Kachel: There is a large body of school librarian impact studies that correlate the presence of strong school library programs with better reading and writing test scores. Not everyone is losing their school librarians, but the ones who are can least afford to lose them. Unfortunately, we didn't learn as much about the evolution due to the challenges of the pandemic.īefore we dig into the findings, can you share a bit about the significance of librarians? What our analyses of this data show is much more alarming than the decline by itself - it’s the inequity of the decline. We hoped to answer whether there is a full decline or an evolution of library positions. ![]() Some added or restored positions, while some deleted or reduced staffing levels. ![]() Of course, we had no idea the COVID-19 pandemic would happen when we proposed this project, but we thought we needed to include the information we found.įinally, our report Voices of Decision Makers is based on interviews with 49 school leaders who made decisions about school librarian positions. We also did a special report about the impact of COVID-19 on school libraries and employment. It’s an analysis of a decade's worth of data from NCES about the status of school librarianship and the number of school librarians nationwide. The first is Perspectives on School Librarian Employment. We wanted to find out their influences as they make difficult decisions on whether to add, increase and/or decrease school librarian positions. Lance: Deb and I decided to do a deep dive into the National Center for Education Statistics data on school librarians and then go even deeper by interviewing the people who make those staffing decisions. EdSurge had the opportunity to discuss the findings with Lance and Kachel as they wrapped up their research.ĮdSurge: What is the SLIDE study? Keith Curry LanceĬonsultant at RSL Research Group and Principal Investigator at SLIDE: The School Librarian Investigation–Decline or Evolution? The findings were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic but also led to serious questions of access equity. ![]() Lance and Kachel’s three-year study, The School Librarian Investigation-Decline or Evolution? (SLIDE), explored the decision-making process around adding and eliminating school librarian positions and the possibility that school librarian roles are merely evolving to meet changing needs. Together, they applied for a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, as part of the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. Not long after, Lance met Debra Kachel, currently an affiliate faculty with Antioch University Seattle, via the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association. But when he sat down a decade or so ago to sort out which states had gained librarians overall that year and which had lost, he was shocked to find no states in the “gained” column. In that time, he has seen a lot of changes. Keith Curry Lance of RSL Research Group has been studying school librarian employment for a long time, roughly 30 years since his first study came out.
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