[Music]
it's a great honor and uh pleasure for me to uh be able to introduce marianne
wolfe who we had in the kansas city public library who i've been a fan of
since i read proust and the squid but i will tell you this i promised uh
marianne that i would give her the shortest introduction i am capable of
giving she laughed as she is laughing now
um but
you want to hear her not me so i will tell you very quickly she's a
been a professor at tufts she's now at ucla
she runs the center for dyslexia diverse learning and social justice there
she's the author of proust in the squid which is a book about reading and brain
science what we know about that uh and and and what a two-way street the
brain uh and uh and reading are uh the development of the brain the
development of reading it is itself uh a mind-altering book
uh about the ability to read the leading to develop thinking uh to to
analysis uh to discovery uh and uh to aspiration
ultimately real critical thinking and reading
is relational dialogic and
interactive and i think she's the best descriptor a
describer of that uh in in our world today
reader come home her most recent book is about reading in the digital age
the positives and the negatives which we've been talking about today marianne
social media is not reading my view i think her view as well
both books i have marianne's signature
which is that reading is not an act not only an act but maybe the greatest
act of aspiration of human beings ladies and gentlemen mary anne wolf
thank you so much and welcome to all of you uh to my living room
my my son's painting behind me um i want
this to be a kind of dialogue if you will
which is the nature of my last book because i will be giving you a very
particular perspective that some of you will agree with and many of you will
have some discomfort um and so i'm going to
i'll show you my first slide which is an unusual title
information knowledge and wisdom and apologia
for reading and books in a digital culture the heart of my work as
crosby and i think all of us all of you have as a shared mission
is an understanding that literacy is a basic human right
that we must share across not only our cities and our neighborhoods but across
our world and i want you to realize in my very
short amount of time that literacy itself is being transformed
and even though there are very many positives i'm going to give you a
cautionary tale because reading as
as crosby mentioned for me is far more than the vonneguty and canary in the
mind it is one of the most important ways
that our brain changes itself elaborates itself adds information and becomes
ultimately an empathic critical analytic reflective
not just reflective brain reflective mind reflective citizen
and so we have to understand those changes that are happening and i want to
begin with t.s eliot who
said something always says something so important for us to think about but this
is a question for our moment in time where is the wisdom
lost in knowledge where is the knowledge lost in information
and this brought me to the thought of
the library as peter briscoe in his small but very powerful book the
bookseller calls
one of the most important if if you will a space time machine
in which we can go what he calls anywhere microscopically telescopically
past present and future and especially into the minds of others into the
knowledge of others but he goes on to say that the modern library he laments
and worries is changing so that it is not so much
about knowledge as about information retrieval and the
inventory and inventory control of information rather
than the previous goal of every person in
library in library science and services which is to provide knowledge as the
basis of wisdom for all of our people and so i i hold
that i want you to hold that in mind as a particular
look at our digital culture and where we are and where libraries are and where
museums are and it begins with the paradox we are
all overloaded with information and i'm going to if you will give you a
quick tour over how information may or may not be translated into knowledge and
how knowledge is the basis of wisdom but not
necessarily and so they're all the all these amazing people doing
great work that i will not be able to quote for you today but that i want you
to realize are dealing with the problem that is a paradox you would think that
with more information we would have more knowledge but in fact how we absorb how
we retrieve that information and use it in
our own lives either becomes knowledge that is stored
or does not and here we go to areas of critical
importance for libraries what we are seeing in many reports is a
decrease in children's use of books children as
crosby knows a special area of importance to me there's a decrease in
reading longer texts and there's brand new reports by kirchik and naomi barron
and anne mangan and others that we are changing in in the nature that of our
book not only in how long they are but even in the density of content
well what is spurring that on in part is how
we read and so my talk is going to be a lot about how we read because the medium
matters just as
most of you know you read differently when it's digital
and yet the libraries are spending so much more
as as peter briscoe and gerald beasley from the university of alberta are
saying our budgets are going more into the storage of digital books rather than
the ordering of books well what does that mean
for the people that are using our libraries and museums what are the
library's role in these big questions especially given their multiple
functions i look at la where they are dealing with homelessness and all kinds
of issues that one would not think that libraries must take on the
responsibilities of the society which couldn't do it and yet they are but i
ask you during this short time together to think about what the role the library
is in this big question of how we read and
how we bring different perspectives to it i'm bringing a particular perspective
to it that you may agree or disagree about
but it's one that i believe is necessary for us to have a dialogue so i'm
bringing it as a cognitive scientist looking at the brain circuit and how it
changes according to how we read and what processes are emphasized
in digital reading what processes are emphasized in book reading but i begin
with a philosophical perspective that comes from the great thinker walter ong
who said technologies are not mere exterior aids
but also interior transformations
of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word
now what we have especially during colon is a if you will a coincidence of
opposites that's what nicholas accuses said as a philosopher centuries ago what
do you do we need digital technology digital technology increases knowledge
exponentially and yet it is changing how we read that
information what do we do to resolve it well nicholas of cusa used the term
we take a stance of learned ignorance and we examine it and i i want to as as
a april you to the rest of my talk especially for those of you whose
funding budgets are funding much more of our digital world in books than than
than our our print books i want to bring a comment i heard at the university of
alberta from their librarian at the time i do not know if he's still there gerald
beasley who said the present situation between digital and the printed book is
unresolvable until it is
we must be the guardians of the book's attributes now i i i hope
someone sends a recording of this talk to him
we have never met and yet that that
that is the reason in part why i am giving you
and many other people talks about how understanding the reading circuit
points us to a cautionary tale about how we're reading today and it begins with a
very important concept actually it's the first line in
prison the square the story and science of the reading brain
we were never born to read the human brain doesn't have a single gene for
reading or a single region no it is connecting the parts that were existing
there vision and language and affect and motor and conceptual knowledge
it's it's making new connections among that to bring a new
circuit but because there's no genetic program that
means that circuit is plastic it's going to be changed by
multiple factors the writing system the writing
system of a chinese or a japanese country reader is emphasizing more the
visual areas than the alphabetic systems so we have different even we have
different kinds of brains even within alphabets
we have different circuits depending on the educational formation
we have different uses of that reading circuit according
to our purpose of what we're reading i would never read any my email in any
deep way unless it's an important something we can read for different
purposes but the reality is that that circuit is not reading the same when
it's reading on different mediums so
my my work is to ensure that people understand
that that original circuit
is plastic and over time that it moves from this very basic
decoding to a circuit that is able to consolidate knowledge when given enough
time to do so and here we move into what are those
processes that are being elaborated and i call them the deep reading processes
those of you who studied literary criticism would call them close reading
processes but because i'm in cognitive science and i want to be more specific i
want to talk to you about what is involved in that breeding brain circuit
that we do not want to lose well the first is that we are analogy makers we
are building from what we know
and bring it as background knowledge to what is there and the great alberto
mongol who wrote the one of the finest books on reading a history of reading
said reading is cumulative and proceeds with geometric progression everything
builds upon everything but it has to be there
well there's another aspect that that peter briscoe quote was saying has uh
the the the reader is able to enter the minds of
others that is the nature of what is enabled by reading
because it allows us to leave ourselves enter the thoughts and feelings of
another which is the basis for
of if you will empathy but a compassionate imagination it's like a
moral laboratory we are given from frog and toad and charlotte's web all the way
up to some of the most important novels in your life for me i will simply say
middle march is one of the great ways that i was able to understand
perspectives i would never have had it's just an example however of how fiction
enables us to take on a piece of consciousness and the theologian john
dunn used the term passing over books allow us to pass over into the
perspectives whether they're scientific perspective perspectives our fictional
ones we're able to leave ourselves and bring something that enriches us now all
of that all these deep reading processes that i describe much more in my book my
reader come home i hope some of you read it that's letter three
all of this prepares our brain to enter the most one of the most important
things we do with information we connect it to the background
knowledge we make inferences and we evaluate using our frontal cortex
quartets or both hemispheres are involved in generating hypotheses is
this true do we refute it because of what we know and because of what we
infer do we discern the truth value this cannot be more important in an age of
false information intentionally sometimes non-maliciously other but we
are in an age in which truth is not being discerned in part because
the entirety of that reading brain requires the time we aren't giving in
digital mediums oh there's many other reasons that are going on
and we aren't that's not what this talk about is about this talk is about how
complex that reading brain circuit is and it requires time to give its all
now one of the last things that brain does is contemplate and reflect it's
what i call the prostate pause st thomas aquinas said we must hand on
to others the things we gain in contemplation well we have the
opportunity to as true said leave the wisdom of the
author behind to discover our own but that takes time and it takes time in two
ways it takes time to build a deep reading brain to form it and it takes
time by us who have a form deep reading brain circuit to use those milliseconds
they this is never a given now i want to use my colleague patricia
greenfield to say something very important
every medium has both its costs and weaknesses
and its gifts our job my job is to really look at both
and see out of this
knowledge where should we go but one of the things patricia is saying
and it's it haunts me is that the cost in the digital medium seems to be deep
processing why because we have this plastic circuit
that's going to reflect the medium's characteristics and the
medium of digital is fantastic for giving us
rapid fire massive information
but it's not giving us the set the way a printed book does our
print does towards processing it
in deeper ways and that's where purpose we can read deeply on digital of course
we can't but it requires intentionality and purpose
there are no binaries here you are probably talking about all the benefits
and advantages of the digital culture especially in this time of covid i am
not a if you will talking about the past versus the future the traditional
or the innovative in terms of print versus digital no
i'm talking about what are the cognitive linguistic and affective processes
encouraged or advantaged by both
and we need to think about what sherry turkle said we
transgress not because we try to build the new
but because we do not allow ourselves to consider what it disrupts or diminishes
both the medium and the purpose for reading are changing under our
fingertips and we have evidence to show this that we are changing
how our children's attention is being developed and in very different
ways in that zero to five now some of my colleagues from
pediatric neurology are doing images of what happens when children are getting
the same story in print which is
read to them by their parent or caretaker versus an audio version versus
a video digital animated version there is no question
the best activation of language regions is when the parent is reading the book
not when it's being heard though that is better than when all the bells and
whistles are just distracting and not even in our young encouraging their own
participatory act their own reap
if you will learning to to to establish this this
the the content in memory and so we have evidence in every age we have evidence
in our in our youth that basically they are needing ever higher levels of
stimulation they're always bored when they go off what we're talking about is
is is is a change and we even have brain imaging to show that there are
differences in white matter the myelinization the connective tissue if
you will with increased screen use so
what about you i i'm most interested in children to be
sure but i'm interested in you and all the people that we deal with and there's
no question that evidence is mounting
that we are all becoming skimmers of information rather than the kind of
immersive readers that all of us who who love books
once were but it's and it's if you read my letter four you will see i it has
affected me as much as it affects you because the medium the dominant use of
any medium is really changing the mode with which
we read and so we're becoming these skimmers who do it like an f or a z we
go zoop z we get these word spotted
word spotting browsing uh information um but we aren't necessarily
giving the time to consolidate that in knowledge and
therefore there are implications for the rest of
the deep reading processes now we have children
whom we've studied and we have had young adults who my colleagues in the e-read
network are studying and when you look at what they are finding
if they if if
if i can convince you through 171 000 young adults who've been studied
from the year 2000 to 2017-18 i i hope this this data can just
convince you of how important this is these all these studies it's a meta
analysis of more than 50 studies have one and only one task
the young adults read the same exact fictional story
on digital or in print the comprehension is superior in print
their ability to sequence details plots and then you do a subset and say oh but
what about the kids who are the digital natives at the very end of the studies
they have even a higher superiority effect
on print why for comprehension why when asked and what's their perception they
say oh we're always better on digital why
because they say we're faster exactly right they're faster
at the expense of deeper processing and so this meta-analysis of over
171 thousand subjects is showing us that print is better for comprehension
when we look at different genres and this is increasing over time i look
at another wonderful author italo calvino who said
way before any of this was so obvious it seems to
me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive
faculty the use of words it is a plague afflicting language
revealing itself as a loss of cognition that levels out all
expression in the most into the most generic anonymous
he goes on but the implications
of whether it's a novelist an essayist or a psychologist or a neural imager is
that we are are changing the way we read
the results are and back to that information silo information overload
the results are many and they're so important for all of you to realize when
you have all of this information the tendency is not
to try to grasp all the different
perspectives the tendency as we see in the polarization of our country in our
world is that we go to the silos that are basically confirming what we thought
before we are not using those silos with our
full capacity of critical analysis in essence we are
failing to grasp complexity by living in those silos of confirmatory bias we are
failing also to perceive beauty or to to to have that
reading sanctuary that we all believe we we once possessed and i hope most of
you still possess it we can go back to it which is why i called my book reader
come home but there are such broader implications
for society if we give less attention to other perspectives if we give less
attention to others we become more susceptible to demagoguery
to those who will mislead us with false information
when we talk this moment about democracy versus autocracy
we can do something about it
by refusing to let this question of how we
use our information and change it to knowledge and wisdom or not
we in the library sciences in cognitive
neurosciences and education we have to think about how we can build a better
brain if you will i call it a biliterate brain i hope that you read about it or
ask me questions about it but it's never a binary it's learning how to use deep
reading across mediums it's learning how to preserve what is best in our present
deep reading brain and with books and expand it and there's so many people
doing wonderful work my colleague judy coke and and and and her all of her
colleagues and bring me a book are taking this question so seriously
they're working with the rotary they're trying to bring books as a community
catalyst for literacy there's
what they call the virtuous cycle of book abundance they're working with a
beautiful app called bookalicious and remember we're not only talking about
printed books though we are although we will always
emphasize printed books but we're also talking about
digital books as well but what i what what i really see from
things like bookalicious is they're trying to encourage in this case through
a digital app how do we meet the particular if you
will level of reading of of our children and
their areas of interest and link it to books in our libraries link it to public
libraries link it to school libraries link it to publishers but to bring books
and give children choice and agency so there are so many things that we can do
but what we must not do is develop only this what martha
newspaper calls this these technically competent
children who've lost the ability to think critically to examine themselves
and respect the humanity and diversity of others
most of you have heard or read essays by joseph epstein in which he
says basically a biography of any person ought to deal
at length with what he read he or she because we are what we read well i will
say something that goes a bit beyond and that is we are not only
what we read we are also
how we read for how we read
and for what purpose depends on our knowledge
that is now not readily accessible to people
this half hour with you is simply my way of telling you
the seriousness of some of your funding choices
like gerald beasley and and peter briscoe i say we must protect
the attributes of books and what i will call
the deep reading processes that allow our
species to become ever more critically analytic knowledgeable
empathic and wise i'm going to end with a quote i've never
done this before i'm going to end with a quote from reader come home in other
words i'm quoting myself i have to laugh
but i really want you to know why i read as a way
as a if you will my last words to ask you why you read and why you have joined
one of the most important first responding
um services acts of service professions of
service to our world through museum and library sciences
so why do i read i read both to find fresh reason to love
this world and also to leave this world behind
to enter a space where i can glimpse what lies beyond my imagination outside
my knowledge and my experience of life to expand an ever truer more beautiful
understanding of a universe with
gods footprints everywhere and to lead a life based on this vision
for my students my children and those who will follow
so i thank you for your service and i wish you
godspeed in all that you do thank you so much
thank you
so uh now i want to call our uh panel up and we have a very uh distinguished
panel first of all thank you marianne for uh
for wonderful wonderful presentation and kicking this
part of our conversation off first panelist is a depression of zaria
he's a pediatrician with graduate degrees in
public health children's librarianship physician assistant studies and medicine
a unique combination of interests he's an associate professor of pediatrics at
the school of medicine and public health uh
and human ecology at the university of wisconsin wisconsin-madison
uh he has also i've been very involved in reach out and read i believe is the
incoming chair of reach out and and reid
as well as the american academy of pediatrics
monroe richardson who is an old friend of mine from the days he was at the
kauffman foundation and user of the kansas city public
library dedicated user who homeschooled his kids i like to think that the
library was the place where a lot of that happened
monroe is the executive director of read charlotte a community initiative that
unites families educators and community partners with the goal of improving
third grade reading proficiency in mecklenburg county and his course
partners with the with many organizations in charlotte including uh
the library british robinson
british thank you uh british robinson is the president and
ceo of the barbara bush foundation for family literacy
she has 20 plus years of experience in international and domestic health
corporate responsibility public and private partnerships and government
relations she served as the founding ceo of the
women's heart alliance and in leadership positions at women for women
international and susan g komen thank you all for being here
we really appreciate it so terry
so with this panel we're going back to yesterday's format we'll get to here 10
minutes from each of them um they have their their light indicators down here
and i think we have some signs we can wave at you when you're getting to two
minutes to the end of your time uh so we are five minutes what have we got there
uh we will wave it uh we appreciate you being here and after we finish this
section we'll head into a break so again with the sticky notes and the questions
if you have things you would like to feed to your imls
table representative they will come to me during the break and then we'll go
into a question and answer period all right
so i will leave it to you as to the order who would like to go first why
don't you go first doctor graham look at me great thank you
so hi folks so um it's really really a
delight to be here and um i i just have to say um
marianne peck's more thoughtful information and
notions and ideas and thinking on one slide than i think i
have encountered in entire semesters in some training
so always a delight to hear her hear her talk
um so you know one of the things that i get the wonderful privilege of doing is
sometimes musing on how what what i get to do in the different
worlds that i inhabit i am a practicing pediatrician i
still do see patients and all i spent many years in primary care
but i also get to teach i get to think about books i get to think about reading
i get to think about parenting i get to teach about parenting
um and and so forth and it occurs to me that um as as
marianne was speaking she hit a point about
where she was talking about how
the parent reading to the child right was
the best right out of those various modalities that were being being looked
at and
we've known this for a long time all over and this is one of the reasons
reach out and read does what it does we we work with clinicians to have them
talk at the regular checkups that kids get in the first five years of life
about the importance of shared reading you know um people think we're a book
giveaway program and i say yes but actually we're secretly a
parenting support program right that's that's the behaviors we're trying to
change and one of the things that
we we've noted and that i i talk about is that
in that parent-child relationship is
is is a whole there's a lot wrapped up in there
right and we talk about this in um in pediatrics in general there's a lot
of work that's been going on over the last
really decades but i want to say it's come together in the last five five
years about this notion of what we call relational health right what's the
health of relationships like not just the parent not just the child
but the interaction that's between them and how do we notice that and how do we
help support it how do we help protect it because often
it's going really well right so let's not screw it up right
how do we help repair it when it's not right and thinking about all those
different things and one of the observations we made was
that when shared reading is going well
in a family when we observe a child so one of the things i do we talk about
this all the time is you the health care provider walk in
with the book in your hand right and give it directly to the child
okay don't give it at the end like it's a sticker don't have the front desk do
it whatever because you're missing a really really really critical moment
you're it's your uh your opportunity to observe what's happening right and when
that little kid hopefully takes that book from you
studies it for a moment and toddles over to their parent and
holds it out in that wonderful read to me gesture right
they have just told you volumes my goodness they've told you tons right
they're saying i know what this thing is that you handed me this is that thing
that if i bring it to you there's a good chance you're going to
pull me up in your lap and we're going to open it and you're
going to do this thing called reading aloud with me
and i want you to do it right
and it's it's a sign of not just familiarity with books and literacy but
it's familiarity with the act of reading right and family and a trust that if i
bring this to you i think you're going to do this
right it's almost like there's a button on the parent that says press here and i
will read to you right um this is like my kids knowing that you know i will buy
them any soccer jersey from our local third third division soccer team um you
know like that oh yeah dad will always do this right but that's the thing
there's this trust this feedback loop that happens there
so this notion of relational health is really central to this job of parenting
and there's a second and related notion that i want to talk about here for just
a second which is when you say what is the work
of parenting right what's the core thing let's get really meta about this yes yes
feed and clothe and all that stuff right really important and so many families
are challenged in being able to do that and then they need help and support with
that but what is it that a parent does
with their child when we say they are parenting right and and anyone who's in
a parenting role not just an identified biological parent it can be other
caregivers etc i think of it as this world where we're
helping them make sense of the world around them right that the parent is
helping this child understand what is this universe we live in right
if you've never seen a dog then to have someone name this thing called a dog
and give you ways of don't pet a dog unless you know you're
allowed to or that you've asked permission right just don't go running
up to them um you know other things about the world and this sense making
goes on my i have two kids that are now in college right and you know
occasionally they'll come up to me with the thing from my daughter from her
starbucks job going dad i got this thing about a tax thing what do i do with this
help right um and i try to do sense making but i
gotta admit i don't really understand these things either i say here let's
throw it at the tax accountant here you figure it out right right but we're
doing this job of this thing called sense making right and we spend our
entire lives doing that for those that that we care about and care with
i would argue that these two notions this idea of
relational health of these connections that are happening of the strength
and an ability of relationships to do well
and this notion of sense making apply not only to the parent child
relationship but they also apply to the professional slash client relationship
right what am i doing when a parent comes to me and says my child has a
fever and a runny nose and a cough help right
yes yes yes i'm coming to a diagnosis right but a diagnosis is fundamentally
also about sense making the parent is saying help me understand what is going
on here right and we sometimes discount this in
all the you know imaging and tests and blah blah blah and blood work yeah
whatever what is the thing we're actually doing
is that we're helping make sense of things
right and there's a relationship based there i hope based on trust i trust that
you know what you're doing that you care about me you care about my child and
that you're going to do the best thing possible for us
and furthermore last part of my my thesis here is
i would argue that this is what you do as well
okay as you heard i went to library school in the middle of med school long
story um right and i remember sitting in some of
her basic library science classes and saying hold on i've heard some of these
things before i've heard them over in medical school
of course in medical school we believe no one else could possibly know these
things right i mean whatever right and i was like wait a minute reference
interview right the whole open-ended close-ended sort of thing right
that's medical interviewing in a different form right that what you all
are doing or helping others do is to make sense of the world
when people come in and they say i need a book i need this they email you you're
making collection development decisions you're deciding what ebooks to buy what
print books to buy whatever the case may be what programming to put on
you're contributing to this whole notion of sense making of helping populations
make sense of the world around them and
you're building that trust right there's a reason that libraries
are held in such high esteem is that trust is still there
right because it's this idea that you're there for your patrons and not with some
other ulterior motive or agenda or thing of that nature
right so again i would say that when you pull all these things together you start
to recognize that there's more in these different streams around parenting
around healthcare around libraries right that makes incredible sense that these
are the same meta things that are that are going on to the point that i said
once well if you take away prescriptions and procedures i would argue that
librarianship is merely a high that medicine is merely a highly advanced
form of librarianship so there there you go
so i wanted to offer that to pull out that nugget there that i think is so
important because i think it helps us think and maybe make sense about the
world around us so thank you
okay well good afternoon and thanks for
having me across me thanks for inviting me i'm monroe richardson i'm the
executive director of reed charlotte i'm going to do three things in my 10
minutes one i'm going to give you a little snippet about who we are what we
do second i'm going to talk about why
reading and why i think it's incredibly important and third
i'm going to share with you three
evidence-informed ideas that i think
libraries can contribute to to to improve reading outcomes first i want to
say reach out and read is one of my favorite
programs reach out and read carolina's and the
executive director kelly boulware is fantastic it's been one of our very best
partners i love this program has great bones there are 15 well child visits
between 0 to 5 13 or in the first 36 months
i can't think of a better way to be able to reach families who
in very high numbers take their kids to well-child visits even if they don't
take care of their own health so i can never fail to give a love this program
um later all right all right just give give callie some more money um
so i'm going to try to leave you with some nuggets today and
you know the first one i want to share is one of my favorite quotes if you go
to my linkedin profile you'll see it it's from larry page
um and i think about it often in the context of our work he says most people
tend to assume things are impossible rather than starting from real world
physics and figuring out what's actually possible so for the last seven years
we've been engaged in the work of trying to figure out what are the real world
physics of literacy our kids demand and need rigor just like
we would have with anything else it's not ideas our experiences my experience
as a reader is irrelevant it's what is the very best evidence tell
me that works for our kids for whom under
what conditions and how do we actually use that to help our kids improve in
their reading read charlotte is not a program
we i am part of the national campaign for grade level reading
one of 350 communities we focus birth through third grade
i don't run programs right we are a capacity building
intermediary we help our partners in the community organize and work together we
work from the smallest grassroots organizations to the the largest in our
community and we combine a deep knowledge of
reading both parts of the science of reading how kids learn to read
as well as how adults effectively teach in the read i would call the science of
reading acquisition and science reading instruction we combined that with deep
knowledge about evidence-based interventions and then we focus on
bridging the research to practice gap we're big fans of improvement science
implementation science we also serve as an outsourced program
officer for the funding community in charlotte north carolina
in some ways people refer to us as either harbor master quarterback
sometimes field general to get everybody moving in
the direction to improve early literacy when i came to charlotte from kansas
city seven years ago i had two big questions
what can i know that other people don't know and what
can i do that other people don't do because reading is actually the most
research area in academics and people have spent
millions of dollars think about reading first billions of
dollars and we didn't see reading outcomes improved so why do i think that
we can do something different so i was on a hunt to figure out what other
people haven't figured out i actually think we found something
that's not the that's not the topic you want to ask me i'll tell you um but i
will say to the point earlier that was raised around digital the most powerful
thing we found actually is digital to actually guide
the behavior of adults around meeting the needs of each kids but i'm not going
to talk about that today okay so why reading
reading especially by third grade is what
someone's referred to as a keystone outcome third grade is a critical pivot
between learning to read and reading to learn
it is one of the greatest predictors of how well kids will do in school
unfortunately we don't have a we have a lot of ideas about connection between
prison and other things actually there's very little hard data on that
i'm working right now with some researchers at unc chapel hill we got a
nice longitudinal data set uh
the duke endowment is helping to underwrite it hopefully in the spring
we'll actually have something that we'll publish and do in presentations later so
siobhan i've already talked to ralph about doing a presentation later for the
campaign but
reading really matters it makes a big impact and the problem is and i want to
take something that's often flat and i want to make it round so first of all
when i'm talking about children i'm talking about children from zero to
eight and so i want to segment that some of
the things that we talk about love of reading and all that i know that matters
when we're talking about a six-year-old the issue isn't i would argue as much do
they love to read can they read like they're you cannot skip over the
fundamental skills that kids need to learn learning to read is the most
important job of children in elementary school they don't teach themselves to
read guess who does it the adults in their lives so either we are helping
them or we are failing them and unfortunately we're failing too many
children one of my favorite sources of data is the national
assessment of educational progress the nate americas report card i looked it up
this morning 2019. i was telling british this over lunch i
could have inundated you with numbers but you wouldn't remember them all so
i'm just gonna gonna give you two statistics today
in 2019 52 of black fourth graders in the us had below basic reading skills
i'll say it again 52 percent of black fourth graders have below basic reading
skills this is in your communities only 18 percent one out of five were
proficient readers so all the thing that marianne talked about wonderful cannot
access it if i can't read if you want to guarantee
failure however you want to talk about it
make sure that child doesn't learn to read and i guarantee you a high
probability they will fail in life that's what we're doing
right so the question is as libraries is is this part of your mission or not
right um
there's more that i could say um we have two systems in our community
right and the reality is it has never been all about schools never been right
you've had parents making sure their kids can learn to read before they go to
school we've had private tutoring services they're not there out of the
goodness of their heart there is a business model they're making money
people need help parents are sending their kids the problem is it's
inequitable in the sense that some kids who need it don't have access right
um [Music]
impact of the pandemic i think british is going to talk more about this but
recent data from two weeks ago communities in schools in charlotte
had their staff assembled in seven elementary schools i think these are all
title one schools the teachers are reporting only 14 to 17
percent of children in the elementary schools all grade levels are on level
right now this impact the pandemic i looked at incoming kindergarten data
from fall of last year only one out of five kindergartners and title 1 schools
on level for reading that means they don't know their letters
no letter knows no letter id letter sound correspondence
all the other stuff flow right unless we organize ourselves like
we can predict with high probability where these kids are going to be in 10
years in 15 and 20 years right so the question is what role does the library
have right in helping our communities because our
schools are overwhelmed and they can't do by themselves
and particularly the families we're talking about the kids we're talking
about they don't have the resources so who's going to come in and stand in
the breach if not now when okay so here are my um
three evidence informed ideas these are in order of increasing complexity the
first one you're already doing i'm just bringing rigor to it
empower the adults in the lives of children that help them with their
reading outside of school by adults i mean parents caregivers mentors
uh 2015 study okay so we we've long known mother's education
is the most important predictor how kids will do did you know there was a 2015
study found there was one thing that caught specific thing college educated
mothers do for their children it makes all the difference anyone want to guess
what it is reading three times a week that's a
malleable variable malleable variable that's not limited to college education
educated parents who can help those parents do that you all can you're
already doing it we can bring rigor i got more stuff but i'm going to skip
over my time short google home literacy model
home literacy model is one of the most researched proven
ways that parents help their kids with reading
right unknown research largely unknown right
there's rigor this isn't nice to have like you guys have strong stuff you can
anchor what you're doing around how adults are proven to help their kids
okay number two
all right this is gonna get harder um
increase reading readiness at school entry i think pat's already doing that
i'm gonna learn some stuff from from their library
um here's the thing there are four big
things that we want to focus on this is just literacy i know there's a lot of
other domains before four things kids need little kids when they come to
school letter id can you name your upper and lower case letters do you know the
sounds they make can you write your name and do you have big vocabulary you do
those four things you're going to set them up it will never be this simple
again never
right this has to be within what you all can
help adults do and help your kids do all right last one this is harder
it's the hardest one get involved with literacy tutoring in
your community there is not enough and districts are not stepping up
there are in my community alone there are tens of thousands of children
struggling um three big areas
phonics reading fluid comprehension kids need all three
um big gaps in the community more schools
that need tutoring we need way more phonics tutoring and we need a lot more
of it to help more kids if there's any one entity that can help stand in the
breach it's libraries thank you
well he just about taken almost everything i was going to say
just kidding i think i'm going to sort of come full circle um i had a no boss i
have a deep public health background actually i've not been in this field um
so i'm a little bit where the where the doctor is and now i have a new new best
friend here but i want to bring this to ground a little bit and bring it back to
i think this has been a nice segue from the doctor and monroe um is to bring it
a little bit back and sort of connect the dots um because he gave you a lot of
stats and facts in the first thing first thing i need
you to know do not assume that every adult can read
do not assume that every parent and every caregiver
that's bringing that child in can read unfortunately today
54 of all adults in the united states
ages 16 to 74 essentially read below a third grade level
that is a hundred and thirty million adults in the united states
this is data this is evidence i'm not making this up
i just told you 54 of our population adults read below a sixth grade level
that has implications from the keynote we talked about right
it can be a privilege it can be a luxury well it's not for almost one in five
adults those parents and caregivers have to be able to read to those
children but when you see them it doesn't mean that they can right
and so it's a multi-generational problem and to monroe's point i'm just going to
say amen amen amen because you've been on the front lines from the very early
days through the civil rights movement through jim crow
we got another issue here we got another movement and another moment
and i've heard a lot about should you do this should you do that i wasn't here
yesterday but i heard enough as monroe said we need you to be not in the
community but also of the community to recognize that parent
that is low literate that is struggling with reading that is struggling to make
sure that their child is not in fourth grade is not below a third grade reading
level it is a plea
that those of us in literacy have for you as libraries
barbara bush our founder founded this organization six weeks
after she walked into the white house our former first lady
and she did it because she said literacy or reading is connected to everything
it's connected to improving our society it's connected to
better health outcomes it's connected to food security it's connected to housing
security it's connected to jobs you read below sixth grade level you can't read a
ballot you can't fill a job application you cannot read a medicine bottle you do
not understand protocols around diabetes and high blood
pressure right so how are you gonna help your child get on zoom which we've been
doing for two years we have a program uh early childhood
with two early childhood literacy programs one is called teen trendsetters
and the others books boards i'm not going to go too much into it but you can
look at it online we do an evaluation every year the program is 20 years old
this year wildly successful we get kids that are
two grade levels or below in reading and usually within seven to nine months get
them back up not only on grade level reading but some kids a year or two
above that after the program we can always do better the point here is this
year during kovid our evaluation came back and the
evaluation essentially said that black boys
were suffering the most even with this intensive tutoring this
evidence-based curriculum we would posit through our researcher
that it wasn't just what else is going on in the home this is going to bring me
back to the parent or the caregiver in a second what else was going on yes it was
covet lack of access to broadband you know
tablets et cetera et cetera you guys know this the digital literacy piece
that was a huge factor right so we have to take that into account but the parent
and the caregiver matters because you have to ask what is going on in the home
why are those black boys those brown kids below grade level reading because
we haven't looked at adult literacy when you have low literacy rates amongst
adults and parents and caregivers we're not truly fixing the problem it's a
multi-generational problem and that's why in our actual name it says family
literacy we would ask that as you go back into
your communities that you're very conscious not just of the child but of
the parent the parent and the child as monroe said it goes together we've been
doing a lot pouring a lot of money as a society and as a country
just into those kitty programs and we're forgetting about what's going on at home
that kid we also have data there was a study of boston uh boston university a
study in boston a boston tent a study in tennessee both of these were rtc studies
in the last couple of years there were decades-long studies
and they showed that the tennessee studies showed boston said oh it was
wildly successful and look where the kids are with early childhood
interventions the tennessee study showed something very interesting they followed
these kids all the way to sixth grade guess what happened right around fourth
grade they started black brown white didn't matter something started to
happen and you know what it was
we kept paying attention to the kid something was going on at home they were
food insecure they were housing insecure and so you sit as this hub in your
communities and we need you the second thing is we
have good data on library school
after school or some excuse me summer reading programs they're stellar
the outcomes of your summer reading programs are better than when a child
goes to camp or even better than when they participate oftentimes in school
district programming that's evidence-based that's a good
thing because you're starting to break that multi-generational cycle of poverty
of low income of not being full
parents workers and citizens in society so that's something we'd ask you to
reflect on and to think about
barbara bush you've already talked about the mothers being so important we know
that 88 of kids under six if their parents do
not have a ged or a high school diploma they're in low income or they live in
poverty so we have all this kind of social
determinants of health and sort of all these other factors
around the kid and we ask that you take those in do what you do somebody talked
about reading we're just asking you to help the
community to learn to read and don't forget about that parent don't forget
that it is a multi-generational issue and that's something we need to be
concerned about if we're concerned about society and democracy
and economic mobility reading is the through line
reading and literacy are the constraining factors that if we do not
fix we will still be in the same place and so that's for us that's the through
line we have actively we've always funded libraries we were grant making
for 27 years we're now more of a thought leader partner a little closer at the
national level to what monroe was doing but barbara bush
for 27 years gave libraries around this country grants
millions of dollars of grants in fact her very first grants were after the
election this is a great story after the election she they had money left over
the inaugural committee she went to her house when she took all the money and
she gave it to 5 000 libraries across gave five thousand dollars to about over
a hundred a thousand libraries in the united states with the leftover um
inaugural money so libraries are in our dna um and we've
been talking to tracy hall um at ala and we want to do more with you
and figure out the best way that doesn't take you off your mission
but recognizes the moment that we are in now
um and that you are critical to us turning around the low literacy
problem in america today that is reflected in one in five adults
but also in all of our children so we ask that the biggest call to
action is that you join us and know how serious the problem is and we can't do
it without libraries thank you
marianne wolfe start us off
thank you um i want to say this with absolute
sincerity that it is with the greatest gratitude that i listened to each member
of the panel as some of you know i think dr
um navisaria knows this from other talks my entire life has been devoted to the
themes which each of you have discussed
i worried that the talk that i gave you in
in in my words which was an apologia for reading
in this moment in which democracy in my opinion is being threatened
i believed that was my goal for this wonderful group
but my heart my whole life has been dedicated to the
themes which each of you expressed and therefore my gratitude is truly
overflowing to dr navisaria you know that i have
been in fact um something of an apologist for roar
for 20 years i've given several keynotes for you
but the reality is that you represent one of the most important and powerful
sources for the first area of the three areas i'm most concerned with and that's
the first area of zero to five what happened then
and reach out and read has played such an extraordinary role i cannot be more
grateful usually i have three slides dedicated totally to reach out and read
secondly to monroe richardson i could not agree with
you more about the need for evidence-based practice the second major
area of my work and that i want as a campaign for the nation
is to have early assessment early intervention based on evidence practice
half of my research is based on that and it is with pride that i hear about reed
charlotte doing this kind of work on the science of reading for all our teachers
and for your emphasis on tutoring i could not be in more in greater support
our appreciation and finally
i i have to say that i also could not agree more with the emphasis
um that uh british really gave to one of the areas of
inequity that has often gone under under underground
and it was brought to the fore by jeanne shaw one of the most prominent breeding
researchers days before she died she said the
educational system must try to understand and figure out
why the greatest failure in american education are fourth grade
african-american boys why is that happening looking at the
home looking at trauma looking at poverty
looking at equity but i also ask you british to understand that from another
viewpoint we are never and this goes back to uh dr richardson we never get
fluency by grade four for so many of our children therefore the first three
grades are essential for getting fluency because grade four is the drop out from
that point on we are losing so many of our children of color and even later nap
results are worse than what you said so we are we could not be in more if you
will uh on the same pages of your work and i
salute each of you i could not thank you more for giving the talk that i usually
give others and felt guilty of not giving i didn't need to the three of you
did better than what i could have done thank you so much
wonderful and we we have certainly felt all four of your calls to action so i
think we have some questions um the first one might be more of a research
realm but it asks how much of the tendency to
shallow reading of e materials is that most people do not know how to make
e-books their own by marking them up with highlighters or tab-like markers to
help you find your way back to important bits i don't know if any of you would
like to take that on
shallow tendency to shallow reading was how it was framed
well maybe i can start with with an observation and and this is not my my
own observation but is the work of um uh that was articulated well by um naomi
baron who marianne referenced in a number of her slides um
you know she talks about that there's something about the modality of of
ebooks and recognizing that there's not one way in which they're all programmed
but physical books right you turn pages
right this thing we call a codex this discrete turning of pages to sort of a
marker in your head when you move from page to page
you don't get that necessarily with ebooks
often there's sort of the infinite scroll kind of concept
and the argument was that it made it much harder for people to chunk or to
kind of have a natural break in certain ways to process that um and i think
there's other elements of that that that play into it i think for young children
there's other elements also that that are
key issues um most many e-readers are also
do other things right and there's all sorts of distractions notifications
there's bells and whistles that are programmed in there
which mind you are attractive to parents who think well
isn't this better than a static you know paper book which is far from the truth
they're actually distracters right
but parents get sold on this that this is
more educational let's remember by the way that the american public has no idea
that the word educational is not a protected term
i could i could take a fistful of grass and tell people this is educational and
sell it to them for 25 and they'll go oh great point you know um so i think we
need to recognize that that there's a number of different factors that that
play into this i don't know if my colleagues have other observations on
this
well i can say briefly there is in fact a whole group of researchers who are who
are doing work on what is called the shallowing hypothesis and it's very
similar to what doctor no sorry and and actually naomi barron and mangan and the
e-reed network are are all doing that kind of work and the point is the screen
even with notes has an evanescence tendency to hasten this on and not take
those notes and not know where we where we are spatially so there's an actual
spatial element to memory that the book reinforces but
most people do not know about the notation so it's a good thing that as we
move into the future we are thinking how can the medium address its own
weaknesses
excellent all right i think i'll ask one more
question and then if folks want to take to the mics we'll open it up to the
floor uh this question actually came up during
the last panel but i think it's relevant to yours
um what kind of literacy are we talking
about do we have a common definition um
literacy so let's start so first of all um the american libraries association
has an incredible a white paper um on literacy and the
definition of literacy um so i suggest because i don't have it in front of me i
can't read it to you and i don't want to watch it but it's a
beautiful definition of literacy but it really is from
you know sort of life from the beginning because you're supposed to really start
reading to your child literally in utero and when it's born um really to the end
of your life and if we're talking about lifelong learning that's the space that
we're talking about and again family for us is in our name that
doesn't have to mean you know parent child it
can mean whatever family means in 2022 so we'd ask you to take the broadest
definition as possible and if you go back to what i said earlier
not just the child not just the parent but both looking at the space that
you're in and how you can support that family unit through reading and let me
just add a corollary something i didn't mention it marianne you mentioned you
mentioned the word inequity um and i missed saying that
reading is about equity and and leveling the playing field more than
leveling the playing field if a child can read the parent can read it changes
your whole life we have this line that we say so that you can be a full worker
parent and citizen but if you can read write and comprehend you can live your
life with dignity whatever dignity means to you whatever
that progress is that might mean an aaa degree that might mean a phd it might
mean whatever that is but that's the piece that in some ways
marianne you were getting it it's this societal sort of compact if you will
it's a recognition of that humanity and that other person and we firmly believe
and our founder firmly believe that literacy as wide as we define that and
reading in particular is core to having and living a life with dignity and i tie
it back to equity because we're in this moment right we had george floyd we had
all these things we had this reckoning wherever you stand on the political
spectrum and we're all trying to figure out what does equity mean and inequity
and that sort of thing libraries are all about equity you've
been about equity since the beginning when blacks couldn't go to libraries in
the deep south and during jim crow and doing civil rights carnegie built black
libraries one of the first ones in atlanta because it was always about
equity i think we're in a moment just the way we were in the 60s when we
talked when monroe gives you all those stats and facts about black and brown
kids it's the black boys but it's also black and brown kids it's also poor
white kids in appalachia yeah
it is about poor white kids in appalachia it is not us versus them
which marian you talked about it's all of us and so we have to look at
equity and literacy is inextricably linked and therefore reading
and you have evidence you sit on a platform that is evidence-based over
hundreds of years that tell us that you are part of the solution as libraries
and as library systems
thank you yeah
i'm going to go to the mic on the far side of the room
well you know it's digital so i had to talk
i represent a very large library system 50 of our circulation is in a digital
form 7.8 million per year digital checkouts
and i think it's great we're having this conversation it's a great reset for us
because as i said yesterday digital was our savior to our public
saying what are you doing we pay your salaries what are you doing and digital
saved us i respect the pedagogy however you say that behind all this
and it's good for us to think about this however there are two things first of
all i really think we the economics is part of the problem if digital books
were less expensive libraries rural libraries this wouldn't
be a problem we wouldn't be having to
choose between print and digital it just would be it we would have both it would
be a good thing because digital does save a space it saves us rural counties
such as mine that has both it's you know it's it's for people that
can't get to libraries whatever but the other thing that i've learned
from these past two years hiring a dei director
working through the digi the diversity concerns of our county and
doing we're doing a really in-depth study
is we do nothing about us without us and my job now is to take the
information you have given me the science
and have it work with a community
and not prescribe it so in other words go to my communities
where reading is an issue that love of reading um where are you it was
wonderful
learning to to read how do you do that and not be prescriptive because
prescriptive doesn't work anymore prescriptive does not work anymore if
we're going to truly have diverse equitable and inclusive public library
systems so
that is my comment
okay all right we'll go to the mic in the center
i'm michelle martin the beverly cleary professor for children and youth
services in the information school at the university of washington yay beverly
cleary and i wanted to go back to one
thanks to imls for helping me and my research team work on
helping creating through project local and project voice
creating mechanisms for librarians to do more outreach
with a social justice lens with participatory design in communities
asking you know what do you need and then going from there so i'm grateful to
to imls for the work that we're able to do um at the university but i want to go
back to a comment that came up yesterday about that reading is a solitary act um
i also have a nonprofit called read-a-rama that for
12 years has been doing literacy immersion camps for kids that help them
learn how to as we say live books and it's all about using children's
literature as a springboard for all the other activities and one of the things
that i feel when we get to the point where kids are talking to each other
sharing books with each other and really helping to cultivate a culture of
reading among each other that is a level of success beyond the
adults sharing books with kids and we've also been able to pivot that to uh
online as of march 2020 and now we're piped into living rooms where we can
also encourage you know parents little brothers little sisters to participate
in that but i think that um yes reading can be a solitary act but i
think that there's a level of uh success with that sharing and
creating a community of readers that um that is beautiful because that goes
beyond what the teachers or the librarians or whoever are able to do and
it it has a life of its own so i just wanted to bring that up thank you thank
you
okay we'll go to
sorry where's the third one sorry these lights
are blinding because i think everybody up here can attest all right we're gonna
go to the other far side of the room mike hi my name is greg gilpin i'm a
professor of economics at montana state university
i study student achievement and the nexus of how public libraries
impact student achievement the last couple days there's been a lot
of information that has flowed but i just want to articulate
today of just how bad kovid has destroyed
student achievement and learning my wife's a first grade teacher so
i get to hear a lot she's at a title one school seven of 22 of her students went
to kindergarten last year 15 did not
75
okay and i'm we're in bozeman it's a pretty
higher income area and yet 15 didn't go
she has four that are at reading
level okay so
today what i want to articulate
is just how much our our house is on fire
i want to articulate that the whole ship is
is sinking and we need to do a lot more as
educators and as librarians to get it back
some of my research again is on the nexus of libraries and student
achievement i worked with bozeman to tie those records together
because i wanted to know how many books does it take to get rid of the summer
slide sometimes my kids come home they're like
oh i have to read 5 or 10 books or 20 books this summer and i was like surely
20 books can't make up for 100 days of learning
loss so my estimates you're looking into the hundreds of
books for a child
to not have a summer slide so i think we really need to shift how
we're viewing this like we need to understand how public libraries are
interacting with public schools especially
when public schools aren't in session
they're off for over 100 days during the summer
and where do they go what do they do and what are we doing what are we
facilitating what are we allowing access and what do we want them to do
so we did a read 100 program where the
the superintendent said you know what kids try to read 100 books this summer i
don't know if it matters if it's like number of minutes reading
number of books read i don't know i don't think that matters because i know
it's a really big number that we have to hit
um so i hope that like we we try to reach really high now because we're in a
big hole that we need to kind of somehow get out
of especially for the k through three right now
that have lost over two years of education
like they're going to be behind and it's scary to think about this generation of
just how far they've been they've fallen behind if you were like
me during the recession if you had to work remotely
i i i wasn't a teacher for my kids like i
had to do my job my wife had to be a teacher
really tough so that's what i wanted to say
okay we've got a few responses to that so um
part of what i didn't share earlier um over the last seven years like i've
looked under like every rock to try to find things
that people have missed and there's a researcher named carol connor who
in 2000 i'm so glad to see you shaking your head because not enough people know
carol who passed away two years ago too early tragically i got to meet her
before she passed away i've been watching her work since summer 2017 his
most phenomenal work singularly focus on how do we
effectively teach children read and what dr connor figured out is that there's an
interaction between children's reading vocabulary and comprehension skills and
four different types of reading instructions when i heard the last two
comments like i'm plugging you into what dr connor taught us so there's reading
instruction it teaches kids code focus skills everything from phonemic
awareness through phonics and fluency and then there's reading instruction
that teaches kids what are called meaning focus skills vocabulary
comprehension writing there's two modalities to deliver it
there's adult managed and child managed manage means who's guiding the learner's
attention and child manage can be individual peer work
so when you're talking about the kids together i'm thinking oh that's a child
managed meaning focus activity but also greg when i'm listening i'm thinking the
expansion and what we're seeing in charlotte because we're using what dr
connor created this is what i didn't tell you all before
look up a to i stands for assessment to instruction the company is called
learning ovations ovation like standing up right it's the best this is the worst
kept secret in reading research ies has put millions
of dollars into it the director told me in december 2020 is the best example
research to practice happy to share through crosby
what we've been doing but um what i hear greg is there's and
i've seen it from data in charlotte because we're using this expansion of
kids that need a lot of code focus if you're behind you need a lot of adult
code focused right
the stuff that you do around reading individual reading that's meaning focus
but there's an interaction between the four types and and kids reading skills
so the big challenge and this is what tutoring has to solve how do we get
enough to the right kids in the right ways at the right time how do we make
shifts over time as kids progress
that's the big challenge for us in our community and so the challenge of giving
bits and pieces you're doing some some parts the meaning focus but if we're not
getting them the code focus and we're not doing the adult instruction the
adult part there are no shortcuts to the adult manage there is something about i
don't understand what it is i trust dr connor's research seven randomized
control trials it works right i've seen the data
but that's the big challenge how do we get enough to enough kids they need all
of those so the rigor the work you do around helping adults reading with kids
dialogic reading we call it active reading in charlotte we build out a
program partnered with charlotte meckenberg library starting 2017 that's
covering a piece of it but we also need the code focused parts and our kids
we're on fire because they need a lot more of it
and they're really behind and so that's going to be the challenge for us if it's
not you can you partner with someone that can help with the code focus part
where you do this you've always been doing the meaning focus part really well
either adult or child managed but they need both and they need to work together
that's our big challenge in front of us
i'd like to if you will reinforce can you hear me i
don't know go for it go for it can i reinforce exactly what you said not only
do i do we all appreciate carol's work and think it's been under
underrepresented but many of us from a slightly different perspective are
finding the exact same thing but i want to emphasize for you based on this
research we have found in nichd randomized controlled trial studies that
if you do early assessment now when we talk about screening we're not talking
about over diagnosing over identifying anything we're talking about identifying
just as you're saying monroe identifying areas of strength and weakness based on
that either tier one or tier instruction gives
the appropriate emphases to the particular students only then if that
doesn't work do we do intensive diagnostic work and give intensive tier
3 intervention but the point is we have found without a doubt that early school
if you will early assessment leads to targeted early intervention in
which all those things are integrated and then
some of them are more emphasized for individuals so this is a new study we're
doing for the office of special education i can't support more what you
said
i thank you um these are wonderful and
i'd like to say that while we're looking at the house on fire and calling the
fire department we should also be looking and saying
and is there someone standing there with the
gas can that we also need to kind of you know take care of
because when well because when i had to
just to make sure they sleep with the fishes yeah no um
that uh i
i grew up in new york what can i say um you know
so because here's the thing when you say
that so many of these kids didn't go to kindergarten
and all the the effects that have knocked on from that
i'm saying here going okay what else is going on besides their lack
of reading achievement their lack of educational progress etc how many of
those parents lost their jobs how many of those parents are possibly
not even alive we know that thousands upon thousands of children have lost
their parents in this pandemic how many have themselves or in their
families um diagnosed or undiagnosed or
under-treated anxiety depression etc um loss of homes you know you name it right
and i want to be really clear about this i
am not at all suggesting that libraries need to go and fix all that
when because one thing i've been wanting to get up and say this entire time and i
figured whatever now i'm up here i can say this is that
i think there's a point where libraries need to say
we are not the right people for this we can connect people with those right
services but if other people would just do their jobs
we wouldn't need to be the the budget social worker right whatever
so there
so that and that's the part where i say and
someone needs to also be asking and why aren't we also putting in smoke
detectors etc so that that fire doesn't start in the first place right so this
is the public health model right tertiary primary secondary prevention
you know etc that i think i would say yes to
everything you said and
we need to be asking and what else is going on because many of you are
probably familiar with maslow's hierarchy of needs etc
you're not worried about your educational progress if you're wondering
what's going to hap when i get home from school today
is is mom going to be a mess is dad going to be drinking is is is because
then we're dropping back into survival and who cares whether you can identify
the letters at that point right from that kid's perspective
right i know we have a question on the side this might be our last question
we've got about four minutes left four minutes great hi team i'm john i'm with
every library the every library institute we do politics for libraries
and policy for libraries i have a question for a funders and systems
perspective what
do libraries need to do in order to talk to the funding community properly
about their current alignments or how do we need to realign
in order to be more attractive to the funding community and a stub on that is
where do you uh expect to see us in systems conversations where we're not
showing up can i i'll start with that i want to
answer your question i kind of want to go back to i'm going to call you mr las
vegas las vegas um mr vegas
what happens in vegas stays in vegas no um
that creativity that marketing that branding around libraries and their
value add or their return on investment is number one i think big funders we
just had a one of the things we conceived of and convened is a national
action plan it's a five-year plan to reduce low literacy in america today and
we've brought in uh academic institutions governors associations
mayors our peer sort of groups in the field
and one of the things we're looking at is the ecosystem at the table
the american library's association association was at the table in essence
representing all of you because we believe you are core to the ecosystem in
fact we spent two hours on fundraising and one of the the number one issues was
mr vegas here was the marketing you've got to be in
public health um i used to say you've got to meet people where they are but
what does that mean where they live play pray and work i'm going to say it again
where they'd live play pray and work and that's what he told us about this
morning everywhere in the bar in the church
everywhere and what's getting funded to the tune of tens of millions of
dollars how do we steal from the arts community um the the current director
from ala right is that is in the from the arts community and that's the model
that i think we have to look at you are part of the ecosystem number one so lean
into that and number two it's a it's a marketing issue um to to stay relevant
be relevant but that you have a return on investment that i don't believe some
funders truly understand and recognize and that's actually why bring it back to
us why you're a part of this national effort uh to reduce low literacy in
america we don't think we can do it without you so marketing marketing
marketing there's a huge part of it not the only
part but i just want to raise that so we don't forget it
monroe i know you have something to say i can feel it
well i mean part of my job is working with the
funding community in charlotte so we're sort of a quarterback and um
part of what i do is put together high quality philanthropic deal flow and then
bring co-investors together and we've done that for seven years
at the end of the day there's i mean it's the value proposition i always say
as a long-time funder myself i'm trying to buy impact right right so how do you
position and market so that they can buy impact because that's what they have to
do that's what they're looking for they don't do it themselves they fund and so
understanding um you know that intersection between
your mission values priorities and the impact you can offer and
like your ability and i'll just say as a former funder i remember one of the best
grants we made was i made was to the missouri um
was it uh college advising corps it took two years for me to finally get it
right and i think part of it was i just didn't
position it in a way that i could understand it i'm busy
as a funder i used to say i was i'm professionally in the business of saying
no right and so
um i actually had a venture capitalist help me um when i was um doing a pitch
in silicon valley for a tech company i was a co-founder of he said your job is
not to get them to say yes your job is to remove the reasons for them to say no
and so if the if the impulse immediately say no it's how do i peel that onion so
i can get to a conversation so um at the end of the day it's about
they're trying to buy impact and you're recording this um
don't assume they know as much as you think they know
all right good point enough all right
i think we might have to wrap it up but let's thank our wonderful
panelists
so i'd like to i'd like to start off to tell you a
story that a young man boy probably just coming out of third grade
returns home to school from school to his parents
and he throws his not very good report card
down in front of them and he says okay what is it
environment or heredity
so we
i hate to explain a really good joke but you know we
we we've inherited a lot of problems as as librarians and and i'll talk in in
one minute just a little bit more about the state of our world that we we have
inherited and our environment in the library and the pandemic environment is
of course incredibly difficult but
we need to grade ourselves on what we do about it not not
what we can complain about and and what's going on in the world that limits
us it does limit us but within those limits there's much that we can do and i
think we heard a lot about that particularly i think
uh in our last panel the the second the second thing i i want
to say is that uh
the the proposition before you about our
resources and how we use them and how we focus them is not an attack on the
digital world didn't i didn't get tim to come here to do that and i don't think
he intended to do that the digital world is a part of our world we're engaged in
it i understand everything that lisa was saying um maybe a little bit more
difficult on the pricing side but um but
uh and and i've been very engaged as many
of you know uh as the chair of shelby uh after after jenny my my uh my mentor and
all these things after jenny staff uh school's healthcare libraries and
broadband the major advocacy organization working with angela c for
who angela are you still here um
uh there she is you know who uh who is the the engine of the internet i believe
uh now and and so i think you all know that i
care about the digital divide i think it's very important i also believe that
digital information is a huge boon it's mentioned a couple of times the
information flow and flood is a huge boon to us if we use it well you boone
to the library world and and boone to all citizens
um so i i make that that point and i also want to make the point though i
felt roosevelt's pain i felt roosevelt's roosevelt's still
here um i felt his pain you know he when we
were talking about the many things we're asked to do
um and uh we are being asked to do things
during the pandemic incredible things natural disasters incredible things and
in the kansas city public library when i was director we did all kinds of things
we were the center of the home uh homeless coalition um you know we we
made eviction a a major issue in in the in the city we did all kinds of
programming i'm very proud of our our programming and and it connected us
to the community in a way that led to when we're talking about funding led to
the community voting 84 for our tax increase so it also was pretty pragmatic
so i want i want you to understand i come
with that background and understanding and what i'm about to say and what i
think we heard uh yesterday and today the state of our world is
tough for everybody because of the pandemic
bob putnam and shaylynn romney garrett explained to us in the iwei framework
not only the polarization that we have but the huge economic divides racial
divides the divides in our community are as high
as they've ever been and it is not our job to solve every
problem we don't solve the economic problem we can work certainly on the on
the racial problem but one thing we can do
uh from an equity point of view uh is is work on reading i mean i i do
think if there is a takeaway from this and if i have one thing that i wanted to
share with you that i i wanted to share with you through our our panelists and
our speakers is that there is really something
important that we can do about equity in this world
the bite administration is very focused on this i come from a completely
different political background than president uh biden but i share that
with him and i think it's a library world value
that we can do something about equity if we can do something about it we should
do something about it and i think we heard today i think from this panel and
from mary ann we heard exactly what we can do about it it's not the same thing
in every library because there are hundreds of different activities we
heard about maybe a dozen or or two dozen today from uh from panelists from
uh folks from the floor and from marianne and one of the one of the jobs
of the imls should be to put all this together
um and to talk about best practices is what we should be doing we haven't done
enough of it this is an inspiration for us to do more of that with your help
well you know i talked to pat lucinski uh after and he's talking about a
program that uh that he's doing with 200 volunteers uh uh in in the coming summer
uh uh doing doing reading programs one of the great things about the a2i
program that monroe talked about is that it can be done with volunteers and where
is the best place in america to generate volunteers it's the library
we have connections to so many groups the trust in libraries is so high the
third grade reading project is frequent is significantly based on volunteers
and is significantly based in libraries we can do this we can work on this we're
not going to solve every problem in the world we will not wake up in edward
bellamy's paradise um we
we can however in our communities do more and we heard from previous
panelists from from carmen and diane and felton about things that they can do in
their community different size communities that are transformative that
are extraordinary but if we if we decide that there's an
issue we should focus on and i think
i think this is the issue i think reading is the issue
it is after all the traditional thing that libraries do
we are good at talking about the joy of reading that was mentioned today
we are very good about doing that we are good about curating books for kids of
all ages of all kinds of all backgrounds we're doing we're doing a better job let
me put it to you that way than we than we have uh done in the past for certain
kids and we can do a really good job for all
kids so i think
if if if we have a call to action it is about that
i want to say that there is research out there that shows
uh and and bob putnam talks about this in more than one book um there's a man
named peter sharkey at nyu talks about this in our own reinvestment fund
research mike norton i think is here who helped
us do that that research
shows shows this simple fact and it's a simple fact and it needs to be
delineated in much more detail and there are a lot of people working on it uh
there's a group uh represented here by nate hill who's working on uh something
called a new york digital equity uh project um
plan i'm not gonna get that exactly right
portal sorry portal portal um and and the point of of this research
is that we know that the cultural
institutions and the neighborhood institutions the network and connection
you heard that those words from bob putnam
which is you know his his research over the years and so much
other research says that the more connections we've got in the community
the better the community will function in all ways all these ways about equity
and we know that we know that a key to that is the library particularly the
neighborhood branch library we know that the the neighborhoods that raj chetty
studies where
neighborhoods with almost identical demographics some
neighborhoods perform better than others and the one thing we know about that for
sure is that there are cultural and neighborhood institutions that are
functioning in those communities you are functioning
in those in those communities and
uh you know we heard about so many different things that that we can do but
i will just say this i'll end as i like to uh with alexis de
tocqueville the uniquely american thing is at the
neighborhood level at the local level what he used to call the township level
that we can associate to to deal with problems well that's really what
libraries do there weren't there weren't any public libraries or very very few
real public libraries in the 1830s when tocqueville was writing this i think if
he saw what you are and what you do today he
would say that's the continuation of the unique
american thing that
if we've been talking about the soul of the library that's the soul of the
library and i think we can do this work we can expand this work
and it's the real equity work of this country and so i charge you to go out
and do it and thank you very much for being here