High-Stakes Testing Threatens School Librarians

As school districts nationwide face budget cuts, the role of the librarian—not to mention media centers themselves—are being called into question like never before. While some argue that the digital age has made the librarian obsolete, I believe that librarians face a far more insidious threat—the growing reliance on high-stakes testing.

Certainly, the last 20 years has fundamentally changed the way we, as a society, think about and access information. With that has come the slow—perhaps much too slow—realization that our schools must evolve to keep up with a changing world. While technology has fundamentally altered the role of every educator, it's a mistake to assume that these changes have made a librarian any less important—in fact, today's librarian, the information specialist, is more vital than ever before.

Others are much more articulate than I am at defining the role of the librarian/information specialist in the 21st century (Doug Johnson and Joyce Valenza are two of my favorites), and I think that their work on how librarians remain vital are must-reads for every principal, teacher, parent, and budget analyst.

From an administrator's perspective, I consider librarians important for several reasons—first, and most importantly, we live in the information age, and our librarians have long functioned as the information specialists in our schools. Secondly, as schools change and traditional classrooms evolve so that more students have time to spend beyond the rows of desks, our libraries become even more essential. Finally, libraries provide a critical place for student-centered learning. For decades, librarians have helped students find books and topics that interested them—and not all of them were for school projects, thankfully. We need more of this in our schools, not less.

In the end, it is not the Internet or the changing nature of information that threatens our school libraries, but the change we are seeing in our school value system. With the advent of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the high-stakes test, I fear that the very values that make libraries so essential in schools are at risk because their measurement is messier. If there is a poison pill for school libraries, it is not the Internet—certainly, school libraries and media specialists can adapt to and celebrate the democratization of information—but rather an assessment system that prioritizes multiple-choice answers that identify a single "correct" response, rather than contemplation, research, thoughtfulness, multiple perspectives—all vital elements that a library can bring to a school.

This is the challenge that we face. Our school librarians are the keepers of the progressive flame. They are the "guides on the side," helping students to find information, make sense of it, and craft meaning from multiple sources. But more and more schools are moving away from these values in favor of preparing students for the standardized assessment that NCLB demands.

As schools narrow and script the curriculum in "teaching to the test," the question becomes: What is the role of the school library in the era of NCLB? I say we need our libraries now more than ever. We need media specialists to help students make sense of the blizzard of information at their fingertips. We need our librarians to continue to help students find the joy in learning something new.

Our librarians have always known that the vast store of information available to our students did not end at our walls. Helping the rest of us deal with that in our classrooms makes our librarian colleagues even more relevant today.

Finally, we need our librarians to remind us each and every day that our students can learn more—and do more—than a high-stakes test could ever measure.