Research into Practice. School Librarian Employment Research: An Interview with Debra E. Kachel and Keith Curry Lance

by Rebecca J. Morris, December 2021

Research Recap

The School Librarian Investigation—Decline or Evolution? is a three-year, mixed-methods project submitted by Antioch University Seattle to explore patterns in the continuing, national decline in school librarian positions and to learn how and why school administrators decide to staff library, learning resources, and instructional technologies programs. The project will examine information from 1) an in-depth analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) school library employment and other district data, 2) interviews with decisionmakers in districts that have reported librarian gains and losses over the past five years, 3) job descriptions from interview sites, and 4) state survey data providing needed context. Data for almost 13,000 school districts has been analyzed including enrollment, setting, poverty, race/ethnicity, and per pupil spending to uncover inequities to K-12 student groups. Partnering organizations, the International Society for Technology in Education and Future Ready Schools, along with school library agency or association leaders in each state, will assist in identifying school district leaders to be interviewed, disseminating findings, and using Web tools to inform their work. Interactive data tools will enable users to select state and district NCES data, download charts and tables, and view customized maps. Vetted by an advisory council, reports, webinars, journal articles, and infographics summarizing employment trends and inequities, as well as information from interviews and staffing models, will also be posted on the SLIDE website. The values and choices of school leaders who set staffing priorities will reveal current realities behind the declining numbers of school librarians, uncovering whether and how school librarianship is evolving to meet structural changes in public education, as well as local school needs.

Interview with Rebecca Morris

Rebecca Morris: Debra and Keith, thank you for spending some time with School Library Connection! You wrote about the SLIDE research for SLC earlier this year; let's start our chat with a refresher, or perhaps an introduction, for readers who are learning about your work for the first time. What is SLIDE about?

Debra Kachel and Keith Curry Lance, SLIDE: SLIDE is called an investigation advisedly. We want to understand what's really going on behind the statistics that indicate highly inequitable access to school librarians in the United States. While the oft-reported fact that school librarian numbers have been on the decline for a couple of decades is accurate, there are a lot of caveats. First and foremost, school librarians aren't disappearing randomly among school districts. Districts with smaller enrollments, in more rural locations, in poorer communities, and with more non-white and specifically Hispanic students are significantly more likely to be without librarians or, if they have librarians at all, to have fewer of them relative to their numbers of schools. In other words, we are losing school librarians where we can least afford to be losing them. A few states and more prosperous districts are not only maintaining school librarian jobs, but actually adding to them.

But, what federal data tell us about school librarian employment is only the first part of the story. We have a lot of questions about what's going on behind these trends. We want to talk with school administrators who have made decisions to add or cut librarians to find out why those decisions were made. The easy, oft-given answer is school funding cuts; but, according to the data, that alone is not a sufficient explanation, as the best staffed districts are actually those that spend the most and the least per pupil. Further, while school librarian jobs have been disappearing, lots of other jobs—particularly administrators and a broadly defined group of jobs called instructional coordinators—have been growing dramatically. So what are the real reasons for these decisions? Are decisionmakers creating new kinds of jobs that aren't perceived as school librarians? Are they combining librarian and ed-tech jobs? In the case of both job gains and losses, how were those changes affected by the decisionmaker's perceptions, experiences, and priorities? And, we are especially keen to speak to administrators who decided to cut their last librarian jobs. What's going on in districts that no longer have librarians? Are all the things we claim librarians do or can do truly not being done by anyone? And, if any of those services continue to be available to students and teachers, who's providing them? The statistical data are the tip of the iceberg. We hope our interviews with decision-makers will shed some new light on what's happening.

RM: Why are you interested in this investigation?

SLIDE: First and foremost, we want to speak to district or school administrators who have made decisions in recent years that led to gains or losses of some school librarian FTEs, or elimination of all librarian FTEs. We want to learn more about their perceptions, experiences, and expectations of school librarians, and how those and other factors affected the decisions they made. The standard assumption is, if an administrator reduces or eliminates librarian FTEs, they must not understand the scope and value of the position. We expect there are a lot of other reasons for their decisions, and those other factors are ones the school library community should be more aware of and should develop effective strategies to address. In other words, the default assumption has been that there is something wrong with the thinking of some administrators. We are approaching this investigation with a little more humility, acknowledging that there might be some wrong thinking on our side of the relationship. Public education has been restructuring for many years. We may learn that some of the ways that restructuring has unfolded in some locations calls for a shift in thinking—whether minor or paradigmatic—on our part.

Secondly, we wanted to do something about the alarming lack of comprehensive, quality data on school libraries and librarians. We used the only detailed, nationwide data available about school librarian staffing. While most of the data are reasonably good, in some states, there are major data reporting and data quality issues. Our project's online tools are designed to reveal these data and equip interested parties to access and examine it easily.

Data about school librarians is extremely limited and much of it is of dubious quality. We knew that the best way to get interested parties to start addressing that was to expose the data, warts and all, to the light of day. The good news is that most of the data from most states looks reasonably good. But, there are several states—unfortunately several larger ones—where either dubious data are reported or no data are reported for many districts. As a result, one of our interests in this investigation was to assess the quality of the NCES data and—as it turned out—to improve the data where they were questionable and where an authoritative alternative data source exists. Further, because we knew the limits of the available data, we resolved to try to speak to decisionmakers about how librarian and related staffing really looks in their districts or schools and what they decided and why. While we don't yet have a clearer picture of what is going on, the one thing we're convinced of is that it is far more complex and interesting than the data reveal.

RM: Did any of the findings surprise you, or perhaps confirm something that you expected to find?

SLIDE: To put it succinctly, the extremity of the inequities in access to librarians is what stands out to us. Every student and teacher deserves to be in a school and district where their learning and teaching information needs are being met. Those needs might be being met in a variety of ways, and we hope to learn more about that. But, based on the data available to us right now, it appears unlikely that an acceptable baseline of equity exists—or, for that matter, that we even know where such a baseline could be drawn. Our ultimate finding is already shaping up to be that there is a lot of work to do, and continuing to do the same things we've been doing for the last twenty years isn't likely to work. Yet, to develop a new strategy for ensuring that educational information needs are met, we need the results of the SLIDE study and more studies that build on it.

RM: The timeframe for this research is three years, with Year 2 beginning in Fall 2021. This is an exciting phase of the work as it includes interviews with 100 administrators. Who will be interviewed, and why these individuals?

SLIDE: We want to interview administrators and school board members, if they are willing, who have made decisions to add or cut librarians in recent years. The reason for that is we want to find out why they made those decisions. Because of turnover at the administrator level, it's unlikely that newer administrators would be in a position to explain changes that happened more than a few years ago.

RM: Would you share some updates on current activities in the project? What's next, and what's coming up down the road?

SLIDE: We are diligently publishing and pushing our findings out via social media but it is still difficult to reach non-library audiences. However, we have been interviewed by Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, and Houston news media and information about our project has been published in NEA Today and The Conversation. The pandemic has certainly impacted conferences making it even more difficult to be able to present at non-library events. We are currently working on a major article for the Peabody Journal of Education.

At the recent AASL conference, there was much interest in the SLIDE findings based on the NCES data and the recently added data tools on the SLIDE website. The tools make the NCES data more usable. Data can be downloaded by district and state profiles, as well as district comparisons. Equity issues, including race, ethnicity, and poverty are also easily searched (https://libslide.org/data-tools/).

Resources & Additional Information

Kachel, Debra E., and Keith Curry Lance. "Investigating the Status of School Librarian Employment." School Library Connection. https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Article/2265236.

More SLIDE publications: https://libslide.org/publications/