Latino Students Need Libraries, Congress Pass The SKILLS Act

When I taught high school in the Bronx, the library was the place you went when you didn’t want to eat lunch, and you didn’t want to answer questions about why you weren’t eating lunch. It was a place of solace and contemplation — a place where shushing was still prevalent, although you had to be careful because some of these kids were truly disturbed. The school I taught at was in a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, so the library was adequate enough, but the numbers of classes to be serviced by the solitary librarian seemed almost like a punishment than collaboration. This is not to say that she was derelict in her duty; the librarian there did the best that she could with the limited resources that she had.

However, research conducted by Keith Curry Lance and Linda Hofschire in 2011 seems to indicate that schools with libraries fare better on standardized tests than schools with no libraries; furthermore, schools with visible library programs fare even better on standardized tests. Lance and Hofschire used data from the National Center for Education Statistics and looked at scores from 2004 to 2009; according to them, “states that gained librarians from 2004-5 to 2008-9 showed significantly greater improvements in fourth grade scores, an average of 2.2%. States that cut school librarians only saw a 1% increase.” This is important as a school’s API (Annual Percentage Increase) is a strong marker of its reputation and standing.

Recently, Senators Reed (D-RI) and Cochran (R-MS) have introduced legislation into Congress that will, according to the American Library Association, “help…improve student achievement by ensuring more students have access to effective school library programs.” The Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries (SKILL) Act is designed to retain state-certified librarians, and implement library programs at schools with no library programs. There are several reasons why we want the SKILLS Act to pass in Congress as a country, but there are even more reasons to want this Act to pass if you are Latino and your child attends public middle or high school. For one thing, Latino students statistically access the internet though their smart phones, and don’t have broadband access at home.

If we want Latino students to not fall behind then it is essential that they have access to high-speed Internet; it’s not that dial-up doesn’t suit their needs — it’s just that the speed at which dial-up functions inhibits use of sophisticated programs and formats. So, for example, students might be able to access a search engine but not the website the engine recommends if the page runs Flash or has video capabilities. Much of the wonder of the internet involves multimedia features, so for example a website that has educational uses like YouTube would not be accessible to them. YouTube is dominated by personal videos people upload from their smart phones, but many universities, like M.I.T., use it to stream their lectures, on say Differential Equations. In addition, YouTube EDU has archived most of the TEDX lectures and has technical medical videos titled, Imaging Patients with Myleopathy.

American students need the guidance of librarians now more than ever. The landscape information inhabits has completely changed, and so has the main challenge. Librarians used to show people how to unearth the information they need; nowadays, because so many types of information are abundant and online, the librarians main duty has become to teach students how to discern between quality resources and biased information driven by commercial interests. Librarians now teach students how to withstand the torrent of information spewed at them when they use search engines and popular databases. In this age of information overdrive, librarians collaborating with teachers will only benefit students and specifically Latino students.