The DPLA and School Libraries: Partners Focused on Digital-Era Learners - The Digital Shift

In the most successful public and independent schools, librarians work as teachers in partnership with those based in the classroom. Together, these teachers prepare our kids for lifelong learning, from their school-age years and on into college and the workforce. Librarians and classroom teachers each bring unique and essential skill sets to the task of enabling students to construct knowledge. It is particularly troubling that many school libraries are under threat today, as education budgets tighten and library-based teachers are too often deemed inessential.  While the threat to school libraries is not new, it has intensified in recent years. Budget cuts have eliminated support for many school library programs and the librarians who work in them. The Obama Administration, strong on support for education as a general rule, has failed to champion school libraries and instead cut federal funding. The President’s 2013 budget proposal cut $28.6 million that was earmarked for literacy programs under the Fund for Improvement of Education.

These types of cuts to school libraries are short-sighted. Data suggest a direct correlation between schools with strong libraries and academic performance. Students in programs with more school librarians and extended library hours scored 8.4 percent to 21.8 percent higher on English tests and 11.7 percent to 16.7 percent higher on reading tests, compared to students in schools where libraries had fewer resources, according to a study by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA).  In an era of ubiquitous information, the need for school librarians is greater than ever. Critical thinking requires students to find information to fuel their inquiries. The same goes for the creative forms of learning that many of the best teachers seek to inspire in their students. There are far more sources of information for students to choose from, but students are rarely taught how to develop a good process for making wise decisions about information quality. Students need to learn digital literacy skills to be able to identify credible information in a more distributed, complicated world rich with data... If we build it well, a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) can help school libraries meet the information needs of students even as local budgets shrink. The DPLA can provide important resources to the partnership between library-based and classroom-based teachers, especially during this period of rapid change in education, in libraries, in technology, and in the world of information generally.  During last two decades, education leaders at the national and state levels have made significant changes in how students learn in our public schools. These reforms, including the adoption of a set of common core standards approved by 45 states, imply that teaching and learning will be geared toward a shared set of particular themes and skills in mathematics as well as English and language arts. The new standards have only increased the importance of librarian-classroom teacher partnerships in meeting the needs of our schoolchildren.  Schools will need to adapt the materials that they use as texts. While publishers are rushing to meet this demand for new teaching materials, not all schools can afford to pay the prices that Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and other education-oriented publishers are seeking. School librarians have the skills to identify and access materials to support student learning. Whether or not the school library is able to offer licensed proprietary databases, librarians can find appropriate instructional resources on the Internet in open textbook projects and other educational repositories...  The DPLA can help to bring down the financial barrier to full participation by librarians as they seek to provide the resources for kids to meet the new requirements of the common core standards. The DPLA can help librarians identify and provide access to materials that will help kids reach the standards, as implemented at the state level. For instance, the common core standards call for the types of reading for young people to increase from 50 percent non-fiction and 50 percent fiction in the fourth grade to 70 percent non-fiction and 30 percent fiction by the end of high school. This shift toward “challenging informational texts in a range of subjects” can be supported by shared resources, collected at a national level and then curated locally by librarians to meet the needs of specific communities..."