For example, where we once built public buildings (stores, churches, schools, courthouses) in monumental ways and with fine materials, we now cut corners. We place what should be important buildings in poor locations. We put a school in a field at the edge of town. We put a courthouse in a rundown neighborhood. There is an uproar if anyone tries to do more than the basics when designing or building anything with tax money.

I was again reminded of this when I read this article in the NY Times about the precipitous decline in school libraries.

In the “old days” every school had a library and librarian. The library was a central part of the school experience. It was well used, funded and maintained.

Then over time, things began to change. First we started getting behind on updating the library collection. This is brought up twice in the Times article:

• A “library, whose books were so outdated that some still referred to the Soviet Union without reporting its demise.”
• “[T]he principal of one of the six high schools that share the building said the books there were too outdated to be usable.”

When a collection is not appropriate for use, it’s not surprising that fewer people use it.

Then we started sharing libraries between schools, eliminating the ability for many kids to simply stop by the library during their school day. It now required a special school trip — maybe even in a bus — to go to the “school’s” library. Not surprisingly this further marginalized library use.

And now finally, we’ve simply stopped hiring, and have moved on to firing, librarians. While many folks seem to feel that Google can somehow replace a librarian, this is obviously not really the case. Curators and experts are needed no matter what situation we are in.

Basically, we’ve said that these things, school libraries, which were apparently mandatory and expected in the first part of the 20th century are now way too expensive. And because they are too expensive, we first marginalize them and then eliminate them.

And the subtext here, of course, is the incredible hole we’ve dug for ourselves in education overall.

As the President mentioned in his Twitter Town Hall yesterday: “For us now to give short shrift to education when the world is more complex than ever, and it’s a knowledge-based society and companies locate based on whether they’ve got skilled workforces or not, that makes no sense.”

Again, back to my main point: How could we afford this stuff in the past? Why can’t we now? Where is all the money going instead?

There’s one thing that has always mystified me, though: Why isn’t there some free, public, alternative to AR?

Considering what it is, AR is absurdly expensive. Even the smallest school can easily spend thousands of dollars a year on it. Schools can buy quizzes for individual books, perhaps to match their existing library collection, or they can buy big blocks of tests, categorized in a variety of ways. There’s also an online version of AR called Renaissance Place where a school can get access to all or some of the tests for an annual subscription fee.

Despite the claims on the Renaissance Learning website, there’s absolutely nothing special (or frankly interesting) about AR. Basically Renaissance Learning categorizes books by reading level and then they develop very simple, short 5- to 20-question computer-based quizzes about those books. That’s it. The only thing Renaissance Learning seems to have going for them is that they have created a lot of tests. They claim to have over 125,000.

There are some alternatives out there, but they all seem to be proprietary. For example, Sylvan Learning’s Book Adventure. It’s basically the same concept as AR, and it’s available free over the web, but it only has tests for 6,000 books. And because Sylvan Learning is a huge electronic testing and tutoring company, there’s a feeling that Book Adventure is simply there to maintain a minimally competitive position with Renaissance Learning in this space.

So why hasn’t the Department of Education or a state department of education or a non-profit like Reading is Fundamental or a big library school or a major university stepped forward to create a free version of the “AR Concept”? If it was reasonably done, elementary schools would flock to it. The amount of money needed to create an online testing and scoring framework and to pay grad students to write tests and categorize books would be a drop in the bucket compared to what school systems are spending on AR.

AR is the kind of product that certainly made some sense before all schools had Internet connections and before it became clear that it was possible to supply valuable, quality, resources over the web. But today when students and schools make heavy use of free general resources like Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube, not to mention more specifically targeted free “educational” sites such as MERLOT and BBC Learning, it seems odd that so many schools are spending so much money on a product that could be replaced with a free web-based version relatively cheaply and easily.