Excerpt from What's It Take?   in  White House Conference on School Libraries

Gary Hartzell
Professor, Educational Administration and Supervision, University of Nebraska, Omaha


...  The average age of school administrators today hovers around fifty, which means that about half are over that age. (1)  This means that they were themselves K-12 students in the late 1950s and through the '60s - before most school libraries became media centers, and certainly before most librarians reached beyond their traditional roles. Most school administrators are not former school librarians, and probably most went through their own educations in schools where the librarian was not a major player. (2)  They did not grow into their educational philosophies and positions in environments that fostered appreciation for the library as a major instructional resource. Many still hold their early stereotypical images of libraries and librarians. (3)

We took these real and celluloid images of libraries and librarians to college with us - which leads to the second factor shaping our limited view of libraries and what they have to offer: our own professional training as educators. One would hope that such misleading impressions would have been corrected during teacher training - and, if not there, in our administrative training. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, partly because the images were not completely inaccurate at that time and partly because the professors training teachers and administrators then - as now - had no alternative visions to offer us. In fact, the greater likelihood was that the perception of librarians as different from teachers was more reinforced than modified.
 

Even now, few teacher-training programs contain any systematic instruction in how librarians might improve instruction, serve in staff development projects, assist with special student populations, or provide administrative support. (4) Teacher training emphasizes the individual classroom interactions between teacher and student. Teachers are predominantly trained as independent operators simultaneously in charge of and responsible for what goes on in their classrooms. (6) They usually are not trained in the collaborative and consultative models found in law, medicine, and the other professions. The result is that aspiring teachers are not provided with any model or expectation that school librarians should be regarded as partners in curriculum and instruction.

Robert Louis Stevenson once remarked that the cruelest lies are often told in silence. That characterizes administrator training programs. Any review of administrator training reveals a stunning lack of attention to the library and its potential. (7) The net result is that administrative training does little or nothing to enhance administrators' awareness, let alone understanding, of the library and librarian. Aspiring administrators are not made aware of the library's potential and don't recognize themselves as important players in maximizing the librarian's potential to contribute to school quality.

It's not too difficult to see why this happens. Most educational administration professors are former school administrators. They simply bring their own limited perceptions with them to the university setting, and nothing there challenges them. More than ninety percent of EdAd professors in a recent survey didn't see the principal as an important influence in teacher/librarian collaboration (8) -a notion counter to virtually all research on school site collaboration.

....  once in office, the demands of the principalship preclude much chance of an administrator learning the truth about libraries and librarians on the job. The simple fact is that they just don't have the time to. Once into positions as teachers or administrators, they get caught up in the imperatives of their own environments and it becomes very difficult for them to expand their conceptual horizons. Teaching is demanding, (10) and administrative work is downright consuming. (11)  Every administrator here will confirm what one vice principal in California told me: "Being a school administrator today," he said, "is like living in an Indiana Jones movie." Unless the library is forcibly brought to administrators' attention, it is likely to go unnoticed - and things that are unnoticed frequently are undervalued.

See the full text at What's it take? in 'Proceedings of White House Conference on School Libraries'  June 4, 2002

NSW Teacher-Librarians