Surprising and not-to-mention disturbing article about the lack of librarians in the Chicago Public School system: 'CTU Pushes for Libraries, Librarians in Every CPS School'. We get the count in the subtitle: '... just 107 librarians for more than 500 schools'.
Lemme do some math: So we're talking about almost four fifths of Chicago's public schools without access to research help? Disturbing!
From yesterday's Chicago Sun-times:
In an Age of Misinformation, Why Are There So Few Librarians at Chicago Public Schools?
The nation’s third-largest public school system with 290,000 students in 513 district-operated, non-charter schools, CPS has only about 90 schools with full-time librarians.
Librarians -- whaddya need them for? The article goes over a few good examples including:
"Leslie Westerberg, one of those recently laid off, said librarians also help students with research projects and finding accurate information online."
Worth a read.
Student protest at DeSable High School against the firing of their librarian. The students were right to do this. In fact it would seem more of a survival tactic than simply a protest.
It's amazing to think of an institution that claims to be about education that has no library function. What are the students going to do when they hit college? They'll each have to learn how to do research -- that's what going to college involves -- and this is infinitely harder to do if they have no prior familiarity with what a library is and how it functions.
What's next? Take away the textbooks? :-(
UPDATE: Good news...
From the Chicago Tribune:
After-school tutoring, better-trained teachers and new classroom assessments in Chicago public schools helped drive an "extraordinary" increase in state scores that improved the fortunes of nearly every city elementary school last year, district officials said.
This is just one year's results and from year to year there are enough changes in the way the test is given to make drawing longer-term conclusions problematic. That said, anyone familiar with our school system knows how hard everyone works -- particularly the teachers!
These results are a great credit to their efforts.
