Culture Vulture

This year’s political conventions conveniently coincide with the start of school for area students and educators, which prompts a reminder that through the noise and spin of both major party’s campaigns, surprisingly little has been heard from either candidate about education issues beyond the usual platitudes.
That may be due in part because so many other issues bulk so large. Whoever inherits the White House next year will have a full plate of problems and leftover business from the outgoing Bush administration.
Let’s start with foreign affairs. Arranging some kind of graceful exit from Iraq, if that is even possible, would alone be a task challenging enough for the nimblest of administrations. While there’s been some good news from Iraq lately in terms of an improving security picture, it could all evaporate in the blink of an eye, or a wave of suicide bombings. We need to leave Iraq, or at least drastically scale down our forces committed there, to quell a growing problem in Afghanistan, which could have been avoided if we hadn’t gotten sidetracked in Iraq. That’s water under the bridge now, but we face many years of continued involvement there in all likelihood, fighting the real war that we should have “stayed the course” with back in 2003.
And now of course, we face a heightened level of tension with Russia. Their invasion of Georgia — an independent, democratic state that wants to be allied with the West — may not be the start of the second Cold War, but the authoritarian Russian state has served notice it’s back to business as usual, now that we’ve helped refill their once-depleted coffers with money for their oil and natural gas.
Meanwhile there’s all the other big picture stuff — relations with China, who, despite the glow of Olympic harmony is ready and willing to claim its place as an economic superpower — and all the other gnarly Middle Eastern business like finally coming up with a workable solution to the Palestine-Israeli conundrum and the rest of the global war on terror.
Then there’s the economy. It’s number one on the list of voter’s concerns, the pollsters tell us, as well it should be. The past year has seen a housing market and mortgage meltdown, panic on Wall Street, an economy hovering near a recession and unemployment and inflation rising. We have gas prices at painfully high levels, and other commodity prices, which may finally be showing signs of easing only because of the specter of economic recession, at near all-time highs.
It’s enough to make you wonder why anyone wants the job.
Against that background, education is somewhere in the second half of the top ten.
It shouldn’t be, because ultimately most, if not all, of the nation’s problems will be solved through a smarter workforce, one that knows how to creatively exploit the opportunities made possible through technology and awareness of the great world beyond our borders. If there is one red flag that’s flashing brighter than ever it’s the chronic inability of U.S. education to recruit enough qualified math and science teachers. That's not to say there aren't many talented and dedicated ones currently serving in the ranks of teachers — just that there aren't enough of them. All other subjects are critical too, but for years the pay scales for would be mathematicians and scientists have been severely out of balance between what teaching offers and what is available in the private sector. Somehow, being a math and science teacher needs to become something other than a vow of poverty relative to what else is out there for the best and the brightest in these critical fields.
Instead of getting bogged down in endless arguments about No Child Left Behind, or even more foolishly, re-debating settled science on the theory of evolution with nonsense about “intelligent design,” let’s get with the program and stop wasting time and resources. The rest of the world is passing us by.
TRIM for Edit
It doesn’t have to be that way, but it will be if we allow our politicians to go on believing that we are in fact, as stupid as many of them apparently think we are.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s understandable that in the wake of the Brooke Bennett tragedy, lawmakers and citizens around the state are rushing to urge enactment of far-reaching legislation to better control, in their opinion, persons found guilty of committing one of the crimes typically grouped in the category of sexual offense.
The death of the young 12 year-old girl was a senseless tragedy that has many people asking if it could have been prevented, or the chances of it occurring lessened, if Vermont had had a tougher law governing sex offenders. “Jessica’s Law, ” a statute enacted initially in Florida in 2005, which calls for a mandatory minimum sentence of 25 years in jail and lifetime electronic monitoring of adults convicted of lewd and lascivious acts against a victim less than 12 years-old, has been frequently invoked over the past month as a piece of legislation that ought to be part of the state’s penal code. Governor Douglas says he supports the concept. Petitions have been circulated. At one point state leaders seemed to be on the verge of calling a special session to consider enactment of either Jessica’s law, or something like it. However, that idea didn’t pan out, but we can be certain that the issue is far from dead, and that legislators will be asked to consider something new, and more stringent, in the way of sex offender legislation.
Lawmaking in the midst of an election season is rarely a good idea, and given the emotions that an issue such as this releases, it was fortunate such a special legislative session didn’t work out.
Sex crimes, rightly, are a hyper sensitive subject. For that precise reason, lawmakers should be very careful when they sit down in Montpelier next year to write new rules on the appropriate punishments.
Vermont may not have the “toughest” laws on the books regarding sex offenders of the 50 states, but on the surface they seem pretty stiff. Right now those found guilty face a mandatory five-year minimum sentence, along with long term placement on the state’s sex offender registry, which they have to check in with by mail once or year, or notify if they move.
While many people today may not be overly concerned about protecting the privacy rights of convicted sex offenders, the fact remains that they are still citizens entitled to constitutional protections. Some sex offenders may be so hardened that rehabilitation is impossible or difficult at best. Others may be sincerely remorseful about their transgressions and want to make a fresh start after they’ve paid their debt to society. Any new rules and regulations should not remove all possibility of this occurring.
The real issue lawmakers ought to address is why aren’t the rules currently on the books aren’t good enough, if in fact they are not. Ensuring adequate enforcement of existing sex offender laws should be the first priority.
For instance, if you log on to the state’s current sex offender registry and pull up the list of names for Bennington County — 32 in all — you will find that 16 of them — half the total — have the “treatment status” listed as “unavailable” or, more disturbingly, as “non-compliant.” What does that mean?
Before we go rushing off to urge passage of new, supposedly tougher sex offender legislation, maybe we should fix what may be broken or not working well, or not funded enough.
For instance, perhaps sex offenders could be required to check in with authorities in person more than once or twice a year. Maybe, it should also be mandatory when a convicted sex offender is released from prison into society, local police officials should be required to make a direct, in-person contact — just so the former felons knows they’re on the radar screen and the police get an opportunity to make an assessment of the risk level they pose.
And when it comes to the funding side of all of this, voters should remember that tougher sentencing, more jail space, more supervision, all cost money which is not is overflowing abundance right now. Many would say that protecting one innocent child from the depraved actions of a sex offender is worth every penny we can possibly throw at it. But, you could say the same thing about health insurance, or education reform and probably a dozen other things, and you would be right — but even in prosperous times there’s only so much money to go around. Choices have to get made.
Sex crimes grow from multiple complex sources and no one piece of legislation, as Senator Dick Sears, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and someone who has been at the center of criminal justice issues in the state for a long time has observed, will adequately provide a solution to the problem. These are heinous, disgusting crimes, which deserve harsh punishment, but a lock ‘em up and throw away the key approach may not be the answer either.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)