Thoughts on Tucson
This isn't an education story, per se. But it's too important to ignore. The education angle to the recent tragedy in Tucson, Arizona is the fact that the apparent shooter recently attended a local community college. While I think it is unfair to hold Pima Community College responsible for Jared Loughner, this New York Times article and Sunday's Washington Post editorial does raise some smart questions about what could have been done differently, most notably having sought an involuntary mental evaluation of the suspect. Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. Currently, too much of the public conversation about Tucson is about culpability and about the role of political discourse in fueling the violence. Those are possibly irrelevant or overly simplistic conversations. It is unclear if political discourse had much bearing on Loughner's decision to do what he did. Sunday's New York Times story suggests that his twisted belief that "women should not be allowed to h...