Goodbye, Mike

Today is Gov. Mike Easley's last full day in office, and he may be thinking that the end of his second term hasn't come soon enough.

Easley enjoyed six years of considerable success followed by two of upheaval. Before 2007, his administration saw few controversies. In the last 24 months, however, the administration has faced major challenges.

Any fair assessment of the Easley years should begin with his main accomplishments. In the tradition of previous "education governors," Easley put our children first. He moved the state more heavily into pre-kindergarten services for children, launching the More at Four program that prepares disadvantaged children for elementary school.

Easley also pushed for reduced class sizes in the early grades. Public-school teachers now have very manageable student loads in those critical grades. The combination of the two improvements should mean that our children reach the fourth and fifth grades prepared with better reading, writing and calculating skills.

In his second term, Easley recognized that improvements to early education were not sufficient. North Carolina loses far too many of its young people in middle grades when they decide school offers them nothing.

Easley's Learn to Earn program lays out a real promise for all North Carolina children. If they stay engaged while in middle and high school, they can graduate with both a diploma and an associate's degree from a community college. From that point, a bachelor's degree is not a dream at the end of a rainbow but a goal within almost any student's reach.

Unfortunately, improvements to post-elementary education have not been sufficient to drive down the state's appalling high-school dropout rate. North Carolina high schools still graduate only about 70 percent of the youngsters who enter ninth grade.

Easley's most remarkable achievement is that he accomplished these changes in very lean years. He initiated More at Four and the class-size reductions while dealing with the economic downturn associated with the dot.com bust of 2000.

His predecessor, Gov. Jim Hunt, either didn't foresee the economic drop or didn't think it his problem in the fall of 2000. Easley entered office in 2001 with only six months to balance the budget and a huge revenue shortfall. To his credit, he took tough steps even though they soured his relationships with municipal leaders and state employees.

Over the past eight years, North Carolina enjoyed considerable success in recruiting new business and jobs. Easley's team did good work in this regard, and he was instrumental in persuading Dell to build its computer plant in Forsyth County.

On the environmental front, Easley also can take some of the credit for significant improvements, most notably the state's Clean Smokestacks Act.

The most damaging Easley accomplishment was the state lottery, an inefficient tax on the gullible. The governor promised to use the money only for new educational improvements. But when the lottery money began to flow, Easley and legislators used it to pay for the class-size reductions and More at Four. Since the state was already paying for these programs out of general revenues, this amounted to a breach of the original promise.

Easley's detached method of governing probably led to the two biggest failures of his administration. Mental-health reforms approved by the legislature early in his first term were never adequately implemented. The result was a disastrous failure of services to some of the state's neediest residents and at great cost.

The state also learned this year that enormous problems in the state's probation and parole systems were not adequately dealt with during Easley's tenure. Things may have been worse before Easley came to office, but during his two terms the system continued to allow too many violent criminals to remain on the streets unsupervised. They, in turn, were committing heinous crimes. Two men who were on probation will be tried in the alleged murder of UNC Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson.

Easley also allowed his transportation secretary, Lyndo Tippett, to abuse the system and use an inordinate amount of state highway funds in Fayetteville, the secretary's hometown.

Easley is an enigma as a leader. He is a politician with considerable personal and public-relations skills who, nonetheless, does not seem to enjoy being with people. He gives new definition to the word "aloof." By refusing to do the glad-handing and hard, dirty work of politics, he doomed some of his initiatives. For example, the victims of the state's eugenics program got an official apology but none of the remedies that a governor's committee suggested. A more engaged governor would have spent political capital and twisted the arms of reluctant and uninterested legislators to get those recommendations passed.

Late in his administration, news surfaced that Easley had spent a great deal of state money on an official trip to Italy and that his wife had done the same on a cultural-affairs trip to Latvia. For many North Carolinians in the middle of a recession, the trips and Mary Easley's hiring by N.C. State University at a huge salary appeared to be attempts by the governor to cash in on his position.

In the midst of all this bad news, Easley tried to stanch the political bleeding by denying the press access to the public records that demonstrated his administration's failures, including intra-office e-mail and letters from departed officials.

Easley leaves office tomorrow and will probably be seen publicly only on rare occasions. He's a very private man. Despite our differences with him, we recognize that he did a lot of good for this state during his years as a prosecutor, attorney general and governor. All North Carolinians should wish him well in whatever lies ahead.