Primary Sources: America's Teachers on America's Schools

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Scholastic Publishing are good friends of education and libraries, so it is a disappointment that the Primary Sources report on America's Teachers on American Schools overlooked a very important finding. See Question 1505 on independent reading. Dr. Stephen Krashen alerted school librarians to the omission (see below).

"I just finished reading "Primary Sources: America's Teachers on America's Schools" which was published by Scholastic and the Gates Foundation. This report has been discussed in newspapers all over the country. Not mentioned in any of the media reports, and not mentioned in the summary section of the report is an interesting result about where students get their books for their own independent reading. This result was not discussed in the text but is buried deep in the appendix.

Q1505 Where do your students get books for their independent reading most often? Select all that apply.

1. school library: all levels: 83%. high school 80%
2. my classroom library: all levels: 68%, high school: 31%; elementary school 87%
3. public library: all levels: 38% high school: 46%
4. retailers: all levels: 20%, high school: 35%

"This is similar to what has been reported before in the professional literature, as I reported in The Power of Reading, but shows the impact of the school library far more clearly than ever before. If independent reading is a major source of our competence in literacy, this confirms that school and classroom libraries are very very important."

"Unfortunately, the study did not look at differences in level of poverty."

Primary Sources: America's Teachers On America's Schools
Scholastic, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
http://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/download.asp


The California School Library Association wrote and reminded media representatives of the two organizations that research shows a strong relationship between strong school libraries and student achievement, regardless of the income level of the community. Here are two recent reports and one somewhat dated but very relevant research:

1. Achterman Study on “Haves, Halves and Have-Nots: School Libraries and Student Achievement”
2. School Libraries Work by Scholastic.
3. Differences in Print Environment by Courtney Smith and Rebecca Constantino (1997) - Changed my life and made me an advocate for strong school libraries.
   

In California, students are having their school libraries and teacher librarians reduced or eliminated. "Pink Slips" go out on March 15th. It is both tragic and counter-productive. Building and funding strong school libraries is an investment strategy the Gates/Scholastic study should be recommending, but given the overwhelming ratio of classroom teachers to teacher librarians, that recommendation will never see the light of day without assistance from important organizations. Here's hoping the Gates/Scholastic researchers and others will take another look at the research findings and address Q1505 in more detail.

Today's school teacher librarians teach online research and cybersafety skills, in addition to carefully selecting and sharing good books for students to grow on! Today's leaders need to better understand and actively promote the key role of school libraries.

BETTER LIBRARIES > HIGHER READING SCORES

Stephen Krashen (University of Southern California), Syying Lee (National Taipei University), and Jeff McQuillan (Center for Educational Development) had a poster session at the American Library Association annual conference. The poster session title was "Is The Library Important? Multivariate Studies at the National and International Level." They presented findings from a number of studies. Dr. Krashen provided me copies of the research and handouts, and gave me his permission to share. A paper on the findings will be presented this August at the International Association of School Librarians.

Here are their conclusions:

The library emerged as a consistent predictor of reading scores for children in the United States taking a national reading test. Library quality was a significant and strong predictor of fourth grade (NAEP) reading scores, and was a predictor of the difference between fourth and eighth grade NAEP reading scores. This second result suggests that libraries play an important role in stimulating reading improvement in students between grades four and eight.

In a second report, Krashen, Lee and McQuillan reported that the library was also a strong predictor of reading scores for ten year olds in 40 different countries (data taken from the PIRLS study). These results are remarkable for several reasons:

• The measures used were crude: library holdings, and even general circulation, in the case of public libraries.
• The results held even when other powerful factors, such as poverty, were taken into consideration.
• The results held both for students in the US, and for students in 40 different countries.

Bottom Line: We now have strong evidence that library quality is associated with reading ability in individual states (Keith Curry Lance's research), for the U.S. as a whole, and internationally.