06.23.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:31 pm by Leonard Kniffel
Fresh from the launch of “
United We Serve” at the Fanwood Memorial Library in New Jersey, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took time to do a “Newsmaker” interview for
American Libraries yesterday afternoon.
Arne Duncan
I chatted with Duncan for about 20 minutes, and he talked with conviction about the value of libraries and about the threats to funding they are facing across the country. He noted that funding cuts are ironically in inverse proportion to the rising demand for their services, which are essential to solving America’s financial and social problems.
The father of a 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son, Duncan’s faith in libraries and education is firm, but “our children today need more than we are giving them,” he said. Collaboration with other social service and nonprofit organizations is the key to library success, he believes. What a lot of young people need more than money, he added, “is our time.”
Calling it “a 19th-century concept . . . based on the agrarian economy,” Duncan talked about what a waste it is for schools to be in use only during the six-hour school day and the nine-month school year. What are schools trying to accomplish? he asked. “We have schools in every community in the country; they all have libraries, computer labs, gyms, some have pools,” and “they don’t belong to me or the principal, they belong to the community.”
Summer reading, as Duncan sees it, is a large part of the “Summer of Service” volunteering concept embodied in “United We Serve,” to avoid the “reading loss” that students typically experience over the summer months.
Duncan spoke eloquently about the value of libraries and the commitment of the Department of Education to supporting them, but when I pressed him about specific ways the Department of Education can really prevent plug-pulling on the state and local level, the best answer he could give was a sort of “we’ll do all we can.” There’s no denying that the federal agency has no real control over local decisions, and Duncan characterized the “tough economic times” as “a real test of leadership at every level” that would bring out innovation as well as struggle.
I asked Duncan how librarians and teachers can lobby for library services without seeming self-serving. “It’s not about being selfish or self-serving,” he responded. “It’s about demonstrating the difference you are making our students’ lives . . . in the lives of families and the community.” He said the Department of Education would “do whatever we can to let folks know that we have to keep . . . libraries open and staffed.”
A transcript of the interview will be published on American Libraries Online; the Newsmaker Q&A is scheduled for the August-September print issue of American Libraries.
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02.10.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:39 am by Leonard Kniffel
You probably heard it for yourself, but last night President Barack Obama did it again. He said “libraries.” At his first prime-time press conference since taking office, he addressed a nervous nation about unemployment, emphasizing that “the single most important part of this Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Plan is the fact that it will save or create up to 4 million jobs, because that’s what America needs most right now.”
More than 90% of the jobs created in the plan will be in the private sector, he said, and “they’re not going to be make-work jobs but jobs doing the work that America desperately needs done, jobs rebuilding our crumbling bridges, repairing our dangerously deficient dams and levees, so that we don’t face another Katrina.” And then he added, “They’ll be jobs creating the 21st-century classrooms, libraries, and labs for millions of children across America.”
“He hears us,” I thought to myself, and he hears ALA. His people are listening. Asked later in the press conference about bipartisanship, Obama took it back to education: “The suggestion is, why should the federal government be involved in school construction? Well. I visited a school down in South Carolina that was built in the 1850s. Kids are still learning in that school—as best they can…. It’s right next to a railroad, and when the train runs by the whole building shakes and the teacher has to top teaching for a while. The auditorium is completely broken down and they can’t use it. So why wouldn’t we want to build state-of-the-art schools with science labs that are teaching our kids the skills they need for the 21st century, that will enhance our economy and, by the way, right now will create jobs?”
Indeed, why wouldn’t we? Every once in a while, it’s good for all of us inside ALA to remind ourselves that we are a 501(c)3 organization—noprofit educational—and that we are in the knowledge business more than the information business. It’s going to take more than the dissemination of information to play a key role in the nation’s economic recovery. The new ALA Office for Library Advocacy and the Washington Office are redoubling their efforts to reach the new administration with our education message. It seems they are listening.
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12.17.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:30 am by Leonard Kniffel
Ten years ago, for a moment, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, then a U.S. representative in Congress, was the darling of school libraries in Chicago. I can remember interviewing Ann Weeks, then director of the Chicago Public Schools Department of Libraries and Information Services, after he’d made the grand gesture of donating his share of the year’s congressional pay raise ($2,140.09, to be exact) to a CPS book fundraiser with a $20 million goal. We were both impressed by the gesture; after all, here was a congressman coming out in support of books and reading and school libraries. We could see that this was a man on the way up, and it was pretty obvious that we needed friends like him in high places.
Fast forward ten years. It seems the governor has turned the tables. Time for the money to flow in the opposite direction, he has apparently decided. And he thinks a good start, federal investigators are alleging, would be to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder.
I heard from Ann Weeks this morning. She is now a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and has the same recollection I do. “I’ve always thought of Blagojevich as a strong library supporter,” she said. Unfortunately, she and I both, along with everyone else with even an iota of insight into how Illinois politics seem to work, would register little surprise if the corruption allegations being leveled by the U.S. Attorney’s office turned true.
Although I never had an opportunity to interview Blagojevich, his grand gesture stuck in my craw, and I will say that I voted for the man, twice. I rationalize that some of it had to do with my memory of his grand gesture for school library books. How could anyone who came out for libraries turn out to be such a foolish and arrogant man? The way I feel about him now is that Illinois citizens should form a mob, go down to his office, and pull him out of his chair. But it’s probably fairer to stop presuming he’s guilty and let the impeachment process kick in.
In any case, we have to move on from the Blagojevich mess to the promise implicit in President-elect Barack Obama’s selection of the Harvard-educated chief executive of Chicago Public Schools as his secretary of education. In Chicago, Arne Duncan has a reputation as a reformer who has confronted teachers unions and held schools accountable for performance. Duncan has been head of Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third largest school district, since 2001, and current education secretary, Margaret Spellings, has called him a “visionary” school leader. Duncan has already said the first item on his to-tackle list is No Child Left Behind.
Meanwhile, I received an e-mail message yesterday from Donnella Mitchell, an assistant cataloger for Tacoma Public Schools in Washington, pointing out the “America’s Best High Schools” article published by U.S. News and World Report, which touts their three point analysis for determining the 100 best U.S. high schools. “As a school librarian,” she said, “I wondered. There is another reason that these high schools could present such high student achievement: a well-stocked, well-staffed, full-time school library. There was no mention of libraries in the articles that I read. I think that research into what kind of library programs these high schools have could result in a very, very interesting article in American Libraries and give us more ammunition for protecting school library programs all over the country.”
Julie Walker, executive director of ALA’s American Association of School Librarians, agrees, noting that AASL has always preached that instruction in information literacy must be embedded in the curriculum content . She points out that a related article says, “What’s new today is the degree to which economic competitiveness and educational equity mean these skills can no longer be the province of the few. This distinction is not a mere debating point. It has important implications for how schools approach teaching, curriculum, and content.”
Although AASL has no immediate plans to cross check the programs, says Walker, “I always think the same thing when a see a ‘notable’ school listed: It would be an interesting study—budget, staffing, etc. On the other hand, the ever present challenge would be establishing a causal link.”
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