few if any low-income communities have been able to do.
But despite this blatant inequality—and the resultant unequal impact—Sweeney makes clear that cuts to school libraries have been leveled by school superintendents and administrators in every corner of the country—rich and poor, urban and rural, red and blue.
“We know that school librarians with a Masters in Library Science degree contribute to literacy inclines,” he says. “We need to make sure the general public knows this so that people begin to pay attention to the negative impact these cuts will have years down the road. Every Library believes this is the best way to pressure districts to restore funding and support school libraries.”