Librarian Impact - E211

WEBVTT
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I'm Julie Saunders. I'm Jan Wilson. Julie and I both have experience as school
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librarians, and we've worked together as district library leaders.
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In each episode, we'll dive into our profession with interviews and meaningful content to inspire you.
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The ideas and opinions shared by any host, guest, or listener are their own
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and do not represent those of any respective school district.
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Welcome to Library Exchange.
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This episode is sponsored by Mackin. For over 40 years, Mackin has provided
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Welcome, everyone. We're so glad you're here. Today, we are addressing a topic
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that every school librarian thinks about and deals with, showing our impact
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on student achievement.
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Right. It's the ultimate school library challenge.
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But today's guest literally wrote the book and the studies on this.
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Our guest today is Dr. Keith Curry Lance, a renowned sociologist and consultant.
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Librarians, if his name rings a bell, it's because you've seen his decades of
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library research published in School Library Journal, Five Dots of Kappen,
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and the Peabody Journal of Education, just to name a few.
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Most recently, his research was featured in the article The Librarian Effect
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on Literacy in the April issue of School Library Journal.
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We are thrilled to have you on the podcast today. Welcome to Library Exchange, Keith.
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Thank you, Julene Jan. I'm delighted to be with you.
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So, Keith, with your background in sociology, what led you to research the impact of school libraries?
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Well, I'm one of those people who did not have the career he intended to.
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Instead of me choosing my career, it chose me. I got a master's and a doctorate
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in sociology, expecting to be a sociology professor in a university.
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And that just didn't happen.
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Instead, I ended up with a job at the Colorado State Library.
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And even that took an improbable course because I was hired for a two-year temporary job to do the,
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long-range plan for library development for Colorado back in the mid-80s.
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And so by 87, 88 at the latest, I was supposed to be out of a job.
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I finished that planning project. And by then we had a new state librarian and
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I was delighted with her. Her name was Nancy Bolt.
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And I stepped into her office one day and I said, you know, Nancy,
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I'm just delighted you're our new state librarian.
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But I'm really kind of sad that I am not going to get to work with you that
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long. Because at that point, I had about six months left on my two years.
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And she just looked at me like, what are you talking about?
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And I said, well, you know, my job's over at the end of June.
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And she said, oh, don't be silly.
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She said, yeah, that project's over. But, you know, we need the stuff you do,
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the data work and the research work.
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We're going to need that for, you know, forever. So, you know,
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your job's not going anywhere.
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So my two-year job turned into a 22-year job that I retired from.
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I'm doing my bit to hold down the average number of career changes per person.
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Well, that's very lucky for our profession that you stayed where you did.
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So I'm going to go back to 2007 for a second. You were interviewed for an article
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in School Library Journal, and in it, you discussed the importance of the role
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of librarians in leadership.
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I recently read it again, and honestly, it's just as relevant today as it was then.
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Will you share your thoughts on librarians and leadership in schools?
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Well, at the time that was all happening and I was beginning to do the state-level
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studies, there was a set of standards for school libraries from AASL and it had three themes.
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In order, they were collaboration, leadership, and technology.
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So we framed the second Colorado study in terms of those themes.
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And what we found, interestingly, was that leadership was sort of the prime mover.
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Collaboration shouldn't be in first place. It should be in second place.
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Because if you want to be a collaborator with your principal and your teachers,
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you've got to get your foot in the door as a leader first.
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You know, you need to be on your school leadership team. You need to meet with
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individual teachers and groups of teachers as often as you can.
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And you need to meet individually with the principal.
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You know, the librarian and the principal have something in common.
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In most schools, they're the only person in that job.
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You know, there's usually just one principal and one librarian.
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They need to be doing all of those things that establish them as leaders in
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their schools. And, of course, it's very important for librarians to have the
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support of their principals because the principal sort of sets the culture for the whole school.
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And so you've got to win them over first, and then you have to win over the
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teachers. You're not going to get a lot accomplished if you're not working in
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collaboration with them.
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But in order to persuade them of the value of collaborating with you,
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you've got to prove yourself to them first.
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So that and the statistical findings of the study were what led us to rearrange
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those themes from collaboration, leadership, and technology to leadership,
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collaboration, and technology.
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So, Keith, you just talked about the three themes, collaboration,
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leadership, and technology.
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And I'm just wondering, that was the slogan from many years ago, early 2000s.
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And how do you feel about the word technology being one of those major themes
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in 2026, considering that now people are well-versed in technology and education?
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Kids have one-to-one. They have the devices. They have the access.
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From kindergarten through 12th grade. Teachers are trained in undergraduate
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to come in and, you know, through their pre-service learning,
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they already come in being pretty well versed on instructional technology tools.
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So would you still use that word technology as the third theme?
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I would add the term integration. Technology integration is the role that librarians,
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I think, can play better than most anybody else. Most schools have a technology person.
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Their job is usually to keep the hardware and software going and keep the internet
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connection functioning at its highest capacity. That's not the librarian's job, usually.
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Their job is helping teachers use technology as a tool to improve their instruction,
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helping students use technology to improve their learning.
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That's how I think they can make a real difference with technology.
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Of all the things school librarians teach, I think,
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the absolute most critical thing is information literacy.
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Some people debate what we're supposed to call it. Is it information literacy
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or digital literacy or news literacy or media literacy?
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I say, I don't care what you call it. It's critical thinking about information.
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And that doesn't even necessarily have to involve technology,
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but it's very important in technology Because if you do an AI search on Google
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these days, you can get completely wrong information.
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And if you look at the sources it's based on, they're all Facebook posts.
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Which are, to say the least, not authoritative.
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Teaching people how to be critical thinkers about information is just incredibly important.
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And frankly, it's something we have to keep remembering ourselves.
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Everybody in the school library world.
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You know, I have lots of retired school librarian friends on Facebook,
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and some of them post things that do not demonstrate a great capacity for critical
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thinking about information, you know.
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So knowing that you've answered with critical thinking at the forefront of your
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answer, with information and media literacy skills or whatever you term it in
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your district, do you feel it's possible that you can teach these instructional strategies?
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You can teach those strategies for information literacy to students with or
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without the use of technology.
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Absolutely. But I think because technology has become so ubiquitous,
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it's especially important to teach it in connection with technology because
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far too many of us, and we all slip into doing it occasionally.
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Believe anything we read online. Right. You know.
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The role that librarians play, well, one of the many roles they play in relation
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to technology, that's probably the most critical one, in my estimation,
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is what I call the navigator role.
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I think the navigator term is so appropriate for librarians.
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You know, the librarian is the one who helps you use that technology to get
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wherever you need to go, to get whatever information you need.
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So you're now a consultant to the Every Library Institute.
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Yes. What is the Every Library Institute? And will you share information about
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the slide project with our listeners?
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What resources are found there? All about it. Okay. We've got some really powerful
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data tools on the SLIDE website, and they all have step-by-step prompts for using them.
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So you don't need a training session about them.
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It will literally train you as you go in doing a search.
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And there's a profile for your state.
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Right. You can get a profile for your district. One of my favorite features
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on the state profile, we have a map of every state by school district.
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And for about 10 or 12 years worth of data, you click the start button and the
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map changes year by year.
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You see the districts that have and don't have librarians change over time.
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Wow, that's really cool. It's really cool. I think it's a very powerful image.
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Back in 2018, School Library Journal asked Deborah Cockle and me,
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my partner in this research for many, many years now, they asked us to write
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a series of articles for School Library Journal about the status of school library and employment.
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It was very educational, very depressing in some ways, to be frank,
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because we had had a whole decade, the whole decade of the 2010s, when we were losing.
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FTEs, what the federal government counts were, full-time equivalents.
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We were losing FTEs at a truly alarming rate.
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In one decade, we lost 10,000 FTEs, an average of 1,000 a year across the whole country.
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Well, there were fewer than 50,000 at the beginning of that decade.
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So you're losing 10,000 FTEs a decade. That doesn't look too good, does it?
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You know, that makes you feel a bit like an endangered profession.
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That happily did not continue. Right.
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We had this little event in 2020 called COVID.
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And as you and everybody else who works in schools know, your world changed,
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literally overnight with absolutely no warning.
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The whole world shut down overnight.
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And that turned out to be an incredible opportunity for a lot of school librarians.
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Because especially if they were leaders in their schools, if they were plugged
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in in all those ways we talked about a couple of minutes ago,
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and if they were good technology navigators, they were in a perfect position to assert themselves,
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be leaders, and help their schools survive that traumatic overnight change.
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And my belief is that is one of the two major reasons that the decline of school
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librarian FTEs leveled off.
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During the early 2020s.
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We've been watching that for several years now, and the conclusion that Deb
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and I have come to, besides the one just mentioned,
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is that the other big factor that helped,
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bring a halt to that long-term decline was the ESSER funding,
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the emergency school relief funding,
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that Congress legislated and
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sent out to the states and districts and schools nationwide. Thank you.
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One of the things Deb did in her article for SLJ, she interviewed people all
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over the country about school librarianship, and she started collecting job
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titles. She started collecting a list.
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And out of 24, 25 job titles, you wouldn't believe how many of them did not
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have any version of the L word in them.
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My personal favorite was et-il and then put whatever you want after that teacher
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consultant specialist whatever or coordinator,
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educational technology hyphen information literacy oh,
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so we looked at those kind of job tiles and thought i wonder if the people reporting
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to NCES understood that that was a school librarian. Right.
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Who knows? We hoped to find out in the interview stage of our project,
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which was the last when we did this, mostly in 2023, we interviewed superintendents
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and principals all over the country, 50 of them,
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and we heard really interesting things from them.
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Their decisions depended so much on their own previous experience of having
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or not having school librarians.
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Now, it wasn't the kind of connection where it was a correlation,
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because no matter what situation they came out of, they could either perpetuate it or react to it.
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We talked to people who had been in districts where every school had a librarian.
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It didn't occur to them there could be a school without a librarian.
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They moved to another state and they found themselves in a district where there's
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not a librarian in sight.
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And they just couldn't imagine what was going on in these places.
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If they were in charge, they were the superintendent principal,
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a great many of them decided this was one of their causes.
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We're going to get librarians back in these schools. Of course, that was a great thing.
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We were trying to get them to explain to us why they were making the decisions
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they weren't. When we would ask people, why did you cut librarians or eliminate them all together?
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Inevitably the first answer we would hear was oh we you know we love our librarians
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but we just didn't have enough money,
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well one of the things we did in the perspectives on school librarian employment
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report the first big slide statistical publication we looked at the trends
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on the employment of librarians teachers instructional coordinators school administrators
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and district administrators.
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And you know what? The strangest thing was going on.
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People were telling us, well, the reason the number of librarians is going down
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is because we don't have enough money.
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But while the number of librarians was going down, all four of those other categories were going up.
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So, well, how come you had enough money for these other positions, but not for librarians?
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Which is what led me to conclude, which I imagine most people would have anyway,
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even without strong evidence.
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Money is just a medium of communication. You know, how you decide to spend your
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money tells us what your priorities are. Bingo.
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And what we learned from looking at these statistics and their trends for these
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five kinds of positions was school
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librarians were obviously not valued as highly as the other positions.
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Or perhaps to be a little more charitable, perhaps if they weren't valued as
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much, maybe their job just wasn't understood well enough.
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When you only look at the national numbers of school librarians,
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you know, frankly, a lot of years it's looked pretty depressing.
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If you look at it state by state, it is unbelievably different from one state to another.
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What we found during the slide federal project was that there's 15 to 20 states,
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that mandate school librarians.
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It's not a decision for a superintendent or principal to make.
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And somewhat surprisingly to many of us, most of those states are in the South.
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So they had the highest ratio of librarians to school buildings compared to
00:19:27.664 --> 00:19:31.054
other parts of the country, and particularly to my part of the country, the West.
00:19:31.443 --> 00:19:35.127
I do an article every year for the Library and Book Trade Almanac.
00:19:35.127 --> 00:19:39.708
It's the only thing they have about statistical information they have about school libraries.
00:19:40.161 --> 00:19:43.947
And it's about school librarian employment, of course. And what we do every
00:19:43.947 --> 00:19:50.213
year is for every state, we track how many districts gained staff,
00:19:50.549 --> 00:19:54.334
how many remained exactly the same, and how many lost staff.
00:19:55.022 --> 00:19:58.187
Like virtually every state has
00:19:58.187 --> 00:20:02.470
some gain, some districts gaining and some districts losing every year.
00:20:02.899 --> 00:20:05.871
And the vast majority report the same numbers.
00:20:06.998 --> 00:20:15.277
So it's a very fluid, very dynamic sort of situation that is masked very well
00:20:15.590 --> 00:20:19.647
if you just look at total state-level numbers or, worst of all,
00:20:19.647 --> 00:20:21.167
just the national numbers.
00:20:21.167 --> 00:20:25.077
That's why I'm glad LBTA wants me to do that article every year because I think
00:20:25.077 --> 00:20:32.059
it keeps reminding everybody this is a very divergent environment.
00:20:32.431 --> 00:20:37.267
It varies by state, it varies by district, and it's important to pay attention
00:20:37.267 --> 00:20:38.936
to that. Very important.
00:20:39.848 --> 00:20:43.893
So, Keith, what's next on your research plate?
00:20:44.108 --> 00:20:49.056
I'm going to be doing, for the Every Library Institute, I'm going to be doing,
00:20:49.900 --> 00:20:54.216
an update of a study I did for SLJ back in 2011.
00:20:54.216 --> 00:20:59.855
Most of the school library impact studies are based on data from one snapshot in time.
00:21:00.157 --> 00:21:02.624
You know, it's data from one school year.
00:21:03.517 --> 00:21:10.340
Well, Linda Hofshire, a colleague and I, what we did for that SLJ study in 2011
00:21:10.769 --> 00:21:13.556
was compare data over time.
00:21:13.747 --> 00:21:19.871
We looked at, for state by state, we looked at the change in the number of librarians
00:21:20.046 --> 00:21:23.883
over time and the change in the test scores over time.
00:21:24.656 --> 00:21:29.306
And what we wanted to see was, you know, do test scores go up when the number
00:21:29.306 --> 00:21:34.364
of librarians goes up and do test scores go down when the number of librarians goes down?
00:21:35.016 --> 00:21:42.240
I don't know, does it? To some extent. It's not a perfect always one-to-one
00:21:42.240 --> 00:21:46.846
correlation, but the trend is absolutely in that direction.
00:21:47.137 --> 00:21:52.390
And we controlled for the things we always try to control for when we're doing
00:21:52.390 --> 00:21:54.039
this kind of statistical research.
00:21:54.323 --> 00:21:59.440
We want to compare for student demographics. We want to control for poverty,
00:21:59.440 --> 00:22:04.340
which is the 500-pound gorilla variable when it comes to test scores.
00:22:04.340 --> 00:22:08.210
People in education research, they seem to want to ignore it a lot,
00:22:08.210 --> 00:22:13.415
mainly because it's this great big colossal cause that they cannot control.
00:22:14.950 --> 00:22:18.650
But the fact of the matter is, and this is what we found in all of the very
00:22:18.650 --> 00:22:23.716
earliest impact studies we did, it's always the biggest factor.
00:22:23.925 --> 00:22:29.050
In fact, what was striking about the earliest studies is what we found again
00:22:29.050 --> 00:22:32.820
and again was that there were two things.
00:22:33.260 --> 00:22:37.500
Of all the things we had data on, there were two things you could count on having
00:22:37.500 --> 00:22:41.373
a measurable, independent impact on kids' test scores.
00:22:41.652 --> 00:22:46.200
It was whether their families are richer or poorer and whether or not they had
00:22:46.200 --> 00:22:48.300
a good school library. Whoa.
00:22:49.320 --> 00:22:54.080
Aw, I love that. A lot of the research about this was done by a reading professor,
00:22:54.080 --> 00:22:57.533
a reading scholar named Stephen Krashen, who was out in California.
00:22:57.701 --> 00:23:03.550
He's retired now, sadly, because he was doing yeoman work, advocating for libraries,
00:23:03.550 --> 00:23:05.497
even though his field is reading.
00:23:06.077 --> 00:23:12.742
His belief is, and mine, is that school libraries are the great equalizer.
00:23:13.660 --> 00:23:19.324
You know, kids who come from, you know, middle, upper middle class,
00:23:19.940 --> 00:23:22.146
outright, you know, wealthy homes.
00:23:22.604 --> 00:23:28.220
They've got all the books and magazines and newspapers and access to things
00:23:28.220 --> 00:23:32.814
on the internet that they could ever want you know that's not true,
00:23:33.537 --> 00:23:37.461
of kids whose families are more economically disadvantaged.
00:23:37.629 --> 00:23:42.517
Right. So the school library can really step in and make a big difference for them.
00:23:43.204 --> 00:23:48.013
So, Keith, I just want to say it's been a total full circle moment for me to
00:23:48.013 --> 00:23:50.420
meet the man behind the studies.
00:23:50.849 --> 00:23:56.123
I think I speak for all of our listeners when I say, we need you on our speed
00:23:56.123 --> 00:23:58.153
dial for advocacy backup.
00:23:58.553 --> 00:24:03.113
So like the next time someone questions our role, we can just say, hold on.
00:24:03.613 --> 00:24:05.373
Let me call Keith. Let me call Keith.
00:24:05.913 --> 00:24:14.319
Well, the Every Library Institute is an allied organization of every library, which is the preeminent
00:24:14.551 --> 00:24:21.244
organization that advocates for libraries of all types and particularly school and public libraries.
00:24:21.540 --> 00:24:25.636
They're the ones you should put on speed dial because they can really be a huge help to you.
00:24:25.947 --> 00:24:32.283
As a researcher, I try to maintain my independence because as a researcher,
00:24:32.283 --> 00:24:36.965
you know, I need to be as objective as I can possibly be.
00:24:38.113 --> 00:24:42.273
So it's not appropriate for me to be an advocate, but I can certainly provide
00:24:42.273 --> 00:24:45.295
information about what our research has found.
00:24:45.806 --> 00:24:49.073
So, Keith, we're going to make sure we have include all the links to all those
00:24:49.073 --> 00:24:53.283
things. I know people will really want to refer to those and just really want
00:24:53.283 --> 00:24:55.709
to thank you for your contributions to our profession.
00:24:56.139 --> 00:24:59.478
Thank you for your time today. Thank you. Great to talk with you both.
00:25:00.171 --> 00:25:05.250
Julie, I know we're supposed to say we've exchanged ideas. It's time for the recap.
00:25:05.645 --> 00:25:10.521
But I feel like this episode was more of a Keith Curry Lance masterclass.
00:25:11.261 --> 00:25:13.541
And I didn't have much to exchange.
00:25:14.961 --> 00:25:19.490
And I'll be honest, I don't know if I feel qualified enough to do a recap on Keith.
00:25:19.831 --> 00:25:24.501
His work has literally shaped how we understand our role and how we understand
00:25:24.501 --> 00:25:25.828
the trends in librarianship.
00:25:26.501 --> 00:25:30.884
So one of the most important points Keith makes is that leadership comes first.
00:25:31.261 --> 00:25:35.271
In order to really gain the respect of your colleagues and to increase that
00:25:35.271 --> 00:25:40.660
perception of value for your role, you have to be seen as an instructional leader in your school.
00:25:41.351 --> 00:25:44.527
Another point that he made was about technology,
00:25:45.147 --> 00:25:49.484
and technology integration is still an important piece of the puzzle for librarianship
00:25:49.862 --> 00:25:54.317
and for us to model the use of appropriate instructional technology tools within
00:25:54.317 --> 00:25:56.439
our inquiry-based activities.
00:25:56.955 --> 00:26:01.037
I do believe that critical thinking skills should be emphasized in our library
00:26:01.037 --> 00:26:07.297
programming events and lessons with or without the use of technology. Yes, I agree.
00:26:07.797 --> 00:26:13.273
I like that discussion. and when we spoke about the SLIDE project,
00:26:13.534 --> 00:26:18.027
we had to do a little bit of editing, you guys, but SLIDE stands for School
00:26:18.027 --> 00:26:22.407
Librarian Investigation Decline or Evolution.
00:26:22.407 --> 00:26:26.467
This project tracks staffing trends, data, etc.
00:26:26.987 --> 00:26:32.547
In school library programs and it has infographics in some of the slide decks
00:26:32.547 --> 00:26:34.228
from their presentation.
00:26:34.820 --> 00:26:39.847
And I checked out that interactive data tool that Keith mentioned because you
00:26:39.847 --> 00:26:42.527
can select your specific state, Julie, and then.
00:26:43.202 --> 00:26:49.097
Hover over individual districts to see exact librarian staffing numbers so you
00:26:49.097 --> 00:26:54.423
can see which districts currently have zero librarians, unfortunately.
00:26:54.766 --> 00:26:59.677
And then lastly, there is a progression map that you can view so that you can
00:26:59.677 --> 00:27:05.507
watch the map change as it tracks librarian data since 2009.
00:27:05.507 --> 00:27:09.011
It is really easy to go down a rabbit hole here.
00:27:09.203 --> 00:27:14.627
So one of the most effective ways to advocate for the profession is to consistently
00:27:14.627 --> 00:27:18.274
demonstrate and communicate your impact on student learning.
00:27:18.762 --> 00:27:23.777
Help us all by being the best librarian you can be so that collectively the
00:27:23.777 --> 00:27:27.824
perception is that no student should attend a school without quality library services.
00:27:28.415 --> 00:27:35.887
So everyone, don't forget to check out LibSlide.org and KeithCurryLance.com
00:27:36.207 --> 00:27:40.623
for more resources and to go down that rabbit hole like I did.
00:27:41.279 --> 00:27:46.265
Keith is knowledgeable and humble. I hope everyone enjoyed our conversation
00:27:46.265 --> 00:27:49.486
as much as we did. Thank you for tuning in.
00:27:50.932 --> 00:27:56.905
Make sure to visit our website at www.libraryexchangepodcast.com.
00:27:57.166 --> 00:27:59.256
You'll find episode notes and links.
00:27:59.436 --> 00:28:04.782
You can even submit your questions or inspiring stories that may be featured on the podcast.
00:28:05.090 --> 00:28:08.975
If you're looking for some swag for your library or book-loving friends,
00:28:08.975 --> 00:28:12.271
visit libraryexchange.etsy.com.
00:28:12.770 --> 00:28:16.503
That's a lot of URLs, so I'm glad you had to say all of that, Julie.
00:28:18.006 --> 00:28:19.318
Thanks for joining us.