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.
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Among the links to our work provided are these:
- Antioch University Seattle School Library Certification Program: School Library Research
- Library Research Service
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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.
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Sarah D. Sparks and Alex Harwin, “Schools See Steep Drop in Librarians, New Analysis Finds,” Education Week, 37 (33), May 16, 2018.
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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.
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