Three Papers on Public Libraries and K12 Education
Open Access DepositedI present three papers examining the link between public libraries and K12 education. In my first paper, I examine the relationship between public library access and reading scores on the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). I find a positive correlation between student’s reported use of a public library and NAEP reading test scores. Using distance from the student’s school to the nearest public library as an instrument, I continue to find a positive relationship, but the standard errors from my IV approach are too wide to definitively determine the direction or magnitude of the relationship. In my second paper, I use a panel of school district-level data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), linked to library service areas, to assess the relationship between attendance at library events and nationally-normed reading test scores. I find that increases in attendance at library events, within a given geographic school district, are correlated with increases in 3rd and 8th grade reading scores. Employing a rainfall IV approach, I find some evidence that this relationship could hold as a plausibly causal relationship for 3rd grade students. For my third paper, I provide descriptive data on the staffing and funding of public library systems and school library systems, over time. I illustrate how national trends belie the existence of substantial heterogeneity in resources for both types of library systems at the state level, and use three case studies to show how these differences may have emerged.
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