The 99-Year-Old Problem You Won’t Believe America Still Hasn’t Solved

“The rapid increase in adult illiteracy not only is costing an economic loss of $500,000,000 a year in the United States, but has become a menace to representative governments.” 

In 1914 — yes, you read that year correctly — P.P. Claxton, the commissioner of education, said this. And it’s still true. If you have children, grandchildren, or a little sibling anywhere in the world that you even remotely care about, it is time to demand more. If you are a business owner who might ever hire someone who was educated in America, it is time to demand more. If you are a taxpayer who wants your fellow citizens to pay their fair share through productive work, it is time to demand more. If you defended or are defending America from danger and are worried about our future safety, it is time to demand more.

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How Entrepreneurs Are Going to Kickstart America’s Employment Rate

Summer is coming to a close. Back to school sales are springing up everywhere. BBQ briquettes are smoldering, lemons are being squeezed, and beer is on ice. Boats. Bikes. Tents. No matter how you celebrate, take a minute to remember American workers, past, present and future. Take a minute to remember the “99ers” whose lifeblood is threatened by members of Congress who earn more than five times the average American.

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15 Steps America Can Take to Create Jobs Now

America has struggled with how we create jobs, how we prepare people for jobs, and how we keep jobs here since the Industrial Revolution when we moved from small business owners to employees of large companies. We can’t afford to put these decisions off for one more minute or we risk being swamped under by countries who took their economic health seriously.

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The GED is An Epic Fail, But Not For the Reason You Think

As young Americans marched off to fight the Nazi’s in World War II, millions traded their diploma for a draft card. It soon became clear that if a warrior was smart enough to liberate Europe, he was smart enough to graduate from high school.

The GED was developed to give warriors and veterans an opportunity to test out of courses as an alternative to returning from war and taking your seat, for example, in eleventh grade civics class. So the military commissioned the American Council on Education to develop a battery of tests covering including English, math, science and social studies. Within five years, many states had began administering the GED test to other non-traditional students including disabled students and students who needed to get into the workforce faster for personal economical reasons.

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Sequestration 2013: Are We Abandoning Military Children, Our Littlest Heroes?

The Global War On Terrorism has surpassed the conflicts of the 20th century to now rank as our nation’s second longest war. Yet, we sequester. Repeated deployments with insufficient “dwell time” between have created stress on service members, their families, and their larger support systems including theDepartment of Veterans’ Affairs. Yet, still, we sequester.

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Education Reform is the Key to Economic Recovery

Education is the greatest economic development tool known to man. It is not social welfare and it is not political fodder. It is much more important than that. No country can stay at the forefront of the world’s economy with an illiterate citizenry and yet our education system remains woefully inadequate to keep America at the forefront of the 21st century. In the words of Bill Gates; “we don’t need to reform the system; we need to replace the system.”

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8,000 Kids Drop Out Of School Every Day – And We’re Ignoring It

America is speeding toward an economic tsunami the likes of which we won’t easily recover from. Three million young Americans drop out of high school every year, over 8,000 per day. The class of 2012 marks the first time that all schools are actually calculating data on children who drop out of high school with uniformity. Now in America, if you enter 9th grade and don’t leave 12th grade with a diploma or its equivalent, you are formally considered a high school dropout.

It’s a start. A weak start, but a start nonetheless.

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2013 Immigration Reform: This is the Only Question We Need to Ask About Foreign Labor in America

Almost every day there is talk about immigration reform. We know that businesses provide the carrot — the jobs — that attracts people from all over the world to come to the United States. We can also, as Americans, understand that there aren’t many places one would want to return to after having lived here. But when was the last time we, as a nation, really considered who we are hiring through our foreign labor certification process and at what cost?

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