Parents and students need more help now. Mothers want their children to succeed in school and that takes more remediation than pre-pandemic days. Mothers should be better informed in our great cities about what was missing and what was needed as lives were saved during the pandemic. The press and media are needed along with people in government. And I have had several good conversations of staff members of city council members but never a single response from the office of Mayor Eric Adams.
Congressman Charles Rangel and I spoke briefly at Pace University about two decades ago and the idea being presented here today in 2023 was generated by Rangel to me. That idea was soon rejected by Ted Gershon, a Rangel staff member.
Mothers and their children need help in education. State results are not good at all. They ought to be the ones crying out for help right now, but as I follow the news I see little of that. Those parents, fathers and mothers and their children who are young or even young adults or adults voted for our elected officials. They need a forum to speak and also learn about just what it will take to bring greater success now and in the future.
Here is a profile of Charlie Rangel. This is his early life.
He had a Puerto Rican father who was often unemployed (Charlie born in 1930).
Abusive father. Left the family when Charlie was only six.
Rangel was smart but was often truant. He started working in a store at the age of 8. He dropped out of school at 16.
A GED Roundtable of New York City members of Congress, the New York City Council, and the New York State Assembly. I soon held a GED Roundtable in New York City where there was attendance by a staff member of both the city council and the state assembly. The governments of Puerto Rico, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico were represented at the meeting. The President of the National Hispanic Bar Association, the Guardian Angels, the leading GED book company Steck-Vaughn, a GED representative from Washington, D.C., and others including the senior Hispanic advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton were there. I did all the work to bring people together and it took me about forty hours to accomplish that.
Today the Charlie Rangel proposal is back on the drawing board as I have reached out to people in Chicago and New York City. And yes, it still takes hours of work to bring people together. That is if they wish to be brought together to fight common problems plaguing our cities and nation. You can see that I learned something good from Charlie in putting my first event together.
Charles Rangel dropped out of high school in his youth, entered the United States Army at the time of the Korean War, and he earned a GED. He was always great to talk to at meetings where I met him again. He was just a kind, helpful man, looking out for others. He was “my brother’s keeper” before that program was designed by Barack Obama.
It’s really amazing how little people learn about what is needed. Never Is Now is back on the drawing board as hate has risen around the world against Jews (and others). Charlie Rangel is now could have made cities and towns around America safer through education back then and both Chicago and New York City are in the news about crime. Mayors have not learned enough and that was the story back then with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He did good things, but he failed. I brought the Guardian Angels into my life. I communicated with the New York City Housing Police, and they failed. Keep in mind that I taught in three New York City Housing Projects where shootings were taken place often. Keep in mind that I saved a youth from suspension who was being “set up” by the administration of Offsite Education Services of the old Board of Education and that I made trouble for the Auxiliary Services for High Schools program in a school where Connie “The Hawk” Hawkins became a basketball legend. And guess what? I sat in a rented car with Connie back then while he was making a documentary about his life in Brooklyn. Connie was awesome as we spoke.
I exposed things back then in the 1990s in El Diario-La Prensa, The New York Daily News, and New York Newsday. What I was doing should have been picked up by The Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and other newspapers and media.
Today I am in touch with names like Susan, Cayla, Michael, Chris, Graham, and more in the city newspapers and nothing is written that will bring great help to those people who have never finished high school. The newspapers are not there to provide the best help to the people. You can find out that truth in the monumental work about Robert Moses and the downfall of New York. You can see it in Europe at the beginning of World War II when the news media turned away from government propaganda to telling the real truth and then you can also see that that changed back to its original form. You can see it today in my emails to The Daily Caller, The Daily Signal, The National Review where I have written that Nazi Germany is where woke went to die and it now has offspring in our nation in Florida and elsewhere. I am also waiting for The Hechinger Report to write up some of my ideas.
So where is all this leading to? Conferencing is needed right now. Who is going to hold it back? There are Ted Gershons in communities everywhere. I “woke” up Florida in 2001, working with a great man in the office of Governor Jeb Bush, but today I would find opposition in the form of Ron DeSantis. And there are people in power all over that state and across the United States that could not solve the big problems. And before even putting together that conference, I write that the City Council of New York and the mayor’s office can have a mini conference right now. Within a week or two. It could last about an hour and it can be done online. Let me take you back to my article
Education Conference(s) for the American people
Posted January 16, 2023
“In addition to all that I have had a few words published in the past about how universal pre-k for the entire nation needs to be balanced by the education of adults or the parents of those children (young and older), but nobody listened to me. Former mayor Bill DeBlasio got a lot of credit starting that up and the education of adults has since suffered greatly. And it is still the same under a new mayor and a new chancellor in New York City and elsewhere.”
In that article (click here to see it) there was important information sent out to those in power in New York City and there has been no response. There was one paragraph, in particular, that nobody seemed to understand and that takes me back to what happened between Charles Rangel and me almost two decades ago. There is a big solution in the article that you, my reader, may locate when others did not. You’ve heard, I hope, of the DaVinci Code and I wrote my own education code back then. Find the paragraph. Investigate. Think and share. If you see something say something. And let the conference begin to help all the people.
I call upon the City Council of New York to delegate a staff member in each office to be online with me in a Zoom meeting. I can set aside the time each day during a week where everyone can meet, talk, care, and share. If for some reason each office’s designee cannot be in one meeting, a second opportunity will be available to attend. Whatever it Takes will be the theme along with Do the Right Thing for New York City. I say that teaching the history in this article matters a lot and our nation will be much better off when this truth marches on.
Amazing news for me to share. The last year of public record of annual GED statistics is back online to share.
Illinois 22,675 diplomas were handed out that year (1.4 percent delivery or the national average).
New York 31,282 diplomas were handed out that year (1.1 percent delivery or below the national average).
Illinois had a better passing rate which can be explained by the fact that the GED is free to take and people take their chances (a very good thing).
What about Chicago and New York City? Were those cities above, at, or below the state average? What about the people who were incarcerated? Since 2002 I have been telling people to know what is going on your own neighborhood or zip code.
A statistic that I do not report is the ethnicity of the candidate. African Americans 29.5 percent in Illinois and 40.5 percent in New York and for Hispanics 33.2 in Illinois and 31.2 in New York. You can see the larger gap there for African Americans.
Now that I have the statistics again, those statistics can be used to express or demonstrate much more including are the interests of Spanish language learners being met by the numbers, particularly now that both cities have had an increase in immigrants.
And before moving away from this important information, keep in mind (being fair) that 2013 was the last year of an easier test and history shows that numbers fell greatly and due to various reasons until they began to go up again. A major part of the problem has always been successfully mobilizing more people to study and succeed. That problem still exists, and something much better could be accomplished right now for the people in both cities.
Last night I was reading another article about the violence and crime in Chicago detailing its long history going back several decades and I definitely noticed where the failure lied. The article never mentioned the GED once.
And the solution that I have in mind for children who are not proficient on state tests has to be told. Remember that I say often that nobody listens to me and that is why I need government to be part of this. Communities have to be part of this. So it’s up to you New York and Chicago to come through.
Due to the pandemic and other factors, our nation’s schools lost 1 million students from high school in 2020.