Create Prosperity for Your Community by Revamping the 4th Year of High School with a Corresponding Adult Education Program - for Residents Only

Although the elimination of licensing and regulation is primarily a state and federal issue, it is something that can and should be addressed at the local level, which can be done by changing the curriculum of the final year of high school (and thereby by-passing the state and federal licensing, accreditation and student loan laws, rules and regulations that have prevented the needed new-economy education from being given). As a lawyer, educator, businessperson and innovator, I understand how America has lost its competitiveness in many aspects of its educational system, primarily by training students at taxpayer expense to work for major companies, but not training anyone with the skills needed by small business entities. We can change this most easily by giving the right type of education to students in their final year of high school, to prepare graduates for immediate employment in high-paying jobs as an alternative to preparing them for high-cost college with poor employment potential and lifetime indebtedness. I'm not talking about a high school program for making cabinets or fixing automobiles (which are decent, useful types of employment). I am talking instead about the skills which are required in every small business, every small professional firm, every small governmental agency, every small non-profit firm, every small church, every small everything (I'm going to refer to these collectively as "Small Business Entities"). English is no longer alone as the requirement to get a good job. A new skill (or I should say set of skills) has been added, and nobody is teaching these skills. We should start teaching these skills in the final year of high school (to start out, so that the change is not as disruptive and controversial as such change would be if implemented throughout all years of K-12 education. Let's try it out in "12" (the final year of high school) first, before trying it out in vocational schools, community colleges, colleges and universities and K-11.

I am in the unique position of having spent much of my life in education, as a student through high school, college and law school; as a dropout after two years of a 4-year high school; as a career-field creator (the paralegal field and now the town attorney general); and as a proprietary school owner for 18 years, with full state and federal licensing and approvals for student loans. With all this experience I can tell you what's wrong with our educational system. It is the amount of regulation and licensing required for anyone to compete with the non-profit programs and courses offered by the universities and colleges throughout the United States. Colleges and universities are quite inefficient, and generally would not be able to compete and stay in business but for the state's protection by not allowing competing schools to open up, and by excessive, destructive regulation of the proprietary schools that somehow, stupidly, do get to open their doors. These proprietary schools are subject to so much wasteful, disruptive governmental oversight that the schools go out of business, leaving the colleges and universities free to sell their generally inferior educational product.

We should look to India, which gave governmental financing to seven technical institutes, without any rules or regulations imposed by the government. These institutes, able to run without governmental rules or interference, became world-class schools for the teaching of programming, website design, website applications, and virtually everything else relating to computers, and their graduates are in great demand, whereas American graduates of computer training programs and courses are generally not as good. If education in the United States were made competitive, the country would have world-class educational institutions all over the place pouring out graduates able to compete with the graduates of the more productive colleges and universities of other countries. Our schools in America have to be free to determine what's best, instead of government regulators who really have no idea what they're doing or the damage they're causing. I saw it happening during the 18 years I ran my proprietary school, and had to close the doors because of this excessive government regulation. The lack of a competitive education system benefits the professors of the colleges and universities because they are hired for life, when they get tenure, and it doesn't matter whether they are good as teachers or whether they are teaching the right subjects. To protect their tenure, it is deemed necessary to prevent competition from the more flexible proprietary schools, through excessive regulation designed to put them out of business. In this way, the student loan money, which they would otherwise get, will not go to the less efficient, more costly, colleges and universities, with students having to pay+ tuition and other costs that are far in excess of what they can repay out of earnings, creating generations of impoverished college graduates unable to obtain enough income from employment (at Wal-Mart or other employers) to pay back their student loans with interest, and thanks to the Bush Administration are no longer able to eliminate their student loans in bankruptcy. I have dealt at length with this problem in my book (2004, self published) entitled Self Employment - To Avoid the Evil Economic Trio of Outsourcing, Globalization and Declining Standard of Living. Website for my Self Employment Book and 2 other books.

Before explaining the new curriculum which needs to be taught somewhere (and I'm now deciding that the curriculum should be taught in the final or 4th year of high school as an option instead of a college entrance curriculum), I want to show you how there is a huge, unsatisfied need for this new curriculum.

I have been a small business person my whole life, starting at age 9, when I had a newspaper route in North Platte, Nebraska. I didn't realize it at the time but I was the owner of a small business, myself, my bike, my paper route, my metal ring of cards indicating each of my approximately 100 customers for the daily newspaper I was distributing to homeowners along my bicycle paper route. If I didn't collect the weekly sum of $.15 (or whatever it was at the time), I lost money, because I had to pay the newspaper publisher for all of the copies they delivered to me.

Here is the present need for the nation's 30,000,000 "Small Business Entities", of which I am one. It is for the top person in the 1-person firm (or the top person in a 1-10 person firm) to spend less time on computer, applications, financial matters, and internet-related technology and more time on the business or other activity in which the Small Business Entity is engaged, whether it be law, medicine, architecture, engineering, automobile repair, making loans, trading, selling auto parts, running a church or synagogue, or running a small government agency. The top person in each of these activities have this one thing in common: they are spending too much time trying to solve an ever-increasing number of technical problems and spending much less time doing the activities of their Small Business Entity. What they need is to find someone to do these 500+ technical things that need to be done, and prevent the self-employed person and other top persons in firms having 2-10 persons from conducting the entity's business (or non-profit or governmental or religious or professional) activities.

As a Small Business Entity person (attorney), I am willing to pay someone a percentage of what additional money I could earn if my time were not used up doing technical things I'm not trained to do, such as failed downloads when I try to purchase software online, streaming video, a password system for easier access to websites, routers, networks, backups, twitter, facebook, blogging (to develop new business, if you have nothing else to do), Skype, broadband alternatives if you lose broadband for some reason, video conferencing, email filters, calendars, credit card facilities, websites and website commerce, telephone upgrades, cell telephones, portable computers (netbooks, notebooks, Ibooks, etc.), and whatever else you can think which takes my time away from earning $450 per hour, the amount I now charge clients for my legal time. Some lawyers charge $1,000 or more per hour. In businesses where the top person does not charge by the hour there is a way of calculating a comparable hourly rate, which is to take the profitability of a one-person business and divide it by the number of hours devoted to the business each year, to arrive at an hourly rate - such as $200 or $350, for example.

I am willing to pay a person $150 per hour (or 1/3rd of my $450 hourly rate) for each hour per week that the person can save me in my technical time, so that if the high school graduate trained in 500+ different technical disciplines can save me 20 hours per week in technical time (for which I earn no money at all because I have nobody to charge for such time), I will be very pleased to pay that person $3,000 per week. If however, the person saves me only 5 hours per week, how much should I pay the person? The answer will surprise you. I will fire the person and look for someone else. I don't want 20 people each saving me one hour per week. I want one person to save me 20 or 30 hours per week, but I need a market of trained people so when one person doesn't work out I can go back into the market and find a replacement, immediately, and have that replacement start the next day. If a community gives this training to students in their last year of high school (and to adults in the community through corresponding evening and weekend classes), the town or village will create a market of trained persons to enable local Small Business Entities (such as lawyers, doctors, self employed persons, churches, small non-profit and small governmental agencies) to hire graduates and fire them if they don't work out, and hire a replacement. The most skilled graduates (whether they be 17-year old minority, gay, handicapped or elderly persons) will be able to get the job, especially when the market is new and developing. In later years for this new career field it will become more competitive, but at the outset even the below average graduates will be given a chance to show their stuff.

Part of the training program is to explain how the technical person can get help if he/she can't solve a problem. There are more skilled persons who can, and the training program should teach students how to find persons who can resolve these more difficult technical problems. For example, with a router installation problem, you may be able to get the vendor on the telephone and have them complete your installation. Another solution is to pay a fee for additional support. Students have to be taught what to do if they can't solve the problem. This way, the problem can be resolved without involvement of the top person in the business or organization, saving his/her time, which is what this is all about - saving time of the top person in the organization, so that he/she can use this time more profitably.

• purchase and install a router
• set up networking among 2-10 computers in an office
• set up and manage free video conferencing
• set up streaming video
• perform regular backups on an external drive (such as My Book Live)
• manage a project or hourly billing system
• perform blog marketing if there is nothing else to do
• manage an office calendar
• create websites with income-producing capability
• update websites
• create safe and manageable password system
• perform accounting functions
• create YouTube videos and upload to YouTube and Facebook
• manage facebook and twitter accounts
• use robo-dialing where appropriate
• routine maintenance for equipment
• inventory and purchase of supplies
• printing and paying for U.S. postage from the office computer
• monitor the cash flow
• deposit checks
• returns of defective equipment or software
• Internet searches for products and services
• follow up with new products and services
• manage email account(s)
• install and uninstall software
• reducing costs of data storage, telephone services, toner and ink supplies
• ability to use all programs in Microsoft Office 2020