Flashback 1992: Dated books tell tale of schools' fiscal woes

From "The World is Round," by  Rose Wyler (Grosset & Dunlap: 1937)

 

    You need to keep your eyes open in this job. Because one story leads to another. When I reposted the 1988 investigation into the bad shape many students were in when they presented themselves to kindergarten at Chicago Public Schools, another memory stirred. Don Hayner and I had to go around to schools and collect — or drop off, I don't recall — questionnaires. Sometimes we had to wait, and we'd do our waiting in the school libraries. Naturally, I browsed the books, in those pre-Internet years. And perhaps unsurprisingly, was aghast at just how out-of-date and shabby they were. Four years later, I dropped this. This isn't a column — I wouldn't get one for almost another four years. What surprises me, reading it now, is how I downplayed the rather significant news — that schools were holding onto outdated books and loaning books to each other to fool federal regulators, and that companies were reluctant to deal with CPS because they were so slow to pay. To me, that wasn't as interesting as the musty information being forced on children. Say what you will about the Internet, at least the reading isn't generally 20 or 30 years out-of-date.

     Of course, this story could not be written today because there wouldn't be librarians to talk to. Over the past three decades, investment in libraries at CPS has cratered, and only about 15 percent of Chicago's public schools employ a librarian. Though now that I think of it, talking to the remnant might yield interesting results. One story leads to another.

"Meanwhile the savages — or Indians, as Columbus miscalled them — were gathering rapidly in the protective jungle; a thousand or more . . . the savages chattered like sea-fowl, offering to barter their cotton for any trinkets, however cheap; but the admiral would accept only gold."
      — From The Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Armstrong Sperry (1950)

     You can actually see the high-water mark of Chicago education: the line where a surge of money and students pushed schools to their zenith, flushing them with resources and promise, before breaking and rolling back.
     Just step into any public school's library and look at the books.
     The collections are filled with volumes bought during those heady times: science books stockpiled in the post-Sputnik rush to embrace technology; sports books purchased with plentiful federal dollars in the 1960s.
     They are old now, worn and out-of-date. Those that deal with any sort of technical subject are woefully behind the times.
     "If you live in a large city, you have probably seen big buildings with computers in them," speculates a 1972 volume on the shelves of one elementary school.
     Those that deal with history, like the Columbus volume, often view it through an outmoded lens, blurry with bias: "The largest number of today's newcomers has been the blacks," muses Chicago and Its People, a 1972 volume that lumps together blacks, Appalachians and Latin American immigrants.
     Yet schools are forced to keep antiquated books on the shelves because there is no money to buy new ones.
     "If you start pulling all those (outdated) books off the shelf, you are not going to have anything," said Ann Tanner, a librarian at Lane Technical High School, 2501 W. Addison.
     "I'd love to get more books," said Caroline Whalen, librarian at Louisa May Alcott Elementary School, 2526 N. Orchard. She estimates she would need double her budget to replace books such as Baseball's Greatest Pitchers, whose "Heroes of Today" section lauds Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson and Denny McLain.
     "Kids love new books," said librarian Glenish W. Gillespie, of Michele Clark Middle School, 5101 W. Harrison. "Some of them won't look at an old book unless they are highly motivated."
     But at Michele Clark, the biography of Henry Aaron stops with the slugger hitting his 504th home run. A book titled Desert War refers not to the one in the Persian Gulf, but the one in North Africa against Rommel. The two copies of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm looked unused.
     It is no different at other schools. The volumes of the Best Plays series on the shelves at Amundsen High School, 5110 N. Damen, begin in 1899 and end, abruptly, in 1961.
     A look on the sports shelves at one school is a step into not only another era but another city: It's Good to be Alive, by Roy Campanella, Koufax, by Sandy Koufax, and a history of Walt Alston and his Dodgers crowd one shelf.
     Five different books about space can be pulled off the shelves at Lane Tech without finding one recent enough to include any of the Apollo moon landings.

   "But to go to the moon with a manned ship is something that cannot be done unless we have the space station first." 

     — From Rockets, Satellites and Space Flight, edited by Willy Ley (1958).

     Despite the problems they cause — librarians must routinely steer students toward newer reference books and caution them to always check copyright dates — outdated books are a valuable commodity.
     To keep certification, vital for its students applying to colleges, a school library needs a certain number of books per student.
     After Kelvyn Park High School "got rid of the junk" in its collection several years ago, the librarian had no new books to replace them. She found herself forced to put in a desperate call to nearby schools, begging them to quickly send over any obsolete books in storage to line Kelvyn's shelves before a certification inspection.
      Kelvyn got the books.
     The reason Kelvyn weeded out its surplus had less to do with keeping an up-to-date collection than with another common library problem.
     "Our library is totally inadequate in terms of space," said Patricia Hanlon, Kelvyn librarian. "It's so crowded that, every time we get a new book, we have to decide what we are going to throw out."
     At least one librarian keeps old books because they have a certain weight — literally. At one end of the Michele Clark library, scores of identical copies of beat-up textbooks are used to weigh down the freestanding metal shelves, which the librarian fears might otherwise topple over.

   "The company did not employ negroes in the factory. But they were hired to clean the streets, to work around the mill yard, and for other menial tasks." 

     — From The Way Our People Lived: An Intimate American History, by W. E. Woodward (1945)

     This isn't to say old books are necessarily bad. Librarians point out that most classic fiction does not go out of date, and some older biographies are superior to their newer counterparts.
     "Sometimes they're very good," said Frances Szymanski, librarian at Amundsen. "I have found many of the newer books are not well-written but are geared for a lower-level of reading. When you want an in-depth study of a person, what you want is an older book."
     Szymanski proudly points to recent additions — a beautiful 16-volume Spanish atlas, Gran Atlas Salvat; the Reference Library of Black America; the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. But they are not enough.
     "I would greatly increase the number of duplicates in fiction," she said, when asked how she would improve her library if given more funds.
     If anything, the problem will get worse before it gets better. The book budget is often the first thing to get axed — most high schools had their library budgets cut by a third this year.
     "Don't be taken in," said Tanner, gesturing around the three-story library at Lane Tech, with its wood carvings and murals of Native Americans. "Yes, it is a lovely room, very beautifully appointed. But for a school this size, the library is woefully small."
     Tanner said her library has so many pressing needs that new books aren't even the same priority as, for instance, improved security.
     "Maybe my focus isn't on new books because so many of our good books walk that it gets depressing," said Tanner.
     Even when schools have the appropriations to buy new books, they often are held up because of the school system's budgetary procedures, she said.
     "Companies do not want the business of the Chicago public schools because payment is so slow," said Tanner, adding that companies hold books back every year because of board debts. "I call them and they say, `Yes, Mrs. Tanner, we've got your order, but we're waiting for the board to pay its bills.' "
     Sometimes just finding time to order books is a challenge.
     "School librarians have virtually no time to prepare book orders," said Hanlon.
     And Szymanski added: "We would like to remove, perhaps, more old books, if we had the staff and if we had replacements. But we're just not getting the kinds of funds we need. So we just keep taping them."
        — Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 29, 1992