Students win Law Day essay contest

Each year, the Observer's editorial department partners with the Mecklenburg Bar Association to sponsor an essay contest in observance of Law Day. The winners this year were Katie Rivers, from Covenant Day School, who received $300 as the winner, and Arjun Gupta from Providence High in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, who was the runner-up and received $100.

This year's theme was "The Legacy of John Adams, from Boston to Guantanamo." The Boston refers to the second president's defense of British soldiers who fired on residents during the Boston Massacre. Guantanamo, of course, refers to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the military facility where terrorist suspects are being detained and where trials will be held. In the spirit and legacy of Adams, U.S. lawyers, including two in Charlotte, have provided defense.

Both Rivers and Gupta made impassioned arguments for Adams' precedent-setting defense. Rivers took note of the contradictions Adams presented. He is also remembered for signing into law as president the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. The laws were later repudiated as infringing on citizens rights by among other things making it a crime to criticize the government. But she noted that Adams' defense while a lawyer in 1770 of "the redcoats in the Boston Massacre set the standard for American lawyers to eliminate their personal biases in order to give every accused a speedy and public trial."

Gupta concurred: "With his defense of the British soldiers, John Adams gave us a model example of the rule of law: All are judged upon the same standard."

Congratulations to the winners, and to the dozens of other students who sent in great essays. Try again next year.

White House releases Obama's birth certificate

The White House this morning has released the president's long form birth certificate in an attempt to put the birther issue to rest.

In a statement today, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer writes:

"The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting."

All we can say right now, judging from the recent comments and mail we've received, is, "Yeah, good luck with that."

You can download the certificate here:

Douthat on median income: I apologize (sort of)

Conservative columnist Ross Douthat is catching some flack for his recent New York Times column that said the median income for a family of four is $94,900. Say what?!! exclaimed several readers in comments to the column, which also was published in Tuesday's Observerl under the title, "Crushing America's promise." Some readers noted that the median household income reported by the Census for 2010 is only about $50,000 per year, half the figure Douthat used.

On his blog Monday Douthat took note of the criticism, "apologized for the confusion" and explained himself - though he didn't change his column or the conclusions he reached. Here's what he said:

A Note on Median Income
My column today includes an estimate, taken from this Congressional Budget Office report, of what a median-income family would pay in taxes over the next few decades under the “current law baseline” — a scenario in which tax rates rise fast enough to cover the budget deficit without any kind of entitlement reform. The median income figure the C.B.O. used (see Table 4-4 on p. 65 of the report) is $94,900 for a family of four, which (as a number of readers have noted) seems much higher than the usual estimates for median income in a four-person household. It turns out that I didn’t catch a crucial footnote in the C.B.O. document: “All income is assumed to be from compensation, which includes employment-based health insurance and the employer’s share of payroll taxes.” That is to say, the $94,900 in income includes the estimated value of the median family’s health care plan as well as their salary, which is not what most people think of when they hear the term “median income.” I apologize for the confusion.

Ummm. Got that?

Reduce dropouts, save millions in Charlotte

If the 11,200 who dropped out had actually stayed and graduated from schools in the Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord area last year, they could be generating $63 million more a year in earnings for this area. They also could boost state tax revenues by $6.5 million annually and be spending $46 million more on services and products annually.

That's part of the value the Alliance for Excellent Education put on reducing dropouts in eight metro areas of North Carolina in a report released Monday.

The Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord area logged the most dropouts of the areas examined - more than twice as many as the area with the next highest dropout figure (Raleigh-Cary with 5,200) - and thus had the most to gain from declines in the number of dropouts.

According to the Alliance, "the study demonstrates the gross increase in important economic factors such as individual earnings, job creation, spending and investment, home and auto sales, tax revenues, and human capital based on reducing by half the number of students from the Class of 2010 who failed to graduate on time."

“The best economic stimulus is a high school diploma,” said Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia. “From the individual student to the bank branch manager, new car salesman, or Realtor, everyone wins when more students graduate from high school.” For the entire report and information on other states and other N.C. communities assessed - Greensboro/High Point, Fayetteville, Durham/Chapel Hill and Asheville, Wilmington and Winston-Salem - go to findings for North Carolina and the nation as a whole.

GOP convention in N.C., too?

What better way to offset any gain Democrats get in North Carolina by having their convention in Charlotte than to have the Republican convention in the Tar Heel state too?

South Carolina's Republican chairwoman is suggesting exactly that today. Karen Floyd sent a letter to national party leaders saying the GOP's convention planned for Tampa should be moved out of Florida if that state doesn't back down from its current plan to hold its primary on Jan. 31, 2012, which would put it ahead of South Carolina and other traditional early states. Floyd suggests a few places Republicans should consider for their new convention site, including North Carolina. It's a battleground state, she says, and Democrats could get a boost here from their Charlotte convention.

We love the idea, and North Carolinians of all political stripes should too. But don't hold your breath. The chances of the GOP moving its convention from Tampa are almost nil. Floyd is just maneuvering to try to put pressure on Florida to back its primary date up and keep South Carolina's early-state stature.

Republican rules would require that. But it sure makes sense to have Florida vote early. A candidate who performs strongly in Florida is more intriguing than one who can just woo folks in Iowa or New Hampshire.

-- Posted by the Observer's editorial board

Poll: 'No' to private school vouchers, public school cuts

A new NC Policy Watch poll finds N.C. voters favoring no cuts to public education funding, opposing private school vouchers and skeptical of legislative moves to exempt charter schools from oversight. The poll was released at a Crucial Conversation lunch hosted Wednesday by NC Policy Watch reveals. Among the findings from those polled:

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  Most (56 percent) oppose taxpayer-funded vouchers for parents to send their children to public schools (39 percent favored).


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  Most (66 percent) favored maintaining tax revenue at current levels to avoid cuts in public education.


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  Most (55 percent) supported maintain revenue for Smart Start and More at Four, the state's early child education programs.


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  Most (52 percent) said charter schools receiving public funding should be required to provide free and reduced price lunches like traditional public schools (38 percent opposesd).


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  Most (64 percent) said charter schools should be required to hire certified teachers (28 percent opposed).


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  The public was spit on requiring charter schools to provide transportation (48-45).


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  The poll was done from March 21 to 23, and surveyed nearly 700 registered voters throughout North Carolina regarding their attitudes on some of the high-profile issues currently before the General Assembly – including charter schools, the requirements placed upon them, and governance issues. The poll also gauged the opinions of voters on proposed cuts to education, preservation of current state taxes and the participation of non-public school students on public school athletic teams. Full results of the poll are available online at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Poll-Results-March-2011.pdf

Benghazi to Charlotte: Are we world-class now?

Were you paying attention to President Barack Obama's Libya speech Monday night? Really? If so, you got to hear this: "At this point, the United States and the world faced a choice. Gadhafi declared that he would show 'no mercy' to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we had seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now, we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi - a city nearly the size of Charlotte - could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world." That's right. Tucked down in that speech, Obama mentioned the Queen City! And without N.C. attached to it. World-class, here we come!

Duke study: N.C. preschool programs pay off

The nonpartisan Public School Forum of North Carolina pointed our way to a new Duke University study on the value of early childhood programs. The study released March 16 proclaims that "N.C. Investments in Early Childhood Programs Pay Off."

This information comes as N.C. lawmakers consider big cuts to both the state's early childhood programs, More at Four and Smart Start.

According to Duke researchers in a press release, "North Carolina third-graders have higher standardized reading and math scores and lower special education placement rates in those counties that had received more funding for Smart Start and More at Four when those children were younger.

"These findings provide the most rigorous evidence yet that investments in these early childhood initiatives generate substantial benefits for all the children in the counties that receive these funds, even children who were never enrolled in the early childhood programs," said Helen Ladd, the Edgar T. Thompson Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and a professor of economics at Duke.

The release said that "for an average third-grade child whose community had received Smart Start or More at Four funding, the expected savings in special education and instructional costs is at least equal to the cost of those programs, researchers said.

"By the time the children grow up, we expect the investment will have yielded large payoffs in lower special education and remedial costs," said Kenneth Dodge, the William McDougall Professor of Public Policy and director of Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy.

Smart Start provides state funds for high-quality child care and services for health, cognitive and social development from birth to age five. It was initiated in 1993 in pilot counties and then expanded statewide by 1999.

More at Four provides funds for high-quality preschool for at-risk four-year-olds. It was first implemented in 2001 in pilot counties and then expanded statewide by 2004. More at Four spending has averaged about $1,250 for every four-year-old child in a county, and Smart Start spending has averaged about $250 per child per year for children ages 0 to 5.

For additional information and to access the full report, click here.

Gadhafi loyalists release ex-N.C. photographer

You might be unaware of this North Carolina connection to the conflict in Libya. A former Wilmington Star News photographer, Tyler Hicks, was among the four New York Times journalists "detained" by Libyan forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi. They were held captive for six days and released today (Monday), according to the Times.

The three others were Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid, Beirut bureau chief; Stephen Farrell, a reporter and videographer who was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2009 and rescued by British commandos; and photographer Lynsey Addario.

Gadhafi's son, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, said in an ABC News interview with Christiane Amanpour on Friday that the four had entered the country illegally and were arrested in the city of Ajdabiya.

Hicks left the StarNews about 12 years ago to cover war-torn and disaster-hit sites around the world. In 2002 Hicks was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, along with James Hill, also with The New York Times, for images from the war in Afghanistan. In 2009, he was among Times staff members who won a Pulitzer for covering the U.S.’s challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In a message to the Times staff today, executive editor Bill Keller wrote: "We're overjoyed to report that our four journalists missing in Libya since Tuesday morning are free and have arrived safely in Tunisia."