I want to thank Chancellor Carmen Fariña, her staff, my friend Queen Makkada, and all of you for this event. It is a great moment that we are sharing.
Toya Graham and Baltimore have made national news. Did she fail her son? Did the school fail him? Did her son’s church fail him? Did her son’s friends fail him? Or was he just a David taking on Goliath? And for the other youth who were arrested, the school to prison pipeline is full of special ed students and yes a much better parent involvement is needed to help. We need the Toya Grahams of our nation to become parent leaders in our schools. We have to train them and train them well. Keep this in mind. Her son did not belong there with a ski mask and a rock in his hand without his mother’s knowledge.
The GED Hotline was there when Michael Bloomberg ran for mayor. The GED Hotline opposed No Child Left Behind under President Bush and favored No Person Left Behind. The GED Hotline woke up Jeb Bush and Florida and got Governor Eliot Spitzer to transfer $2.1 million into the budget for GED testing. The GED Hotline woke up New York City causing three GED reports, one by the mayor’s own office. The GED Hotline wrote about helping the residents of New York City’s Housing Projects and after ten years Mayor Bloomberg finally did something. He started the Young Men’s Initiative that has led to My Brother’s Keeper. The GED Hotline fought for the education of immigrants as early as 2001, bringing consulates of Latin America and the Caribbean together. The GED Hotline later took the CEO and President of the GED Testing Service to the embassies of Latin America to support President Obama’s Deferred Action. The GED Hotline praised Public Advocate Bill de Blasio’s Finish the GED program in 2013 which provided $250,000 in additional funding to help our youth. The GED Hotline told Queen Makkada years ago that a big reason why students fail state tests is that the teachers need training in how to effectively teach to the test. It is highly probable that Diane Ravitch, who now says that student test scores should not be used for teacher ratings, got the idea from me. The GED Hotline has helped tens of thousands of adults directly and indirectly, but it has failed. New York State has lost close to 100,000 GED diplomas among adults since 2002. That means that the vast majority of those people lost an opportunity.
I feel that helping parents is the key to success. I just spent five and a half hours in Rikers’ Correctional Facility and I liked it much better than I liked being in the Rubber Room in Brooklyn in 1999. I hope to bring an online program and a pilot project to help the families and friends of the incarcerated where those men, women, and teens can improve their education through the rich vocabulary and games provided by a software. The acquisition of the vocabulary will put people who learn the words on the road to college readiness. And in this way the formerly incarcerated will reenter society and study more if their parents are studying. Helping them will help all of you and keep us all safer. There are 100,000 people incarcerated there during the year.
Parent involvement can mean helping with passing state tests, staying in high school or earning a high school equivalency, passing college placement tests, preventing bullying, and helping the family, school, and community and more. There is a plan if you want all of that. It’s Up to You New York. We can achieve much better results.
These young people and others who are not incarcerated have children in universal pre-k. One of every four New Yorkers lacks a high school equivalency and we have the solution. I know that the colleges and the schools can work together and educate more adults, the parents in your community.
If you do what Queen Makkada has done, meaning work with hundreds of parents and their children who pass their state exams while attending different schools, you will be doing what successful charter schools do. Children cannot keep failing the state tests under the present volatile climate. Principals and teachers are getting fired, men and women who should not be fired. Michael Bloomberg said on the John Gambling show that it is alright to be subjective in firing someone. Joel Klein went along with this. We cannot accept that.
Years ago I sent a message to the City Council of New York and this is what I soon learned. Queen Makkada and I met a man named Isaac. No this is not a biblical story. Isaac told us that his cousin was connected with the DOE and the staff was told to account for compliance, Title One compliance. This was what I was asking for and it was being done. What happened to it? It is here right now, finally.
And Title 1 cannot be confined only to parents who come into school. No! We have to do what Joel Klein failed to do. We have to double, triple, and quadruple parent involvement. We have answers. We have solutions. Parents have to be engaged, helping their children pass state tests and helping children prepare for college placement exams. It’s Up to You New York.
I am in Joel Klein’s book, but Queen Makkada is not. Please see page 39 about the Rubber Room. I guess that Queen Makkada is not in his book, because she did not make it to the Rubber Room.
Today is an opportunity to finally do things right. A few years ago, I proposed a change to parent involvement at a UFT conference in Queens by which the parents have to be better engaged long before their children fail college placement tests. And now I am telling you that the future of parent involvement is through technology.
Queen Makkada and I made a special visit to the Tweed to talk about GED help for all of the schools in District 27. Where did it go? Nothing happened. We could have mobilized thousands of parents and their loved ones in a city where about 1.5 million adults do not have a GED. The parent who learns more can continue to be the first teacher of his or her child, but we lost that battle. The Tweed was asleep. Parents and their children should study together. I recently told parents in P.S. 89 Queens how they can learn common core material by studying from the new TASC High School Equivalency book and continue to help their children.
Queen Makkada invited me to the Tweed to attend a meeting with Chancellor Joel Klein. Joel Klein brought Shimon Waronker into the meeting. In that meeting, Joel Klein stated that he felt that District 27’s parents could be a model for the rest of the city. What happened? Nothing happened. Waronker made history by reducing the violence in JHS 22 Bronx. What Klein did not write about in his book is this. Joel Klein did not write about the extra services that the school had been given including: social workers, guidance counselors, family workers, and the school had a new science lab, a new library, laptop computer carts, and much more. These were things that were never revealed in Joel Klein’s book and you must understand why. All of this was left out as Joel Klein praised his principal leadership program. Even the New York Times fell for it. What Joel Klein was supposed to say was that the test scores did not go up. I say that parents have to know about these things, to be better informed. In addition, on math, ELA, and science tests the school recently scored 2 percent, 6 percent, and 18 percent receiving 3 and 4 on the state tests.
I asked Joel Klein’s tag team partner, the mayor, how we could get more gang members into GED testing seats faster. I did not ask how could we get them to class faster, but it would not have mattered. You see Every Child Does Not Matter. Bloomberg responded by saying Martin those youth come from dysfunctional families and we cannot get them into class. At the same time, Joel Klein was saying that coming from dysfunctional families was an excuse with him, an excuse that teachers should never use. And here the mighty mayor who appointed Joel Klein was saying the exact opposite. My attempt to help make New York a safer place failed.