Just Pointing Out the Obvious

The Ontario government has given the province’s school boards $25 million to buy books for school libraries. While it’s hard to argue with the soft and fuzzy video of cute kids talking about how much they love books, nevertheless School for Thought would like to point out a few of the problems surrounding this initiative. First, as is common with rushed government programs of this sort, there have apparently been problems with the implementation. For example, school librarians are complaining that the timelines have been far too short, sometimes resulting in their being forced to spend $2000 in one afternoon. In some cases, the processing of the books (getting them ready to go on the shelf) has been delayed, meaning that the books sit at board headquarters for months and months.

But in addition to the problems with implementation, School for Thought takes issue with the concept itself. The government claims that schools with up-to-date library collections will foster “strong literacy skills and a love of learning”. One might legitimately ask why the books have to be up-to-date to work their magic. Heidi? Harry Potter? Charlotte’s Web? Narnia? And let’s not forget that school libraries are already well stocked - for more generously than most private schools (which get significantly better results). But even more fundamentally, we ask exactly which students are expected to develop strong literacy skills and a love of learning as a result of the extra library books. Certainly not the students who are already proficient readers, since they will read whatever they can get their hands on and, if they can’t get their hands on books, they will read cereal boxes or menus. Certainly not the students who can’t read or who have very limited reading skills. It seems probable that the only category of students who might benefit are reluctant readers, those students with adequate reading skills who always choose to play video games or baseball over reading but might be tempted by a fantastic book. We have no idea whether the presence of a few hundred extra books in the school library would change their habits - you never know, it’s possible - but it seems likely that the gains would be minimal at best.

The real paydirt, the greatest potential gain in reading scores, is to be found in changes to beginning reading instruction. When schools adopt a systematic phonics program in grade 1, the children’s reading scores typically jump something like 30 percentage points in one year and the scores continue to improve, albeit less dramatically, for several years as the teachers become more familiar with the new approach. Compared to the adoption of systematic phonics, the gains to be gleaned from additional library books are negligible.

Buying additional books for the library when more than a third of elementary students can’t read well enough to cope with the work of the next grade is like planting flowers in the yard of a burning house.

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