As a librarian who  and , I was delighted to see the American Library Association鈥檚 efforts to celebrate its  this year, while making several mentions of Pennsylvania.

The ALA highlighted its ; how Pittsburgh philanthropist  funded the construction of more than 1,600 library buildings throughout the United States; and Scranton鈥檚 , who attended and maintained records about the ALA鈥檚 early conferences for nearly 50 years.

But these stories just scratch the surface of how Pennsylvanians have contributed to American libraries and librarianship.

I published a book on , and I鈥檓 working on a sequel that extends the story to the early 2000s. Many scholars connect the beginning of public librarianship in the United States to ALA鈥檚 1876 founding, but libraries鈥� roots .

America鈥檚 first 鈥榩ublic鈥� library

The , established in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, was the nation鈥檚 first successful circulating library and was a model for many others.

These early 鈥減ublic鈥� libraries 鈥� so called because they did not require users to affiliate with churches, colleges or other organizations 鈥� were run by stockholders who pooled funds to purchase books. The owners charged annual membership fees to others who wanted to join.

In the 19th century there was widespread desire among U.S. educators, women鈥檚 clubs, local government leaders and public-spirited citizens to provide libraries to everyone, whether or not they could afford to subscribe.

Today, some people incorrectly believe that steel magnate Carnegie was the first philanthropist to donate money for library buildings. However, a number of other Pennsylvanians preceded him.

In 1883, for example, , a lawyer and land developer, constructed a  in Warren, Penn., that contained a theater and storefronts. Those spaces were to support a public library that was also in the building. The business plan didn鈥檛 work, however, and users had to purchase 鈥渢ickets鈥� to borrow books.

Given such situations,  was especially impactful because it shifted some financial responsibility to local governments.

While some of the lavish libraries Carnegie first erected in the Pittsburgh area came with endowments 鈥� the  is one that still exists 鈥� he later developed a formula to ensure that other communities would not rely on his continuous generosity. As a condition of most of his grants, Carnegie insisted that municipalities provide land plus annual operating funds equivalent to at least 10% of the buildings鈥� costs. This effectively committed municipalities to finance libraries with public dollars.

Federal and state support for public libraries

In Pennsylvania, rural residents received a library boost with the passage of  in 1931. The legislation offered partial matching funds to counties that provided library services.

Notably, the law excluded the state鈥檚 two largest counties 鈥� Philadelphia and Allegheny.

The federal Library Services Act of 1956-1962, a forerunner of the current  program, further aided libraries in communities with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. The funds supported book purchases and projects such as bookmobile services.

Until the 1960s, though, there were no parallel funding streams for larger communities. This may have compounded other inequities.

Pennsylvania libraries did not practice de jure racial discrimination聽. Nor did they deliberately exclude senior citizens or people with disabilities. But how they allocated resources, designed spaces, developed collections, recruited staff and engaged local residents through specialized programming favored some constituents over others.

Just a few weeks ago I uncovered a  in the Pennsylvania Library Association bulletin that was written by , once a librarian and later a member of Philadelphia鈥檚 City Council. Clark wrote about how she believed white librarians in the City of Brotherly Love were failing Black children. She described the librarians鈥� lack of respect for Black communities, their 鈥減ained tolerance鈥� of Black people in their midst, and an unwillingness to render extra help 鈥� all of which, she said, prevented Black children from feeling 鈥渁t home鈥� in public libraries.

Using libraries鈥� records, I have also found many requests from both individuals and advocacy groups asking for ramps, elevators and other alterations to century-old libraries, and for additional listening and viewing equipment. In at least one case, a complaint reached the U.S. Department of Education鈥檚 Office for Civil Rights; it was investigated and ultimately dismissed.

Libraries strive to be more inclusive

Libraries in urban areas of Pennsylvania began to receive state support after the passage of Act 188 of 1961, which created a  program for municipal as well as county libraries. It also provided additional funding to the  and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which became Statewide Library Resource Centers. As such, they received extra funding to provide services to other libraries and customers in the state.

On the national level, the , which replaced the Library Services Act in 1964, did not exclude urban and populous suburban areas as the Library Services Act had. In administering the new funds, the State Library of Pennsylvania approved many proposals that extended services to underserved residents, such as Montgomery County-Norristown Public Library鈥檚 , Altoona Area Public Library鈥檚  for people with intellectual disabilities, and Cumberland County Library System鈥檚  for homebound senior citizens.

In the following decades, libraries continued to strive to become more accessible. In the 1990s the  and state efforts such as   initiative addressed the digital divide between communities that had computers and internet connections and those that did not. It provided grants for libraries to acquire needed upgrades.

Thirty years later, there are still some places in Pennsylvania, especially in rural and mountainous areas, that don鈥檛 have broadband. However, that number  thanks to  to build infrastructure in communities that corporate entities have neglected.

Role of librarians today

 argue that the internet, online databases and AI have replaced the need for public libraries and professional librarians. But a lot of information and recreational reading material is locked behind paywalls that Google and chatbots cannot circumvent.

Librarians today continue to play a crucial role in ensuring that resources remain available to the 鈥渓argest number, at the least cost,鈥� as American librarian  more than a century ago.

The Pennsylvania Library Association has found that for every $1 in tax investment, . This is largely by acquiring materials at discounts and enabling library customers to share and reuse them.

Working in today鈥檚 libraries can require substantial courage, too, given current , including . Requests to remove titles, or reshelve them in less-accessible areas, is nothing new. For example, I documented an example in  in which Catholic citizens urged the removal of Augusta Jane Evans-Wilson鈥檚 novel 鈥淚nez: A Tale of the Alamo,鈥� due to its negative portrayal of a priest and inaccurate descriptions of Catholic sacraments. However, current activists鈥� tactics are becoming more broad-stroke, aggressive and even violent.

The  and , a library advocacy group, have noted bills in various states that propose jailing library employees for the materials their institutions contain. There do not seem to be any bills presently of concern in Pennsylvania. But news reports about other book challenges and bans in Pennsylvania, , regularly show up in my inbox and social media feeds.

When you view the centuries-long history of American librarianship through a Pennsylvania lens, it鈥檚 more complex, nuanced and fascinating than many people realize. And while today鈥檚 libraries face various challenges, I believe they continue to contribute enormously to residents across the entire state.

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As examples, Cone cited Andrew Carnegie helping to build more than 2,500 libraries around the world and Julius Rosenwald (of Sears fame) partnering with Booker T. Washington to build more than 5,000 schools for Black children across the South.

Cone argued that these philanthropists identified 鈥渟tructural absences鈥� in American civic life and then set out to fill the gaps, but that their modern counterparts, instead of starting their own institutions, have mostly been content to write large checks to universities, museums and other nonprofits that already exist.

I think Cone is on to something. If a modern-day Carnegie or Rosenwald wanted to spend millions of dollars on a genuinely ambitious education project, what should he or she build? My answer starts with how much has changed since the turn of the 20th century.

Carnegie decided to fund libraries at a time when books were expensive and hard to access. Rosenwald put his resources toward building adequate school facilities for children who had none.

And those investments paid off. A recent found that individuals who lived in or near cities with Carnegie libraries filed 10% to 12% more patents than people who lived in similar communities without one. Research on the Rosenwald schools even broader effects, including gains in school attendance, literacy, years of schooling and cognitive skills.

But access to libraries and schools is no longer the main barrier to learning. Today, there are schools and libraries all over the country, and the internet has made information cheap and easy to access.

The same is increasingly true of instruction itself. Math programs like will teach students everything from counting to calculus for free. In addition to traditional textbooks, is full of instructional videos, and there are and . Artificial intelligence is making individualized instruction more accessible by the day.

Today, a motivated seventh grader with a laptop could theoretically start working through all of her course content tonight. When she finished, she could start eighth-grade math, then move on to algebra. There鈥檚 nothing to stop her except her own motivation 鈥� and the fact that her school may or may not recognize everything she鈥檚 learned on her own.

Schools aren鈥檛 designed to accommodate this abundance of information. They still put children of roughly the same age in a room and have a teacher deliver roughly the same material to all of them for the same 180 days. Some students struggle to keep up, while others master the material quickly and spend a lot of time waiting. At the end of the year, pretty much all students advance regardless of how they did on the state test. 

But math is well-suited to a different model of schooling. Arithmetic provides a foundation for algebra, and algebra opens the door to more advanced mathematics. The sequence isn鈥檛 perfectly linear, and students need to loop back on old skills to make sure those don鈥檛 wither away. But what students know today strongly affects what they are ready to learn tomorrow.

Math also benefits from being relatively easy to assess. The question, 鈥淒oes this child know Algebra I?鈥� is easier to answer than, 鈥淗as this child mastered ninth-grade English?鈥�

There is also evidence that students benefit from moving ahead when they鈥檙e ready. A synthesizing roughly a century of research found that academic acceleration had positive effects on student achievement. The same review found positive effects from grouping students across grade levels for particular subjects, which is especially relevant here. Instead of assuming all seventh graders should take seventh-grade math together, schools could group students according to the math they鈥檙e ready to learn.

Mastery-based learning is not a new concept, but historically, implementation has been difficult. Making it work in the real world would require at least two significant changes.

First, create a common yardstick.

Suppose our motivated seventh grader goes home every afternoon and eventually teaches herself Algebra I. What happens next? In most schools, nothing at all. Even if this student has mastered algebra, her school won鈥檛 necessarily recognize it. A parent can insist that her child already knows the material, but the school has no independent reason to believe it.

A philanthropist could solve that problem by building a series of rigorous, independent math mastery assessments.

Think of something like Advanced Placement exams, but corresponding roughly to today鈥檚 end-of-year state assessments. Students could take the exams whenever they were ready, rather than waiting for April or May. In addition to being available on demand, the exams would be rigorous, secure, independently validated and available for free to all. 

A new, external assessment organization also wouldn鈥檛 care where a child learned the content: at school, from a parent or with a tutor. The point is to certify that students have mastered the material, regardless of how they got there.

Of course, the children most likely to take advantage of such an assessment system would probably have families who already seek out extra opportunities for their kids: buying workbooks, paying for tutors and advocating for advancement opportunities.

So, while a high-quality, external assessment system could make math acceleration more common, it would not do much to make it universal. That鈥檚 where today鈥檚 philanthropists would need to pair it with a second investment:

Build Math Labs in disadvantaged schools.

Imagine if a wealthy philanthropist went to high-poverty middle and high schools and made them an offer. In exchange for shifting away from their time-based teaching method in math and letting students advance when they demonstrated mastery on the yardstick outlined above, the philanthropy would pay for the creation of Math Labs.

The labs would be staffed by the school鈥檚 credentialed math teachers, but their jobs would change. Rather than delivering, say, five lessons per day on seventh-grade math, they would work as a team to serve as math guides for students learning independently. They would monitor progress and be able to step in to shore up any weak areas. Paraprofessionals and other recent college graduates could serve one- or two-year Math Lab fellowships.

Computers could handle a large share of the day-to-day instruction. Students could watch explanations, work through examples, solve problems and receive immediate feedback digitally. The software would track what each student had mastered and what he or she was ready to tackle next.

Teachers could then concentrate their time where it was most useful. They might pull together students who are all struggling with the same type of problem or work individually with one who is stuck. Meanwhile, students moving quickly wouldn’t have to wait for the rest of the class.

There’s some encouraging evidence for combining technology and human tutoring in this way, from both and K-12. For example, a 2024 followed roughly 4,000 ninth graders as they alternated between working directly with a tutor and using computer-assisted math instruction. The researchers estimated that participating students made substantial gains in math, at a cost of about $2,200 apiece.

A Math Lab would push that idea further by replacing the school鈥檚 regular math class. Every student would participate, and advancement would depend on demonstrated mastery rather than age or the school calendar.

Would it work?

There are plenty of reasons it might not. Middle and high schoolers might require more human assistance than I’m assuming. Schools might struggle to motivate students who aren鈥檛 eager to advance in math. A philanthropist could fund a rigorous evaluation to test those assumptions, including whether students who passed the external assessments succeeded in subsequent courses and what kinds of adult support students need.

But it鈥檚 worth seeing how fast children will go when schools stop making them wait. Maybe most seventh graders really do need about a year to learn seventh-grade math. But I suspect some students would prove to be capable of considerably more than the current system asks of them.

A century ago, philanthropists created libraries and schools to overcome scarcity. Today there are plenty of schools, computers and good instructional resources. What’s missing is a system that takes advantage of that abundance. Students deserve math instruction at the level that’s right for them, an independent way to prove what they know and permission to keep going once they’ve earned it. That鈥檚 a future worth building.