Every Year We Hold Schools Accountable for Test Scores in Reading, but Recessionary Cuts Threaten Jobs of the Nation’s School Librarians
We think we’ve learned the important lessons, but how quickly we forget.
Americans spent 2018 and 2019 learning from teachers as, ten years after the Great Recession, they launched strikes from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Arizona to Kentucky to North Carolina to Virginia to California to Illinois. States had slashed funding for public schools as tax revenues collapsed during the 2008 recession, and after a decade, the majority of states were still spending less on public education than they did before the collapse. Teachers struck to protest the deplorable conditions in which their students were being expected to learn: outrageous class sizes of 35 and 40 student along with shortages of counselors, school social workers, school psychologists, certified librarians, and school nurses. In Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago, striking teachers exposed our society’s absence of political will to fund the urban school districts that serve our poorest children.
Here we are now, because of COVID-19, in the midst of another recession. And again today, states are cutting per-pupil basic aid for public schools as tax revenues collapse. But somehow all the medical challenges of the pandemic and the attendant broader economic problems have blinded too many of our leaders to the coming crisis for our schools as budget cuts will again mean the losses of teachers, counselors, school psychologists, school social workers, certified librarians, and school nurses. The meaning of these losses will, of course, become clearer once schools reopen without these essential professionals.
An Education Week article about the pending loss of school personnel caught my eye last week. The headline screams bad news, As COVID-19 Budget Cuts Loom, Relevance of School Librarians Put to the Test. I suppose I noticed this article because it seems to contradict reality. How could school librarians ever be considered irrelevant?
My own children are now adults, but when they were young, children’s librarians mattered very much to our family. These were the librarians at our elementary and middle school and CONTINUE READING: Every Year We Hold Schools Accountable for Test Scores in Reading, but Recessionary Cuts Threaten Jobs of the Nation’s School Librarians | janresseger
