Nancy Bailey’s Education Website takes to task educators who advocate a stronger focus on reading without acknowledging the important role in it of school libraries and librarians. The title of the March 1, 2020, posting says it all: There’s No “Science of Reading” Without School Libraries and Librarians, A Predictor of Student Success.
This posting, which is getting a lot of play in social media outlets, references directly or indirectly, the work Debra E. Kachel of Antioch University Seattle and I have been doing to share the findings of a generation of school library impact studies as well as our more recent collaboration on the status of school librarianship as a profession and the factors that are reshaping it.
Among the links to our work provided are these:
- Antioch University Seattle School Library Certification Program: School Library Research
- Library Research Service
And these two references appear at the end of the posting:
Keith Curry Lance and Debra E. Kachel, “Why school librarians matter: What years of research tell us,” Phi Delta Kappan. March 26, 2018.
Sarah D. Sparks and Alex Harwin, “Schools See Steep Drop in Librarians, New Analysis Finds,” Education Week, 37 (33), May 16, 2018.
Notably, this Ed Week article cites not only Deb’s and my more recent work published in School Library Journal in March 2018, but also earlier, national and Colorado-specific, time-series studies on the relationship between changes in librarian staffing and changes in test scores on which I collaborated with Library Research Service (LRS) director Linda Hofschire. Respectively, the findings of those analyses were published in SLJ and by LRS.
