The Role of School Libraries in Closing the Racial Achievement Gap

From The Marshall Memo #425

“School librarians are natural partners in the effort to improve the education, social, and employment outcomes of black males,” say North Carolina library/media experts Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Casey Rawson, Lisa McCracken, Mary Gray Leonard, Heather Cunningham, Katy Vance, and Jennifer Boone in this Kappan article. The key is connecting students with meaningful texts that relate to their lives. Alfred Tatum of the University of Chicago coined the term enabling texts, which have the following characteristics:

• They promote a healthy psyche;
• They reflect an awareness of the real world;
• They focus on the collective struggle of African Americans;
• They serve as a road map for being, doing, thinking, and acting.

Some examples: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845, 2005), Sit In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney (2010), and We Could be Brothers by Derrick Barnes (2010) (see the link below for a full list). It’s crucial that students have the chance to talk about enabling texts with teachers, librarians, and other adults.

Here are strategies for getting the right books into the hands of black male students. More information on Durham’s gap-closing initiative: http://rftldurhamcounty.pbworks.com. 

• Strategy #1: Collect, display, and recommend. Librarians should scrutinize the books on their shelves, maximize enabling texts, and eliminate disabling texts – books that reinforce stereotypes of black males as hoopsters, fatherless sons, and gang recruits. Of course it’s not enough to have lots of enabling texts – they need to be recommended to black male students and followed up with discussion and reflection. 

• Strategy #2: Let kids select. Librarians in Durham gave black male students a role in selecting and ordering books, and put the books in students’ hands the moment they arrive. 

• Strategy #3: Mediate enabling texts. Durham librarians recruited groups of students to read and discuss enabling texts, and they eagerly made connections to their lives, identified concepts, themes, and issues from multiple perspectives, and talked about issues and concepts in school and society. Tatum’s theory was confirmed: enabling texts provided a forum for young black males to define themselves, become resilient, engage others, and build capacity. Students reported that the “guys-only focus” was helpful.

• Strategy #4: Students carry the discussion. Librarians helped students organize weekly book clubs, teaching them how to select books, establish ground rules, and lead discussions. 

• Strategy #5: Connect with the community. Durham’s school librarians reached out to public libraries in students’ communities and were surprised to find that many students didn’t have library cards and were unaware of important civil rights events in North Carolina. They campaigned for students to fill these gaps, and also reached out to parents, businesses, and universities. 

• Strategy #6: Provide professional development. Teachers can benefit from workshops on creating culturally responsive classrooms in which students are constantly engaging with enabling texts.

“Librarians Form a Bridge of Books to Advance Literacy” by Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Casey Rawson, Lisa McCracken, Mary Gray Leonard, Heather Cunningham, Katy Vance, and Jennifer Boone in Phi Delta Kappan, February 2012 (Vol. 93, #5, p. 17-22), 

http://www.kappanmagazine.org/content/93/5/17.full ; Hughes-Hassell can be reached at smhughes@email.unc.edu.