One of the five key elements of presidential contender Mitt Romney’s stronger economy plan is overhauling America’s education system — The Skills to Succeed. The bullet points of this education update are:
-Give every family access to a great school and quality teachers
-Provide access to affordable and effective higher education options
-Focus job training programs on building valuable skills that align with opportunities
-Attract and retain the best and the brightest from around the world
As we wrote in our article of June 11 of this year, NEA Report Card: F, the education problem has been growing in America for decades, as the costs of educating our children skyrocket and students are churned out of the public education system with less and less actual education.
A decades-long growing battle between liberals and conservatives over education is culminating in calls to either get the government and unions out of education altogether, or to entirely overhaul the system.
The first bullet point – affording every family access to a great school and quality teachers is a broadly discussed function of reversing decades of damage done by the teachers’ unions and leftist bureaucrats and administrators. Their intractable resistance to objective standards of excellence and testing of teachers for competency – or even compensation based on merit and results, has left them exposed as the typical “more money for less work” union members they have become. Merit pay for teachers and tuition vouchers for students, to take to any school they desire to attend, will have the immediate and permanent effect of forcing schools to compete for their livelihood—a capitalistic concept quite foreign to the unions and their Democratic partners.
The second bullet point – providing access to affordable and effective higher education options is a cutting-edge concept that is as yet, undeveloped in the public arena. The Federalist Press editors hereby proffer a plan that will revolutionize American higher education.
The major problems with the current system are: 1) costs have artificially skyrocketed and the taxpayer is left holding the bag for much of it while students incur decades of debt; and 2) leftists dominate the system and classrooms, leaving indoctrinated students with little usable education and mush for brains.
The editors propose a new higher education option, patterned somewhat after the current CLEP and DANTES programs. In this age of digital access it is feasible to launch a program that provides students with online classes, with lectures by top experts and stunning graphics and demonstrations. A basic 2 year core curriculum will ensure that all students receive across-the-board instruction in math, science, English, history, etc. Then specialization will occur in 3rd and 4th year online classes. This is essentially how colleges and universities are supposed to offer classes now, but they have strayed far from their mandate.
Third and fourth year specialization courses in the government offered online university should emphasize productive degree programs initially; science, engineering, language, history, chemistry, education, pre-medicine, pre-law, etc., with some liberal arts programs being added as the system is more fully developed to accommodate their greater need for interactivity.
To help reduce cheating on exams, a major problem in the current system as well, testing centers should be established for this online university system with certified proctors to administer computerized tests. Students can take online courses at their own pace, and show up to take the exams as soon as they have completed the course.
Costs, which will be only a fraction of the current $500 billion, can be shared by students and the taxpayers. Students can pay a low flat fee for each course, and the federal government can dramatically cut its higher education budget and finance the remaining cost of the online university system.
This proposal will provide higher education for anyone who wants it, and anyone who is self-motivated enough to do the work. It doesn’t get any easier, cheaper or better than this.
PUBLIUS

Frank VanderSloot is a good man, personally known to the Federalist Press editors in a non-political context for over 30 years.
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling on the President’s healthcare law a few weeks ago, a lot of people on both sides of the issue have asked about my reaction to it. It probably goes without saying at this point that I think the law was an enormous mistake from a policy standpoint – $800 billion in new taxes ($675 billion in the most recent estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation plus roughly another $125 billion in taxes from their 2010 estimates of the individual mandate, employer mandate, and other revenues – likely to go up further), plus $500 billion in cuts to Medicare, zero done to control the growing costs in healthcare, etc – but setting aside the specific issue of health reform, my biggest concerns surround the ruling itself and the precedent it sets. These are issues that frankly, I think the media has a responsibility to make sure Americans are informed about.
As we demonstrated in our article of May 16, 2012, 
With the level of the federal deficit approaching $16,000,000,000 (trillions), the interest on which costs Americans the first $1,200,000,000 they make every day, and the recent explosion of federal power over the citizens and the states as handed to U.S. socialists by the Supreme Court, the independence from government rule and tyranny sought by our Founders is all but neutralized. We and our children are indebted and imprisoned by design of a leftist attack on our country.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts exploded from the closet last week, revealing himself for the undercover leftist that he is, forever propelling the US into an Orwellian nightmare of government control and loss of personal liberty.
constitutional authority to make some sort of sense of it all. Perhaps the dear boy was telegraphing a method of ensuring Obama’s defeat in November, we have heard.
Barack Hussein Obama has promised the American people on numerous occasions that he would not increase taxes on any American or American family earning less than $250,000 a year. When pressed for clarification and commitment, his response has been a consistent No New Taxes, reminiscent of Bush I’s “Read My Lips.”
We are surprised each time we hear that presidential candidate Mitt Romney needs to come up with an economic plan if he wants to distinguish himself from President Obama–who has proved he has no economic plan. Certainly, throwing trillions of taxpayer and borrowed dollars at his friends’ companies and organizations has resulted in nothing but record high unemployment rates, burgeoning deficits, and economic downturns.
We who have watched the transformation of America’s political landscape over the past few decades better understand what has been lost than newcomers to the scene. There have been changes, and many, and most for the worse.
class? Shouldn’t the middle class be somewhere in the middle? We instinctively imagine that the middle class would consist of those above the bottom, and below the top, forming a bell curve. Although a bell curve is a technical concept with many possible variables, if we are in a class being graded on a bell curve, we would expect that there is a top 20%, a bottom 20%, and 60% distributed throughout the “middle.” There is our true middle class.
President Jimmy Carter promised Hope and Change to an America dragged through the mud by a media feeding frenzy during the Nixon Watergate era.
shortages and rationing schemes.
were kept in Iran and paraded before the world media up until President Elect Ronald Reagan sent Iran the message, “Let my people go,” and they were brushed up and sent back immediately.
Wisconsin is a state like many others in the Midwest, home to working people just trying to live the American dream. In recent decades the state has been heavily influenced by unions, with Democratic political leaders striking sweetheart union deals in the tradition of leftist politics. The scheme is similar to the Harry Hopkins political plan—Tax, Spend, Elect!—only with a middleman inserted between the politician and the treasury; the union boss.
brought in Governor Scott Walker and allowed him to do the job that responsible government must do. He and his bare majority in the state capital passed legislation that stripped the most egregious abuses of power from union boss hands. The uproar was heard around the state as militant union thugs “occupied” the capitol building and the streets, while Democrat senators left the state en masse during session to rob the legislature of a quorum to pass its initiatives.
President Obama ran on hope and change when he asked America to make him the president. On the day he took office gasoline prices were $1.79.
With so many drivers looking to stretch their gas dollars many have discovered that avoiding fuel laced with ethanol can be cost effective. Ethanol, an alcohol derived from corn, is causing additional wear and tear on cars according to many owners, and is less efficient than pure gasoline.
As the propaganda press stirs up the occupying proletariat in our nation, and our streets become filled with couch potatoes demanding their fair share of that which has been earned by others, the insanity and impossibility of the scene serves as ample proof that too much weed indeed dulls the human brain’s ability to reason.
President Obama and his associates on the left follow the Keynesian theory of economics, the idea that when economies wane, government deficit spending will reignite the flame. To that end the Obama administration has spent trillions of dollars in 3 years, around 40 percent of which has been borrowed, and on which the country is now paying interest.
Those who read George Bush’s Decision Points may have been interested to learn that up until the 9/11 attacks the most important issue facing his administration in his opinion was stem cell policy.
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