Notebook: (2) Classroom Libraries

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Read Part One of this post here!

New legislation drafted to defend library collections from political interference include Illinois’s HB 2789, signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker in June, which conditions state grant funding for libraries on their adopting policies protecting books and other resources from being “proscribed, removed, or restricted” based on "partisan or doctrinal disapproval,” and a US House Fight Book Bans Act, sponsored by Florida’s Maxwell Alejandro Frost and Frederica Wilson and Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, that would fund institutional efforts to resist political interference in library collections, and a Senate Right to Read Act, sponsored by Rhode Island’s Jack Reed and Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva, which would affirm that First Amendment rights apply to school libraries and extend liability protections to teachers and school librarians. In December Massachusetts’s Ayana Pressley, accompanied by advocates from the Library of Congress, also announced introduction of a Senate Books Save Lives Act, classifying book bans as civil rights violations and requiring that certain public and school libraries maintain collections of books about underrepresented groups.

Among private efforts in support of restricted books, the musician Pink, working with PEN America and former Book Post partner, Miami bookseller Books & Books, gave away thousands of copies of four books from PEN’s Index of Banned Books at concerts in in Florida in November. Paul English, a tech entrepreneur and philanthropist, and Joyce Linehan, in partnership with Bookshop.org and Electric Literature, have collected donations under the auspices of Banned Books USA to send free books to Florida residents, schools, and libraries. The New Republic partnered with the House of Speakeasy to sponsor a Banned Book Bus giving away books as they drove through Florida, Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky, and Texas in October.  

The presidential campaign fortunes of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the results of the 2022 midterm elections seem to indicate that these unprecedented encroachments on libraries of the last few years do not have much political traction, and polling too does not show attacks on library collections to be popular beyond their motivated core constituency. And yet as elsewhere in American life a strong judicial case or a plurality of national opinion does not always translate as local sentiment. It is the communities in which minority experience is most frailly defended where a young person’s discovery of a supportive book might be most meaningful. Another recent controversy troubles me a bit in this connection: the recent political successes in advancing so-called “Science of Reading” programs in public schools, with many states adopting a mandated commitment to phonics-based reading at an accelerated rate since the pandemic.

I certainly do not have the expertise in early childhood education or cognitive science to adjudicate curricular decisions, but I would like to point out that one happy outcome of the increasingly demonized whole-language approaches to reading that “Science of Reading” challenges (“Science of Reading” is the name of the movement, not the judgment of the speaker) is the presence of the very classroom libraries currently under attack for the diversity of their collections, as well as the practice of free reading during the school day. Scholars and researchers who have studied the matter over many years, such as former Bush administration official and education historian Diane Ravitch, observe that there have been struggles around reading education since the nineteenth century, long vacillating between the poles of phonetics and what came to be called a “whole language” approach favored by progressive (in the Deweyan sense) educators. Ravitch argues that most seasoned scholars believe the best practice is a balance of the two, with a strong short-windowed emphasis on phonics in the early years, especially for children with dyslexia.

What worries me are thermadorian approaches to phonics that see student-directed reading as “a waste [of] precious classroom minutes” and require that children’s literature in the classroom be replaced by “decodable books” just now being written around combinations of sounds that align with sequencing of the newly created curricula. Sarah Schwarts, writing in Education Week, described these “decodable books,” “because of their inherent language constraints,” as being received by students and teachers alike as “boring and stilted.” Most specialists recommend a mixed diet, with an emphasis on “decodable books” in a very yearly window when children are learning to read, and flexibility around student ability, but hardcore “Science of Reading” advocates argue that mixing the different ways of reading creates confusion, because students are “undervaluing and underusing their phonics skills” when they venture away from books written in accordance with prescribed learning timeline. (Studies show that around 40 percent of children can learn to read without explicit phonics instruction.) Self-directed student reading “can undermine the whole approach” these advocates say, “if students learn phonics in the morning but are then asked to guess at words while reading in the afternoon, they won’t be honing their phonics skills.”

There is more to literature for children than lining up patterns of syllables in accordance with guidance based on scrutinizing MRIs. There is no evidence to support the idea that a regime depriving all children of literary pleasure will improve their reading. The “science” behind “Science of Reading” is cognitive research on written language acquisition, not empirical studies of classroom practices based on that research, which are being hastily developed to meet the new demand. Diane Ravitch argues that funding for school libraries, nurses, even nutrition have much more strongly demonstrated positive effects on learning than still-unfolding mandated classroom practice based on cognitive research. In a nuanced consideration of the “Science of Reading” disputes, Jessica Winter in The New Yorker quoted Ravitch saying “if you can do one thing to improve education, you eliminate poverty. But people say, ‘That’s impossible. What else can we do?’”

“Science of Reading” advocates seem also to share with some more doctrinaire advocates of the Common Core curriculum a preference for nonfiction: teachers describe, under “Science of Reading” directives, having to hunt down new material covering “bodies of knowledge” and texts about issues like climate change, civil rights, and women’s rights. As a sympathetic New York Times account described, the older system gave “teachers and students too much [sic] freedom to select reading material” rather than “challenging texts that build knowledge in various subjects such as social studies, science and the arts.” As I wrote here a few weeks back, the Common Core notoriously mandated teaching more nonfiction “informational” texts, 50/50 nonfiction/fiction in K-12 and 70/30 by high school, signaling to parents and students an embrace of reading as a pragmatic, vocational tool rather than a civilizational endeavor.

I’m all for doing whatever it takes to help kids to read. I just worry a little that in a time of limited budgets, the classroom libraries that teachers have laboriously built, often with their own money, for many kids—in an environment of austerity that impacts not only their school but their local public libraries—may be the only books they have the opportunity to pick up for themselves, and now these close-to-hand books seem to be under threat from more than one direction. We complain about kids not reading enough, but actually reading has in recent years remained persistently strong among the young people raised in the era of the classroom library, who actually read more books than those in other age cohorts, even—surprisingly—more print books. A recent ALA study shows that 54 percent of GenZ and Millenials visited a physical library in the last year; it found that 58 percent of Black and 57 percent of Latinx young people used library digital collections, more than the general survey population (52 percent). And there has been a sustained boom in young adult fiction. Look at BookTok! (An international study also recently found that the US experienced less learning loss in reading than other countries during the pandemic.) Maybe the classroom library has played a little part in this durable enthusiasm among younger Americans for reading for pleasure. David Klion noted a few weeks ago that when convicted felon and former Silicon Valley golden boy Samuel Bankman Fried told an interviewer, “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that,” he cast himself as a walking advertisement for humanities education. Preparing our kids only to rise in a pragmatic, STEM-centric educational ecosystem that chases an illusion of scientific absolutes, and bullying those who have chosen a mission of encouraging them to grow intellectually and emotionally through reading, may not contribute to a future we would want them to live in.

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Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.

A note to readers who are concerned about Substack’s moderation policies: Some of you may have seen that The Atlantic published in November an essay arguing that our platform, Substack, is too permissive in accommodating violent, extremist writing. I read this essay with concern, but not certainty. The question of whether a digital platform is more like, say, a printing press, or more like a newspaper, and what’s its responsibilities are for supervising what gets said there, remains in motion. On Thursday Casey Newton, a writer whom I’ve long followed, who has considered extensively the issue of content moderation on digital platforms (he first came to my attention with a terrifying essay on the experiences of Facebook contract workers paid by the hour to review posts flagged for violating terms of service), decided after considering the evidence and consulting Substack’s directors, to leave the platform. I encourage you to read his post if you are interested in the issue. This is serious for me, and I will be thinking in the next few days about what to do next. Many writers I admire, who have been lions in the struggle against disinformation, such as Timothy Snyder, Margaret Sullivan, Heather Cox Richardson, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, remain on Substack for now. For me the active question is whether Substack’s policy against hosting material that “incite[s] violence based on protected classes” is sufficient, if adequately enforced. Jacob Stern pointed out yesterday in the Atlantic for instance that the newsletter and web site platforms Mailchimp and SquareSpace have shut down white supremacist content that did not, he argued, rise to that standard. Let’s see what happens and I will keep learning.

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Photo: These kids are actually in New Guinea, but they were too cute to resist and they cheered me up. “Children at Buk bilong Pikinini (Books for Children), an independent not-for-profit organization based in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, which aims to establish children's libraries and foster a love of reading and learning. In PNG there are few functioning libraries outside the school system and most children do not have access to books at all.” Photo by Ness Kerton for AusAID (2013), via Wikimedia Commons