For once our president's praise of a top aide was fully merited when his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, decided to end his nearly seven-year tenure in an impossible job: U.S. secretary of education.
To quote his boss, "Arne's done more to bring our educational system, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the 21st Century than anybody else." American education has so many problems that the progress we've made may escape our attention. It shouldn't, and neither should the signal contribution that Arne Duncan has made to that progress for years now:
He's pushed standardized testing at every level--from kindergarten to high school graduation, earning the enmity of teachers' unions and their bosses. Which is always a great tribute.
He's also done his best to get more financial aid for those who need it most--poor students--while blowing the whistle on the kind of for-profit colleges that take students' money for tuition but don't graduate enough of them. In short, he's recognized that for-profit schools ought to be about more than profit.
Arne Duncan's been a fighter--usually in the best of causes--and won a lot of the fights he's started. Now he's returning to his family and his town (Chicago) and deserves to take the thanks of a grateful nation with him.
But the president is sticking with his old, futile reaction every time there's another massacre on another American college campus, which occurs all too regularly. This time it happened at a little community college in Roseburg, Oregon, just as it happened at Virginia Tech in 2007, but The Hon. Barack Obama's diagnosis and prescription doesn't seem to have changed at all. What's needed, he says, is more gun control, and doubtless some of the laws, like those governing sales at gun shows, need tightening. But it's going to take a lot more than that to get at the root of this problem, which isn't the gun but the gunman.
American colleges have made considerable progress in handling such horrors--more campus cops are now available once the shooting breaks out, and there's a lot better communication on college campuses when violence threatens. But till then, not near enough attention may be paid to the source of this threat: the nutcases on campus who may explode at any time. Even though, like the killer at Virginia Tech, this one should have been identified early and often as a homicidal threat. There were certainly enough signs that he was dangerous.
But not enough was done--indeed, little if anything was done--to prevent his first amassing a small arsenal and then turning it on his fellow students, Oh, when will this president--and the rest of us--ever learn? How many more innocents will be slaughtered before the lesson sinks in?
Speaking of lessons that haven't sunk in, still another report on recidivism--that is, the number of prisoners in this state who find themselves back in a cell after having been released--has grown even more severe, with almost half (48.2 percent) back in jail after having been released. That's a 5 percentage-point increase in 2014 compared to the year before.
What to do about it? A lot of well-intentioned officials advise doing what we've always done: initiate new programs, or even double down on the old ones--as if we could expect different results by using the same methods. That's not just a mistake, and an expensive one in terms of money wasted and lives put at risk by parolees let out too early; it's madness. This is a policy rotten at its root: a belief that anything less than a radical new approach will work.
Or maybe anything less than a radical old approach. Like having prisoners serve their sentences. In full. Just as they do in the federal system. Yes, time off for good behavior may be warranted; it may be the only incentive to good behavior in such a system. And while it may be costly to eliminate paroles and keep dangerous types locked up, think of the cost beyond dollars and cents of freeing them to commit more crimes against the innocent. Often enough brutal crimes.
How much would you be willing to pay to protect your family against such predators? If it costs to keep dangerous prisoners under lock and key, surely all of us would be willing to pay a little higher tax on our incomes to pay for it. If only to sleep o'night. The first business of government is, after all, to safeguard the public safety. And it's time to get down to business.
Editorial on 10/06/2015