CA Unveils New School Library Standards

Information literacy skills that are aligned with California's language arts curriculum lie at the heart of the program. Once completed, media specialists will be given 12 detailed grids to evaluate students—as early as kindergarten—on their ability to locate resources, formulate questions, access and evaluate information, and develop meaningful theses.

"The [guidelines] are important because school library teachers, teachers, and administrators need benchmarks to let them know where they are and where they're going," says Jo Ellen Priest Misakian, chair of the CSLA task force that created the guidelines and director of the school library media program at Fresno Pacific University.

Guidelines in the 74-page report are not mandatory because economic realities make it nearly impossible to implement them all. For instance, the report emphasizes the need for a certified library media specialist and library technician in every school building, but California does not mandate certified media specialists in any of its schools. When it comes to adequate resources, the report says media centers must have current and relevant print and online resources, something Misakian says will be hard to do since California now allocates $1.44 per student for school library materials, down from $28.80 per student in 1999. Other guidelines, such as ensuring that media specialists stay on top of all new and emerging technologies will be easier to meet.

A CSLA task force spent two years developing the standards, which will serve some nearly 9,000 K–12 schools. Scholastic has agreed to sponsor publication of the report and will help distribute it to every superintendent in the state, Misakian says.