Big, Low Profile Issues

Today, some big, lurking low profile issues that deserve more attention:

* The public school system does a poor job of serving those who are not in the top quarter or so academically. Far too many students have a curriculum oriented towards preparing them for four years of a selective liberal arts college education that they will not pursue, which will not benefit them, and in which the routinely fail and struggle. Too many students are pushed into enrolling in AP classes which they aren't ready for and perform poorly in. Too many students are pushed into enrolling in college programs for which they are inadequately prepared and fail in at high rates. Regional vocational schools and good community college programs are among the most important exceptions to that rule but are under-enrolled.

* We have far too many people, especially men, without college educations who have skills and work habits that would have been valuable in the 1950s and 1960s, but are no longer needed in the quantities that are present in the work force. Our entrepreneurs have failed to find worthwhile ways to utilize what they have to offer. Public policy history is also filled with dozens of case studies of job training programs designed to address this problem that have failed. Our society needs a vision of a workable decent American dream for them, for people with minor criminal records, for people who had children at the wrong time, and so on.

* Our court system does a poor job handling medium sized civil lawsuits, those larger than small claims and small collection and residential eviction cases, but less than say, $100,000 in controversy. We need a better system for mid-sized litigation. There have been efforts to do this, but Colorado's simplified civil litigation rules under Colorado Rule of Civil Procedure 16.1 does a poor job of it.  It also needs to be a system that people without legal training and with poor bureaucracy navigating and writing and research skills can navigate without catastrophic results.

* We also need more affordable legal professionals to provide affordable representation in litigation where there isn't an ability to pay a lot, which a system that requires seven years of education plus a bar exam and some on the job training to be competent in doesn't provide. Specialist, independent licensed legal professionals in practice areas including child custody and child support, immigration law, criminal defense, consumer bankruptcy, and landlord-tenant law could fill this gap with mid-skill professionals.  These licensed legal professionals would have training levels similar to tax preparers, bookkeepers, police officers, real estate agents, customer service desk workers, title company closing officers, consumer loan bank officers, mortgage underwriters, and insurance adjusters.

* We need an eviction process that is connected to a homelessness mitigation response, because that is how a lot of homelessness starts, and an eviction process that does not result in undue collateral harm to the possessions of people who are evicted.

* We need to support foster children well after they turn age eighteen, until they can reach stable self-sufficiency, and need to improve the quality of life for them in the foster care system.

* Vast numbers of homeowners live in homes in that are in dysfunctional homeowner's associations. The way the needs that these HOAs serve are met must be reformed, because volunteer elected officers of small HOAs aren't competent to run them and democratic self-governance is not an ideal model for meeting most of these needs.

* We need our public systems for taxes, for welfare benefits, for health care, for routinely consumer legal problems, for business and labor regulation, for home ownership, and so on, to be less complex so that academically average and below average people can navigate them.

* We have a large unmet need for inpatient mental health and substance abuse care. The deinstitutionalization movement made some good points, but went too far and still hasn't recovered.

* There is not enough medical education capacity. We could be training twice as many doctors each year and still have extremely well qualified graduates.

* We need better models for how to handle the inevitable decline in population and tax bases of cities and towns in the Rust Belt and in rural America.

* Every place in American should have clean running water and functional sewage systems.

* Our jails and prisons are dangerous, do almost nothing to reform inmates in most cases, and are a major factor in the formation and strengthening of criminal gangs. They need to be run much differently.