Libraries Turn the Page for Literacy

As she has thousands of times before, Marjory Hopper held up an open book and swiveled it around so that all the tiny, curiosity-filled eyes in the room could focus on the colorful illustrations.

“Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,” read Hopper, enunciating and gesticulating in her Mother Goose outfit.

Her audiences at the city’s John C. Fremont Library--sometimes rapt, sometimes distracted 1- and 2-year-olds--may be younger than ever these days, but Hopper, a children’s librarian for more than 30 years, says that her profession’s mission remains the same: inculcating in them a love of books and reading.

As parents, teachers and policymakers across the state have become increasingly concerned about improving children’s reading skills, the role of community libraries has become more important than ever, experts say. Not only are public libraries supplementing what students learn at school--including compensating for the inadequacies of campus libraries--they are also becoming places that foster children’s earliest literacy development.

Across Los Angeles County, neighborhood libraries offer a variety of reading programs for children of all ages. In addition to summer book clubs, they present year-round “story times” with formats similar to Hopper’s, in which librarians or volunteers use animated voices and exaggerated motions--sometimes with a repertoire of hand puppets and other props--to bring alive the written word for little eyes and ears.

Some libraries have broadened their programs, offering after-school tutoring to school-age children. Over the last year, libraries have also been reaching out to parents and caretakers, recognizing that they also play a critical role in developing children’s reading habits.

A program that began late last year, “Read to Me L.A.,” trains volunteers who in turn train groups of parents or caretakers how to read to small children.

From Parent to Child

At the Sun Valley branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, Manuel Gonzalez sat amid a handful of other parents, watching a video and then listening to Read to Me L.A. volunteers give a presentation on how to read to their preschoolers.

It’s not hard to do, said volunteer Rose Hayes. Children “just need time and attention,” she said. Parents should choose a colorful book with a simple story line, sit next to kids and encourage participation.

Volunteer Teri Johnson demonstrated by reading from an animal book and inviting her audience to provide sound effects. “Meow! Quack! Moo!” chanted the adults and children in the audience.

Gonzalez listened through an interpreter. “The person who knows how to read knows everything,” said the unemployed mechanic in Spanish after the presentation, his arm around his 4-year-old son, Sandro. Gonzalez doesn’t speak English but can read it. “I want to read to my son to give him opportunities,” he said.

Not only can reading together strengthen the bond between parent and child, it can also improve listening and verbal skills, even if the child is an infant, said Anne Connor, manager of children’s services for the city library system. “They’re exposed to the richness of vocabulary and words. The rhythm and pattern of the voice also helps in their brain development.”

Research also suggests that early exposure to books can improve a child’s readiness for school.

A study by Susan Neuman, associate professor of reading and language arts at Temple University in Philadelphia, showed that preschoolers who participated in a special program that gave them access to lots of books and encouraged caretakers to read to them performed significantly better in several tests of literacy than a control group of children who did not participate in the reading program.

“The results of the project were really spectacular,” said Neuman, whose study will be published this summer in Reading Research Quarterly, a leading journal in the field of literacy. The children who participated in the reading program were better at recognizing symbols, listening comprehension, knowing the alphabet and conceptualizing words, she found. Even after those children began formal schooling, they continued to show stronger literacy skills. “There was a positive spiraling effect,” Neuman said.

Around the nation, an increasing number of library reading programs are targeting toddlers and even infants.

“What librarians are finding is that it’s almost an insatiable market,” said Christine Lind Hage, president of the Public Library Assn. “Part of this is the whole interest in early childhood development. People are very interested in prepping their kids for success.”

Hopper, the children’s librarian at the Fremont branch library in Hollywood, has seen this happen. “When I first started, the emphasis was more on school-age children and not so much on toddlers and preschoolers,” she said. She now finds in her audience infants still sucking on bottles or clutching blankets.

In the children’s section of her library, there are also more “board books”--with thick pages easy for small fingers to turn--than ever before. Five years ago, her library had only a few board books, she said. Now there are a few hundred.

Children generally have access to a wide variety of books in two places: at school or at their neighborhood library. Unfortunately for California’s children, both their community and public school libraries have been among the worst in the nation, experts said.

The passage of Proposition 13 in the late 1970s resulted in reduced funding for public schools, said Robert Calfee, dean of the School of Education at UC Riverside. Through most of the last 20 years, policymakers neglected school libraries, said Jeff McQuillan, assistant professor of education at Cal State Fullerton.

In McQuillan’s 1998 book, “The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions,” he called California “a print wasteland.” His analysis showed that the state’s public schools had the worst librarian-to-pupil ratio in the country, ranked 49th out of the 50 states in its books-to-pupil ratio and 45th in per-pupil library spending.

According to the state Department of Education, the average copyright date of books in California school libraries is 1973. Some school libraries are open only a few hours a week.

Though California recently injected $158.5 million into its school libraries for purchasing books, it’s not enough to reverse many years of decline, said Barbara Jeffus, school library consultant for the state Department of Education.

California’s community public libraries also lag far behind those of most other states in funding, books per resident and hours of operation, McQuillan said. But most neighborhood libraries still offer more to children than school libraries because of their longer hours, better selection of books and enrichment programs.

Education experts advocate more funding for public libraries, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods, calling it one of the best investments government can make.

Public libraries “have become increasingly important for communities,” Calfee said. “We are raising a generation of kids and parents . . . who are losing touch with our literary heritage. Public libraries have kept it going.”

Encouraging Results

Like some of his colleagues around the county, Patrick M. Dwight, a third-grade teacher at Woodcrest Elementary School in the unincorporated Athens area near Inglewood, has been taking his class to the nearby public library on a regular basis because its book collection is better than the school’s. In the 2 1/2 years he has been making the field trips, he has noticed improved performance among his students. “Their vocabulary goes up. Their word recognition goes up. They become better readers,” he said.

Dwight and others believe that visiting libraries is “one piece of the puzzle” in improving children’s reading scores; library books give children the best opportunity to practice what they learn in the classroom.

Research suggests that public libraries play a critical role in how well children read. “Communities that have strong library systems tend to have higher reading scores, even when you control for socioeconomic factors” such as family income, McQuillan said.

For the last several years, California’s children have ranked among the worst in the nation in reading scores. McQuillan wrote in his book: “While the state’s policymakers have decided to focus their reform efforts on reading methodology . . . there is good reason to believe that California’s woes can be better traced to the abysmal state of its school and public libraries.”

Havens for Learning

Some public libraries in the Los Angeles area, including some in the city system, the county system and the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System, which supports 30 libraries in a number of cities, have begun after-school tutoring programs.

The Homework Center at Woodcrest Library in Athens attracts about 20 elementary-school or junior-high students a day. Jessie Stringfellow, a seventh-grader, has participated for about a year. “I like to come here because I can study and do my work,” he said, looking up from a dictionary he was consulting for a vocabulary exercise. His family doesn’t own any dictionaries, he said.

Genese Murray, a UCLA freshman who has tutored at the library for two years, said Jessie’s grades and reading skills have improved since he started coming to the Homework Center.

A year ago, Jessie knew “harder words” but for some reason had trouble with “little words” such as “of” and “if,” Murray said. “He either missed learning them or didn’t acknowledge them.”

“He’s a really bright kid” who just needed extra help, Murray said. After tutors worked with him, he began to master those little words that used to trip up his reading.

Third-grader Delshawn Norvell has been coming to the Homework Center for only a month, but his guardian, Edna Cohill, already sees improvement. “He can read better. He’s doing his math better,” she said.

The center’s shelves are full of dictionaries, encyclopedias and books on science, grammar, geography and history--in short, reference materials that children like Jessie and Delshawn need to do their schoolwork.

Community libraries and school libraries have had overlapping roles in developing children’s reading skills. But some experts say they feel troubled by the increasing role played by public libraries in education basics.

“Public libraries have been forced to fill our vacuum,” said Jeffus, the school library consultant for the state Department of Education. “Schools need to accept greater responsibility. They can’t rely on the public library in doing what they should be doing.”