#DearScholastic

Do you remember buying books from the Scholastic Book Fair? I think I do. You got a little catalog at school, and you picked the book you wanted, and then brought in your order slip with your money. Well, Scholastic Book Fair is still going strong but I hear from more and more teachers that they don’t want the fair in their school. The books aren’t diverse and kids often buy licensed products instead of books—so how does that promote literacy? I was at a school last month and a 5th grade teacher surveyed my 20 books and asked, “Will these be available at our Scholastic Book Fair next week?” No—they won’t. Your Black and Latino students will probably be hard-pressed to find a “mirror book” in Scholastic’s offerings.

Last year I met a fantastic 3rd grade teacher, Ruben Brosbe, and his students have started a letter-writing campaign to get Scholastic to diversify their book fair offerings:

Dear Scholastic Books,

In the fall my students learned about the diversity gap in children’s literature. When the December Scholastic Book Club catalog arrived, we decided to count the number of books featuring people of color. Out of more than 100 books we counted about 7 that had people of color.

We decided to write you letters to tell you how we felt about this.

Thanks for reading! We hope you will write back!

Sincerely,

Mr. Ruben and Class 301 

Here’s one excerpt from a letter by Maya:

“When diverse kids have to read books with only white characters it makes them feel left out. It makes them feel like white kids are better. Our class counted and out of over one hundred books less than ten are diverse. I don’t think that’s fair. Also white kids want to read about different types of people. It’s never different types of people.”

All the letters are powerful so please take the time to read, and retweet, and follow their campaign: @diversereaders #DearScholastic