Stem tide of Illegal entry across our borders using Carrots more than Sticks

First, we must end free stuff. A welfare State and an open border will never work.  This is attracting many non-employable to live off the taxpayer's largess.

Second, create a bio-metric card for foreign workers after a thorough background check, both medical and criminal.  Workers can come and work, leave their families at home and easily get home for events or emergencies.  Today, trips home for even your parent's funeral are too risky.  Some parents don't see their children for years.

What are the carrots for those who comply?

Workers must return home for three months each year or risk losing their ID.  During that time, they may NOT cross into the US but they and their families receive the FICA withheld from their pay in three installments. Foreign families love their language, their flag, and their colors. Their children can live much better at home than hiding in America.  Often these children can attend a private school providing for a much better future for them.

Why would a craftsman, a roofer, skilled assembly line worker, a coder or an agricultural worker not comply?

Checking workers for their biometric ID is easy.  Factories will learn to adjust and rotate skilled workers through their nine months on the job.  Since the FICA will be refunded, the federal government knows who is here and where they are working.

The load on local communities for education and medical care for the families evaporate.

Those without an ID will be much easier to find and deport.  Why would an employer risk illegal workers?  Since the ID is free, the only reason not to comply is obvious.  They have a past criminal or medical reason found in their background check.

I hope someone will comment.

Education ideas, odds and ends

(Suggestions)

Require Public school principals to accept nominations for a board made up only of parents/custodians of his/her school’s students (tried and working in Australia) and organize an election at the end of each school term-one parental vote per pupil in attendance at that school the following year.  The principal and the subsequently elected board determine a budget based on needed materials and resources, and elect a representative to hold an office on the District School board for that year.  That way each school is represented equally on the Board.

Omaha Public School District has been unduly burdened. Keep schools along the Dodge Street Corridor in OPS but other districts can help with administration. For instance, South High attendance area can merge with the Bellevue District, Bryan can merge with Ralston or Papillion, Northwest can merge with Elkhorn and North can merge with District 66, as an example. Elaborate and expensive solutions like the Learning Community are not working.

I recommend a return to the Spalding Method of teaching reading which involves saying, hearing, writing (penmanship) and seeing words and phonic patterns to build a list of spelling words that are understood by the child including how to form those words on paper, read them, spell them, listen, define them and say them.  As their ‘individual’ book of sounds and words grows, "reader texts" may not be required as children may select topics of interest from their classroom's books or public library books. Students are better able to think independently and contribute to current community ideas when they've been taught to read effectively whereas in contrast, 47% of the adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate today.

Offer a boost to Secondary education by offering within the College of Arts and Science, a minor in secondary education. Upon graduation with a major in their field, be it Biology, Math, Chemistry or a Foreign language and student teaching under their belt, the graduate is qualified to teach in a secondary school, Junior or Senior high school, in Nebraska and benefit from reduced tuition at any Nebraska University, to complete an Arts and Science Masters and/or Doctorate.  Students benefit from the quality knowledge in their field and the enthusiasm of an engaged instructor.

Education Stamps

My newest idea for improving educational outcomes in Nebraska is radical.

Model an 'education stamp' on the 'food stamp' program as a way to fund all public K-12 education as required in Nebraska's Constitution. Parents receive an 'education stamp' for each child and present it to the Principal of their selected school. Principals in turn send all students for a State administered test to assess their individual annual average gains on the California Achievement Test. And the State releases the annual AVERAGE gains of students, by teacher for the year, to the local news media. More detail below.

Parents can depend on published results by teacher, a type of Red, Yellow, Green report on student progress, to select a school to receive their child's 'education stamp.' By injecting market principles into our schools, all will improve. Just as no one takes 'food stamps' to a grocery store with browning vegetables, parents will choose schools that work and entrepreneurs will open schools in under-served areas.

Imagine the relief when all the overhead costs justified today by Districts, the State and federal mandates and micromanagement melt away and our kids become great Nebraska scholars again, able to read effectively, thinking and reasoning through the complex problems of the future. Many details must be worked out, such as, a Unicameral committee determining the value of 'education stamps' each year and funds for junior, senior and special 'education stamps' adjusted rates but those are the easy part once parents are once again put in control.

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A settling in period can require that private schools must accept the amount of the 'education stamp' as payment in full.  President Obama's girls attend Sidwell Friends which accepted several lottery winners' 50% stipend of average spending per pupil in D.C. Public Schools, or $9600, and added diversity to the education of their other students who pay approximately three times that amount.  Unfortunately, in 2009, Pelosi and Obama removed the lottery only grandfathering in some recipients.

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Average reading level of second grade students and their gains in Class A; Class B

Reading level of Students	Teacher A’s Class	Teacher B’s Class
Average leaving First Grade	Grade level 1.9	Grade level 2.5
Average leaving Second Grade	Grade Level 3.1	Grade level 3.4
Average increase	1.2 years	0.9 years

While in math problems,

Math level of Students	Teacher A’s Class	Teacher B’s Class
Average leaving First Grade	Grade level 2.9	Grade level 1.1
Average leaving Second Grade	Grade Level 4.0	Grade level 3.4
Average increase	1.1 years	2.3 years

In reading, Teacher  A is able to speed up reading scores faster than Teacher B but Teacher B does not let readers fall behind and accelerates math scores faster than Teacher A's class.  Teacher C’s job was eliminated as scores in reading and math in that classroom fell below grade level. No parents allowed their child to be assigned to Teacher C’s classroom.

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Some eighth grade graduates taught in Nebraska's country schools of our past and used the Spalding method.  "Once students have learned the first 30 phonograms, they can begin to read the Spalding Series 1 Leveled Readers. This occurs in Academic Week 10 of the Spalding Kindergarten Teacher's Guide."

Children learn sounds, and create a list of words they know, can read, spell, pronounce, use in a sentence and write and their list keeps growing.  Being in a classroom of mixed age children, drill for the younger students was often performed by the older ones. Every had multiple chances to fill in information they may have glossed over when presented earlier.

Success stories in Nebraska are legend, Willa Cather, Bess Streeter Aldrich, John G. Neihardt, Mari Sandoz, to name a few but remember our grandparents and great aunt's penmanship and English was impeccable. Teaching reading, needed for all the other subjects, isn't rocket science.

Don't be fooled by universal preschool raising scores of the underprivileged like we did all day Kindergarten classes. All day classes doubled the amount of resources required; two teachers and two classrooms, but as I discovered by comparing the OPS 8th grade outcomes 9 years after all day kindergarten, that they did not rise scores and in fact scores had dropped again.  Universal preschool may cause our high school graduates to carry a four year college loan for an Early Childhood Education degree to work in a preschool.

Perpetual War for Petroleum

Clinton bombed Kosovo and Serbia and Iraq for good measure. His sanctions left approximately 200,000 children dead from water borne illness because we withheld dual use chemicals like Chlorine and deprived the Iraqis of water treatment chemicals IN A DESERT!
Clinton's team couldn't manage to find support for invasion at Ohio State:

Bush bombed, invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, two of Iran's neighbors, and CIA targeted drones bombed across national boundaries.

Obama bombed Libya and caused death of Qaddafi who supported the African Union and selling petroleum products in gold, Hillary and Kerry funded rebels in Syria to oust Assad, and supplied the rebels with weapons (possibly shipped out of Qaddafi's arsenal) as those rebels were beheading Syrian Christians. When questioned about Qaddafi's weapons by Rand Paul, Hillary 'could not recall' whether any were shipped out of Libya & reminded me of the times Hillary 'could not recall' when questioned under oath about Whitewater. The CIA targeted drones kept flying across national borders, and Obama has bombed Syria even without UN or NATO approvals.

And we're now asked to give arms to Ukraine after Victoria Nuland and our Ambassador to Ukraine supported the riots which overthrew their elected leader. Russia's one warm water port is in Crimea, needed for imports and exports, as well as their Navy, so we must have known Putin would attempt to annex Crimea.

Beau Biden is now, after testing positive to Cocaine while in the US Navy, on the board of the Ukraine Gas Pipeline company.

Here's how I put this all together, as it always comes down to money and power in the end.
1) the US$ has flourished when tied to petroleum and is often referred to as the petrodollar.
2) Russian has been a major supplier of energy to the EU flowing through pipelines in Ukraine.
3) Middle Eastern petroleum is still sold in US$s, so a pipeline through Syria (would Assad oppose?) expedites the process of supplying the EU's energy needs in US$s instead of Russian Rubles.

I hope someone can correct me!