The Invisible School Librarian: Why Other Educators Are Blind to Your Value (Part 1)
By Gary N. Hartzell -- School Library Journal, 11/1/1997
A former principal examines the reasons administrators and teachers overlook you.
It seemed like a good idea at the time: three teachers decided to work together on an interdisciplinary team-teaching project. But it died at birth. There were too few materials and the access to online sources was too limited for the project's ambitious goals. It's a shame that no one thought to consult the library media specialist.
In another district, the social studies curriculum committee decided to reorganize the teaching of American history into two distinct blocks: high school-level American history would start at the end of Reconstruction in 1877; all earlier American history would be taught in the lower grades. But no one informed the school librarians, who were just finalizing purchase orders for the coming year. The high schools got materials on early American history, and elementary and middle schools got more recent materials, the exact opposite of what was needed.
The list of blunders is long. In another city, the school board seriously considered doing away with high school libraries altogether, believing that a bank of computers and a stack of CD-ROMs would serve as well. In several states, most school libraries are operated by people never trained as librarians. And when a national panel of education experts developed a plan for a 21st-century high school, libraries were barely mentioned.
And on it goes. Each example shows a striking lack of awareness regarding school library media centers. In each case, it produces the same results: time, effort, and money are wasted; rich opportunities to improve teaching and learning are lost; student achievement is less than it might be. How can all these things -- and many others like them -- happen? How is it that libraries and librarians are so frequently undervalued, even ignored? And, more importantly, what can be done about it?
| People regard as expendable those things about which they are indifferent. |
If you wonder why funds for libraries and librarians are so easily cut, the answer is this: because they can be. No impassioned defenders rise to protect library media programs the way they rise to save treasured curriculum programs, teaching positions, or athletics. Without significant opposition, school boards and legislators are free to vote for library reductions, and administrators working on budget spreadsheets can strike their delete buttons -- all unhindered by public or professional outcry.
Why don't teachers and administrators rally to support libraries? Even worse, why are they often the ones who, in fact, get behind library cuts? The answers to these questions are also simple.
Many, perhaps most, of them do not understand the value and educational potential of libraries and librarians. It isn't that they don't like them, and they certainly aren't out to "get 'em." Mostly, it's just a matter of indifference -- and people regard as expendable those things about which they are indifferent.
How can educators, of all people, be indifferent to libraries and librarians? Again, the answer is simple: educators are indifferent because libraries and librarians are largely invisible to them. There are at least three reasons for this. The first springs from teacher training -- or lack of it. The second flows from the kind of work you do. The third grows out of traditional school librarian culture.
No Librarians in Textbooks
Many teachers and administrators are blind to the full range of library services because very few of their training programs investigate the potential and role of the library in curriculum, instruction, staff development, or administrative support.1 Consequently, for them, the library is a support service that responds to needs they define. They're not aware that you can provide new approaches to teaching and learning. To them, your job exists only to fulfill the first of the three roles called for in Information Power -- you find them the information they want when they want it and guide students to sources they might otherwise miss.2
Teacher training emphasizes individual classroom interactions between teacher and student but seldomly involves serious study of how to work with other adults. The models of collaborative and consultative work found in medicine, law, architecture, and the other professions are rarely employed in education, especially in high schools.
| It would be ironic if school libraries failed due to a lack of information about them. |
Teachers and administrators don't consciously deny library media people the opportunity to function as teacher, staff developer, or instructional consultant. It's simply that they don't think in those terms. Once through their training, these educators get caught up in the imperatives of their own worlds and it becomes very difficult for them to expand the conceptual horizons established at the beginning of their careers. The demands of teaching and the unrelenting isolation of most classrooms is well documented. And there's no question that the pace and volume of administrative work are consuming. So unless the library is forcibly brought to the attention of teachers and administrators, it's likely to go unnoticed and undervalued.
In the Shadow of the Classroom
In the public's mind, schools are defined by classroom teaching and learning, and teachers and administrators are at the core of it. In that picture, librarians are not perceived as teachers or instructional consultants. That perception also lives within schools. Despite the fact that librarians are often classed with teachers on the organizational chart, on the salary schedule, and in the union ranks, many teachers view librarians more as support resources than as colleagues.3
As a result, you are thought of as people who help others make students successful; not as people directly responsible for student -- and certainly not for teacher or administrator -- progress and success.Since your work is perceived as one step removed from students, it's very hard to measure the extent and quality of your contribution. For adminstrators, the difficulty in pointing to the fruits of your labor is one of the most powerful forces clouding their vision of library services. A principal can recognize a successful teacher, but it is very difficult to assess how much of that success might be a result of the librarian's ideas, resources, services, and support.
The administrators' inability to see these contributions often makes the library and its staff early casualties in budget cuts, in scheduling changes, and in the assignment of extra duties. There is irony in this, and sometimes tragedy. In doing everything to protect the classroom in tight financial times, administrators may cut library services, and in doing so cut away one of the essentials for student success.
Compounding all this is the fact that school librarians are often isolated. There is usually only one per school and thus they have no strength in numbers. This isolation can be intensified by school schedules. Teachers most often have lunch and other breaks at the same times the students do. Since students often use these times to go to the library, librarians are required to serve them. The result? Librarians are kept from opportunities to systematically build visibility, relationships, and influence with teachers and administrators.
The Influence Makers
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The third reason that libraries and librarians are overlooked is because librarians haven't made themselves as visible as they should. You can't win recognition until you convince people that the library is not a peripheral resource that can be done without, but a necessary component of a quality school.Library media specialists have done a poor job of promoting themselves, partly because they have not been schooled in the need for it. Untutored in the reasons for acquiring visibility, power, and influence, or in the techniques to acquire them, school media specialists often do not systematically educate teachers and administrators about the value of a good library media center.
Influence derives from others' perceptions of what someone can do for them, with them, or to them. Without that perception in place, it is impossible for anyone to influence others. Librarians have generally not done their homework in shaping perceptions in either the field of education or at the district and building level.
Why is this? Traditional school librarian culture doesn't encourage promotion. Shaping perceptions smacks of blowing one's own horn and of engaging in workplace politics. And many people prefer to believe that merit inevitably bestows recognition on the meritorious. We all are attracted to the notion that something of quality will enjoy support just because it is so obviously right. But research and experience show that while this idea is wonderfully attractive, it's also fundamentally flawed.
People who believe they do a good job often tend to think that others, especially supervisors, are aware of what they do. This may not at all be the case. An absence of problems allows supervisors, if they want, to ignore particular programs and people. It is not that they deliberately avoid paying attention; it is that their time is taken up by other things -- problems or opportunities that require attention because someone has drawn them to the supervisor's attention and kept them there.
Even the principal's or superintendent's awareness of a program or person is not sufficient. For simple existence to be enough to garner support, there has to be near-perfect alignment of how a boss and subordinate see the subordinate's tasks, the importance level of those tasks, and the measures of quality. There are few situations like that in reality.4
Thinking that merit alone will attract attention or supply either power or influence is a basic error. A high-quality media center operation that is smooth, efficient, responsive, and up to date is certainly necessary. People are attracted to competence, but competence and quality are not sufficient by themselves. If they were, many more librarians would exercise much more power and influence in their schools than they do.
For the librarian, like everyone else in organizational life, recognition and influence depend on whether people believe the librarian can help to make them, or something they value, successful. A person may have the most wonderful library media center in the country, but if others do not perceive it as integral to their own success and to the success of the school, the librarian will not have influence with them. Research shows that most students, teachers, and administrators don't perceive library media specialists and library media centers as integral to their success.5 Since the critical task in building influence rests in building a perception of indispensability, the goal has to be to change the perceptions others hold of libraries and librarians.
It takes work to change people's perceptions; not just more work, but work that is qualitatively different from that required to create and operate a technically sound library media center. Librarians cannot build an image of indispensability by enlarging the library's collection, streamlining purchasing, making cataloging more precise, or improving inventory systems. It cannot be done by having more colorful displays, running noon-time film programs, or attracting students to the library with games and prizes. It can't even be done by getting more teachers to bring their classes to the library or by raising circulation figures. These things help, certainly, but they are only tactics in a larger strategy of building visibility.
The culture of librarianship encourages the exchange of information among librarians, but it has never pushed them to look outside their own group. The wealth of published articles and conference presentations out there shows that librarians do a wonderful job of getting the word out on innovations, problem-solving, making do with few resources, and handling the technical aspects of the job -- but only to other librarians. And that's the problem.
There's an old line that says it doesn't matter if you hit the bull's eye if you're aiming at the wrong target. How many teachers and administrators ever see these journals or attend these conferences?
Very few.
How many are regularly exposed to information about the myriad ways libraries can improve curriculum and instruction, public relations, staff development, and a variety of other essential school activities?
| Principalship textbooks are almost universally silent on school libraries. |
How many are regularly exposed to information about the problems that beset school libraries, or to systematic analyses of what libraries need in terms of personnel, equipment, or funding to be able to do the kind of job the school requires?
Very few.
Teachers and administrators don't read library journals and they don't attend library conferences. Librarians make the same mistake other educators make: they write extensively to each other and they make endless presentations to each other, but not to the people who actually make the policy, operational practice, and budget decisions.
Simply put, without focused and sustained educator attention, there's little hope of a healthy future for school libraries.
Becoming Visible
All of the problems I've discussed -- the effects of teacher and administrator training programs, the relatively invisible nature of the school librarian's work, and the cultural pressures holding librarians back -- contribute heavily to the crisis in which school libraries and librarians now find themselves. It's time for librarians to fight back against budget cuts and layoffs, the handiwork of forces that ignore you -- or worse, would diminish or eliminate you. The way to fight back is to make the role and contributions of school librarians visible to those people who have the power to make a difference.
This is realistic, but it's in your hands. You have to write and present, you have to work to change the culture of library service, and you have to direct your organizations to look outward as well as inward. It would be both ironic and tragic if school library information centers fail the schools and the students they serve because administrators didn't have any information about them.
The challenge is one of those bad news/good news propositions. The bad news is that you have an immense and complex task before you, and you need to attack it on three fronts simultaneously. First, you need to move quickly to break the momentum of what can only be termed as an anti-library movement. Every librarian who is cut and every library program discontinued reduces the resource base on which you can draw to save the rest.
Second, you need to change the perceptions held of you and your libraries by teachers and administrators now in the field. Those practitioners are your first line of support in saving programs and in preventing future reductions.
Third, you need to build a power base from which you can influence the training of teachers and administrators -- and of future school librarians. If not, you'll find yourself locked into a perpetual struggle to change the perceptions of each new generation of teachers and administrators. They will continue to come into the field undervaluing you and your library, and each new generation of school librarians will always contain a percentage of people hesitant to challenge the misconceptions of other educators.
That's not all. You will need to take on activities that are not a part of your job description. You may encounter serious resistance from fellow teachers and union representatives -- you're breaking out of the mold, after all. You will also have to be patient in waiting for positive results. It will take a long and sustained effort before the first clear benefits are realized; perhaps five years to reach the first goal: banishing large cuts. It will take more than that to bring about the second goal, changing perceptions about your role, in a critical mass of educators, and as much as 20 years to have a real impact on the third goal, affecting the content of teacher and administrator training.
Now, the good news. The good news also comes in three parts.
First is that you have the tools you need to reach these goals. The most powerful tool you have is yourself. Librarians are a literate group. There are enough librarians to provide the power of numbers. And you have existing associations and organizations.
The second part of the good news is that some of the things you can do to attack the problem on one front will also serve to strengthen your position on the others.
And, third, there are three clear avenues for improving your status and the status of libraries in the education field.
References
- P. J. Wilson and M. Blake. "The Missing Piece: A School Library Media Center Component in Principal-Preparation Programs." Record in Educational Administration and Supervision 12, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1993): 65?8.
- ALA and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Information Power: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs. Chicago and London: ALA and AECT, 1988.
- F. C. Pfister. "Library Media Specialists: What Role Should They Play?" In D. Loertscher (Ed.), School Library Media Centers: Research Studies & the State-of-the-Art. Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Information Resources, 1980.
- J. P. Kotter. Influence and Power. New York: Free Press, 1985.
- N. E. Gast. "The Role of the H.S. Library Media Specialist as Perceived by H.S. Library Media Specialists, Principals, and Teachers in the State of Oregon." (Doctoral Dissertation, Portland State University.) Dissertation Abstracts International, 45 no. 6 (Dec. 1984): 1588-A.
W. A. Scott. "A Comparison of Role Perceptions of the School Library Media Educators, Media Specialists, Principals, and Classroom Teachers." (Doctoral Dissertation, Vanderbilt University.) Dissertation Abstracts International, 47, no. 7 (January 1987): 2351-A.
- R. Kanter. Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
- Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Robert E. Floden. "The Cultures of Teaching." In Merlin C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching, 3rd Edition, pp. 505?26. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
- B. P. Cleaver and W. D. Taylor. The Instructional Consultant Role of the School Library Media Specialist. Chicago: ALA, 1989.
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Gary N. Hartzell is author of Building Influence for the School Librarian (Linworth, 1994) and Associate Professor of Educational Administration, University of Nebraska, Omaha. He is also a former high school principal. |
