The Schools in L.A.

The CNN Schools of Thought blog has an interesting editorial by the Mayor of Los Angeles here in which he argues that education is a civil right.  He also details all of the things he has been doing to try to make the schools better in Los Angeles.  The comments were overwhelmingly negative, and mostly a personal attack on Mayor Villaraigosa.

Mayor Villaraigosa, this is a very moving, inspiring piece.  I just have one more suggestion:

Turn your schools, all of your schools, into centers of reading.  Increase school library funding.  Give teachers money to build classroom libraries.   Investigate the possibility of getting e-readers donated.  Once kids have e-readers, they can find online a wealth of free and low cost books.

Make developing your students as avid readers an absolute priority.  Avid readers read better, write better, concentrate better, and have wider frames of knowledge so they can do better in all of their subjects.  Once your students fall in love with books, you'll find many intractable problems (discipline, dropping out etc.) fall away.