Baltimore changed its entire attitude toward decreasing the dropout rate for black males when it decided to just ask them to come back to school and some did.

It began a turnaround in the dropout rate that exceeds that achieved in Ohio State University by simply selecting the highest achieving blacks and leaving the rest to rot, a tactic that will only be repeated at other higher education institutions until the pool simply dries up.

The importance of the issue to the economy was emphasized recently in a study by the Council of the Great City Schools, which gives a good idea of the level of the disparity in dropout rates but very little analysis of the results and no suggestion about solutions: good journalism perhaps but almost useless for making public policy decisions. Conservatives will turn to racist explanations and liberals to fruitless expenditures.

Why focus on young Black men? The dropout rate does more than leave individuals with a much diminished means of supporting themselves in a society that increasingly judges a person by the number of degrees rather than how they were earned. It also leads to lawlessness which diminishes civilization, as well as driving up the cost to society of law enforcement and imprisonment. Young Black men are mining's canaries.

This is just crazy enough to work. Something so simple, yet so effective, and I'll bet it hardly costs a dime. Think about the cost to society when a large portion of it is uneducated and underemployed, with few legitimate opportunities to succeed....the recipie for disaster. I wish them all the best.

If they perceive that rules are enforced fairly and justly - not necessarily "equally" as happened with the contrasting laws for crack cocaine and its more refined cousin where the law was enforced equally but biased in its construction - then young black men will begin to participate and compete equally in social progress.

Unjust laws are part of the very definition of institutionalized racism. Lack of enforcement of discrimination laws is another example. The more they are decentralized to the states and local authorities the less likelythey are to be enforced uniformly, if at all.

The theory with devolution is that local people know local people best. The fact is that smaller groups are more prone to the spread of rumor than fact and to the mass hysteria that follows.

One could say that this falsehood-based overreaction is what lead to the election of so many reactionary members of the House of Congress in the 2010 midterms: untruths such as believing Obama is a Muslim.