LM_NET: Library Media Networking
The LM_NET has been abuzz the past ten days with concern about the Time
Magazine article on schools ----- and the fact that it virtually ignored the
role of libraries and librarians in quality schooling. The criticism of
Time was broad and deep. There were calls to write to the editor; there
were calls for people to cancel their subscriptions. The pain was evident
and the concern was real.
There's an old line that says that it doesn't matter if you hit the bullseye
if you're aiming at the wrong target. I want to suggest that Time Magazine
is not the target here. The correct target -- targetS, actually -- are much
closer to home.
Time is not to blame here. I suspect that this article would not have been
very much different if it had appeared in almost any other publication --
save something like The Book Report, The School Library Journal, School
Library Media Quarterly, School Library Media Activities Monthly, or a few
other select journals of particular interest to librarians. It certainly
would not have been different if it had appeared in Newsweek, U.S. News and
World Report, Business Week, Fortune, or almost any other large circulation
non-education publication. I'm also reasonably sure that in regard to
libraries and librarians, the article would have been very much the same if
it had appeared in Educational Leadership, the Kappan, Principal, any of the
publications of the National Association of Elementary School Principals or
the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Clearing House, or
almost any other educational journal.
Ask yourself where the reporters from Time got the information they used to
write the article. The answer has to be that they pulled it from
researchers, from published works, from public documents, and from
interviews with scholars, legislators, school board members,
superintendents, principals, and teachers. If Time didn't mention, let
alone give credit to, libraries and librarians for school quality, it is
because those documents and people didn't either. If reporters from any
other magazine did the same story, read the same materials, and talked to
the same people (or to any of their counterparts), the results would be the
same.
There is a message in this. Several messages. Foremost among them is that
libraries and librarians are virtually invisible to people outside their own
group -- and it is time to do something about it. This is clearly not the
way it should be, but -- as clearly -- it is the way it is. Not only are
libraries and librarians invisible to the public, they are also largely
invisible to other educators. If you seek evidence of this, all you need to
do is to go to the sources in your library, pull down any non-library
journal or magazine -- including (especially) works published by and for
board members, administrators, and teachers -- and try to find even one
article supportive of libraries. You won't find one in a hundred.
This has several implications:
A. Librarians need to develop a visible presence in schools. It is
not enough to simply be good at what you do.
B. Librarian training programs might do well to consider increasing
the courses they offer on influence, power, collaboration, public relations,
and the like.
C. Librarian organizations might do well to lobby teacher and
administrator programs to include more and better information about the
value of libraries and librarians to teachers and administrators as well as
to students.
These three are long-term solutions. If we began doing these things today,
it would be a decade or more before the positive effects were felt across
the field. But if we don't start today, the same decade and more will pass
and the situation will not have improved a bit -- in fact, it may very well
have worstened considerably. Invisible, unvalued libraries and librarians
will have a hard time surviving in the face of budget cuts and school
resource reallocations if the people making budgeting, staffing, and
curricular decisions see other ways to use the money and facilities.
Libraries and librarians are at a multiple fork in the road right now -- and
there are any of a number of futures awaiting them. If technology is not
controlled, the image of the school librarian is likely to evolve from one
of a person with book in hand to one of a person with a screw-driver in
hand. It's not too hard to imagine another secenario where libraries are
gone altogher, their resources scattered to classrooms or curriculum centers
augmented with Internet connections where teachers will do what librarians
used to do. Think about the proposal in Cincinnati a couple of years ago to
do away with high school libraries and replace them with a bank of
computers, an Internet connection, and a stack of CD-ROMs. A third scenario
is much more positive, however: It's one in which libraries and librarians
move more into the center of education as students are made to take more
responsibility for their own learning. While the best of the three, the
third scenario is also the least likely at the moment.
The danger is that the first two scenarios already have many advocates
working for them advancing them. The third has but a few. Unless we turn
this around, the odds of a bright future for libraries and librarians will
continue to shrink. It's one thing to be overlooked by Time. It's quite
another to be the cover story in Museum Monthly or in some historical
publication talking about what used to be, but is no more.
There are three ways to attack this problem. One is to keep concentrating
on students alone. I want to suggest that that is a waste of time. Unlike
virtually any other organization, our goal is schooling is to get rid of our
clients. In elementary and middle schools, we seek to graduate them to the
next level. In high school, we seek to graduate them to higher education or
out to society. When they go, their support goes with them.
Another way is to build your own influence at the building level with your
current teaching colleagues and administration. This is better, but it too
is insufficient. Teachers and administrators retire, resign, get
transfered, get fired, die. You're never more than a heartbeat away from
dealing with a new educator who does not have any real appreciation for
libraries or librarians. Especially look at the statistics on
superintendents. The tenure of superintendents nationally is now under five
years (less time than it takes a student to move through an elementary
school, middle school, or high school). A new report from the Council of
Great City Schools says that superintendents in the 50 largest cities in the
US average about 2 3/4 years before resigning or getting fired. An article
in last month's Kappan reported research that the average tenure of a school
board member is also abut four years. So much for strategic planning.
There is one other way to attack this. And that is to develop a two-pronged
on-going campaign. On one prong, state and national library associations
develop linkages and partnerships with teacher organizations, administrator
organizations, specific subject matter discipline organizations, and
accrediting agencies to put pressure on colleges and universities to include
instruction and training in the use, role, and potential of libraries in
their teacher and administrator preparation programs. The same kinds of
linkages need to be developed with groups like the American School Board
Association. Absent those kinds of efforts, we fight a series of
building-level or district-level holding actions, but we'll never win the
war. The pool of people who will hold the purse strings and the
decision-making power in schools will be no more informed a decade from now
than they are today.
The second prong is to develop an on-going library advocacy program. I thnk
it's great that Ken Haycock has set a theme of library advocacy for his term
as president of the AASL. What I'm afraid of is that the advocacy fires
will go out when his term of office is over. I think we need to do two
things here -- and quickly:
(1) Support Ken Haycock's efforts in every way you can. Even if
you're not -- and never would be -- a member of AASL, library advocacy is
still essential to your local future. Whether you're a member or not, you
still can speak and write in support of libraries and librarians. Start
with your teachers and administrators, get to your board, reach out to your
parent groups, then write articles for teacher and administrator
publications and make presentations at teacher, parent, and school board
conferences and conventions. You must go to them; they are not going to
come to a library convention. If you are a member of AASL, write or call or
e-mail the leadership with your encouragement, your ideas, your demands, and
your support -- and also see if there is a way for you to get involved.
(2) Press AASL to continue the advocacy theme as a continuing
feature of its operation. No matter what the presidential theme, the
organizational anthem is library advocacy. Press for a commitment of
personell and budget. Advocacy is not something you can do for a year and
then stop and have any hope of lasting protection -- let alone any real
improvement. Advocacy needs to be approached in much the same way as
Winston Churchill approached the destruction of the NAZIs: that alone,
that all the time, that to the end.
Fifteen workshops on young adult literature are of little value if you
didn't have the one workshop on capturing board support, or didn't make the
link with the American Association of SChool Administrators, or didn't lobby
the state legislator to fund libraries ---- and your library is closed.
Advocacy must become a major thread in the fabric of libraries. It must be
woven into the training of librarians, the training of teachers, the
training of administrators, the education and orientation of school board
members, and the central operations of the AASL, ALA, and other national,
regional, and state associations. If it isn't, the potential is there for
the whole field to unravel.
So, it's not Time Magazine that is to blame. I don't know whether to close
with an observation from Shakespeare or from Pogo, the swamp philosopher of
the 1950s and '60s -- but the message is the same:
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars [or in TIME], but in ourselves."
- Julius Caesar
"We have met the enemy and he is us."
- Pogo
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