Last week, the Oregonian had an interesting front page story about why kids are losing their love of reading. In Oregon, two-third of fourth graders say they read for fun weekly or even daily. But by eighth grade, half of kids say they read "hardly ever." [Full disclosure: and on paper, Oregon looks pretty good - tied for third place for states in which eight graders read nearly every day for fun.]
One problem may be that five years ago Oregon had 576 school librarians. Now it has 390.