NANCY BAILEY: The Racism Behind Firing Librarians and Closing School Libraries

The Racism Behind Firing Librarians and Closing School Libraries

The Racism Behind Firing Librarians and Closing School Libraries

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.  ~Frederick Douglass

If a school has no school library or a flimsy excuse for a library, students are denied access to books and reading material. They miss opportunities to learn information and become proud of who they are. Look for racism behind the decision.

When school districts diminish school libraries and those who run them, they fail to address the critical issues involving history, civics, and race relations. With all the talk of schools and equity, it’s unconscionable that closing school libraries and firing school librarians are accepted practices.

In May 2020, the Washington D.C. school district passed a $70 million budget increase. In January 2021, the American Rescue Plan infused over $368 million of COVID relief and new aid to DC Schools. Today, school librarians there are begging to keep their jobs. Here’s the petition!

The dismal account of dwindling libraries and librarians is happening across the nation, especially in poor schools and schools with children of color. If your child’s school CONTINUE READING: The Racism Behind Firing Librarians and Closing School Libraries

Fix America With Libraries, Playgrounds, and Parks - The Atlantic

Fix America With Libraries, Playgrounds, and Parks - The Atlantic

Fix America With Libraries (And Playgrounds and Parks and Rec Centers)

Investing in public infrastructure should be at the center of a 21st-century civil-rights agenda.

s the covid-19 pandemic continues into the fall, the Trump administration has ruled out any further action on a federal relief package. Meanwhile, state and local governments, lacking federal support, are considering deep cuts to budgets and public services. These measures reflect a deep problem in American policy and culture: the systematic undermining of public infrastructure.

When I refer to public infrastructure, I mean something much more expansive than roads and bridges; I mean the full range of goods, services, and investments needed for communities to thrive: physical utilities such as water, parks, and transit; basics such as housing, child care, and health care; and economic safety-net supports such as food stamps and unemployment insurance. But under America’s reigning ideology, public infrastructure like this is seen as costly, inefficient, outdated, and low-quality, while private alternatives are valorized as more dynamic, efficient, and modern. This ideology is also highly racialized. Universal services open to a multiracial public are vilified, coded in dog-whistle politics as an undeserved giveaway to communities of color at the expense of white constituents. The result has been a systematic defunding of public infrastructure since the 1970s.

Read: Privatization is changing America’s relationship with its physical stuff

Now under the extreme pressures of the pandemic and the economic collapse, the true costs of this underinvestment have become appallingly clear. As the country looks at how to respond to both the recent demands for racial justice and the needs of survival and rebuilding from the COVID-19 crisis, any recovery agenda will have to overcome these ideological and institutional attacks on the idea of public infrastructure, and commit to investing more dollars into our public infrastructure, dismantling racialized barriers to access, and embracing an economic narrative that defends these public goods.

On an economic score alone, massive investments in public infrastructure would pay off. Every dollar invested in transit infrastructure generates at least $3.70 in returns through new jobs, reduced congestion, and increased productivity, without accounting for the environmental and health benefits. For each dollar invested in early-childhood education, the result is $8.60 worth of economic benefit largely through reductions in crime and poverty. A universal health-care system would save Americans more than $2 trillion in health-care costs (even accounting for the increased public expenditure that would be needed) while securing access to life-saving care for more than 30 million Americans. The fact that federal and state governments fail to make these investments is not a matter of limited resources, but rather of skewed priorities. The 2017 Trump tax cuts of $1.9 trillion sent most of its gains to corporations and the wealthiest Americans; the United States has spent more than $820 billion on the Iraq War since 2003, and hundreds of billions every year to fund the CONTINUE READING: Fix America With Libraries, Playgrounds, and Parks - The Atlantic

Mr G. for District 3 ----------------- Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: Let's talk about the issues, libraries.

Mr G. for District 3 ----------------- Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: Let's talk abut the issues, libraries.

Let's talk about the issues, libraries.

I am going to do a series on the issues and I wanted to talk briefly about libraries.

For a district with a reading problem it did not make any sense to get rid of the libraries but we did we sure did.

This may have started under Pratt-Dannals but it really escalated under Vitti, but here is the thing, Vitti has been gone for going on 4 years now and libraries still have not made a come back.

Vitti was slick too, with a wink he said well I gave schools an option a test coordinator or a librarian but the fix was in because Vitti didn't appreciate libraries or librarians and I don't know if it was because he was dyslexic or he did some cost benefit ratio and decided schools needed another defacto administrator or something else but he decimated the librarian corp. This despite lots of evidence pointing to how valuable they are.

From Phi Delta Kappan,

Since 1992, a growing body of research known as the school library impact studies has consistently shown positive correlations between high-quality library programs and student achievement (Gretes, 2013; Scholastic, 2016). Data from more than 34 statewide studies suggest that students tend to earn better standardized test scores in schools that have strong library programs. Further, when administrators, teachers, and librarians themselves rated the importance and frequency of various library practices associated with CONTINUE READING: Mr G. for District 3 ----------------- Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: Let's talk about the issues, libraries.