Chat Room-No News Is Bad News

To write her new book, Another Planet (HarperCollins, 2001), author and magazine journalist Elinor Burkett spent the 1999–2000 school year in the high school of a prosperous, overwhelmingly white suburb of Minneapolis. The school was considered, academically, one of the better schools in the country. Burkett got to know the students and teachers, and talked to them about their hopes, ambitions, and feelings about school. She watched the students and teachers interacting with parents and administrators. And what she learned and reported in her book doesn't flatter American education.

Burkett describes teachers who allow students to write papers on the movie version of The Scarlet Letter instead of the book, or let students write their research papers in the first person. When one of her heroines, a first-year teacher, tries to raise academic standards for her students, she's shunned by her colleagues and bombarded with parental complaints. The students themselves are mostly happy to do as little work as they can get away with, and they have no problems with copying and pasting big chunks of their assignments from the Net.

The book isn't perfect, but it's a fascinating read for anyone interested in the state of American education. As I read it, I looked forward to learning about the role of the library in the school. But when I reached the end, I was disappointed. Although we get to know the names and stories of many of the teachers and administrators, the librarian's name isn't mentioned, and the library seems to have no role in the life of the school, other than as a place students reluctantly go to for study halls.

So I called Burkett and asked her why. I told her about the ambitions of so many of the library media specialists I know, for whom information literacy and partnering with teachers are key priorities. But she said she saw none of that in this high school. "I would love to say that the librarian was an important part of the school, just as I'd like to say that books and research were an important part of the school, but it wasn't true," she told me. The administration and faculty had determined that the librarian in this high school was a relief teacher, pure and simple. "She was wildly busy with what I'd call nonsense work," Burkett says—mostly clerical tasks like checking materials in and out and patrolling the room. She wasn't an essential part of the kids' education.

Burkett believes that we need to stretch kids more and make them work harder than they do now when they do research and writing, and that a trained professional in the library could be a big help. But she says that anyone who wants kids to work harder is struggling against the tide. "There's this feeling," Burkett says, "that learning has to be fun all the time. The self-esteem movement that began in the '70s, in which kids say they have a right to feel good about themselves, has made the professional educator's job impossible." When I asked her what kind of information literacy training she saw students receive, she said that basically there was none, while "teachers were catching Net plagiarism pretty regularly." She told me that the librarian "wasn't allowed" to train kids about the Net. She says she sat in on many a faculty meeting, but never heard the topic of educating students effectively to use the Net brought up: "With so many 'more important things,' like testing schedules and releasing students for games and field trips, it wasn't a priority." Burkett admits that like many noneducators, she "didn't realize how dangerous the Internet was unless kids are given the skills to filter it.... Kids treated all information as equal, whether it was a site promoting apricot pits as a cure for cancer or a site from the National Cancer Institute."

Of course, not all librarians are viewed simply as relief teachers—although we know all too well how many are. What can we do? Instead of despairing, we should take Burkett's examples to heart and keep pressing for information literacy training in every school, from at least the fifth grade up. We should never stop reminding the teachers, parents, and administrators we come in contact with that learning how to look for reliable information resources has to be a priority. In way too many books and articles about schools, librarians are either stereotypical or nonexistent. We need to make enough noise so that the next book that "reveals the truth about American education" has a librarian among its heroines.