City Councilman Robert Jackson spoke out at the Save The GED Rally At City Hall in New York City. He said you have to work hard and you have to study hard. That was excellent and anything less than that is the old, old, old message that keeps people back. Even Chancellor Matthew Goldstein of the City University told an audience years ago that this is the age of using your brain not your back. People in Suffolk are still in the Dark Ages. Please see my You Tube account mygedhotline. You will see that Marvin Thompson, the brother of Jam Master Jay, was the keynote speaker at this important event. Sean Bell's father, William Bell, has been a keynote speaker at my event in the Fifty Cent Garden in Jamaica. Why? We fight the violence and killings in our community through preventions, interventions, and GED power. Suffolk County keeps making the wrong moves, the wrong walk. Also see the Today Show of a few weeks ago on www.thegrio.com but type Walmart Jimmie Edwards Today Show and find thegrio there. This is an amazing story of hope that we should have been seeing eleven years ago when I started this GED campaign. The opening of the new annex can be accessed by looking in You Tube under the account martinezamro. Thank you Angel!

If 1,200,000 youth dropout of school each year and only 200,000 or so of them earn the GED in a year, you can see that GED programs and testing are actually helping about one-sixth of the youth. The GED testing helps about one out of every hundred people each year. Those Latino teachers and others who have spoken out against the GED are ignorant. The parallel in herbal medicine is sometimes classic. When someone gets pneumonia, that person has to take antibiotics or possibly die. I have seen that happen to people that I know. And what makes things worse is that those schools where there are Hispanic youth dropping out of school, those Latino teachers wash their hands of the youth, forgetting about them in their daily routines and their philosophy that helps just a few. They talk the talk and that is basically it, limiting their successes. If we all unite, we can deliver to this country a stronger community and nation.
This is a story of a large county that did not focus on one of the civil rights issues of our time. I thank Reverend Al Sharpton for speaking about the GED on his Saturday Show soon after I spoke to him about the GED and the role it has to play in civil rights. The GED, especially for the youth and minorities is critical to the future success of our nation. This is the story of the failure of people to get the kind of help that government, community, and corporate and philanthropic people are supposed to help provide by working together. Now the GED takes a back seat to job creation, which there will be little of. The booming economy of the Reagan and Clinton periods are taking place in other countries, as new world powers are emerging. We really have to be thankful that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were Americans and their patents helped American businesses, otherwise things would have been much worse a long time ago.

Please see the rest of the article by clicking the link.

What disturbs me really is that Steve Bellone had no campaign platform for the Hispanic community related to anything other than respect and diversity. There was nothing comparable to the already passed legislation in New York City to help the youth, also. So far it seems like weak political moves have been made, but we have to wait and see. Another problem to watch out for is if that often elected officials send their staff out into the community for a long time to assess the problems and needs of that community. I say that staff should have a big ear open to ideas, but people should be prepared on Day 1. I have written about this in the past and again recently about people taking jobs in other jurisdictions. A person who knows the community should know what to do and influence administrative and policy decisions right away. This should be one of the key elements in selecting the person right off the bat. That is what job interviews are about! When I walk into a room of people and talk about education, I am usually very effective. I stir up the room with my ideas about GED and now with other important issues, issues that the county has to deal with. I know that some people have disagreed with me and many residents who make statements are nothing more than proud people attending a meeting and they have not supported my ideas, but...but...but knowledgeable people all over the nation know that I am right. Community ignorance is a major problem, as it has always been. Now I wrote this last statement for a reason. I stand by the truth, not some fiction forced down on me by someone in a community.

Since the budget is the number item for County Executive Bellone, let us look at Texas and its balanced budget. Texas has been balancing the budget for years. Texas has a large Hispanic population. There are over 100,000 dropouts from school and the GED diplomas have fallen during the Perry years. This is alarming to me. Suffolk under Steve Levy may compare to Texas. Brentwood with its huge Hispanic population may not be as strong as elected officials are telling us. Central Islip is similar and so are other areas of Suffolk. The gap between Whites and Hispanics grew under everyone's eyes under Governor Rick Perry. Do you doubt that the same thing is going on in Suffolk and will continue to go on under Steve Bellone?

The important news coming from Texas may be equally true of all or most of the nation as I write about my home county Suffolk, New York. The appointment of Luis Montes Amaya is a good step and this is the moment for Luis to show his independence after working for Assemblyman Phil Ramos for many years. Brentwood has had some slight gains in education, but there has been no miracle there. Brentwood has had the F.B.I. helping its police. Brentwood, I hope, is about to gain by people working together to help the Hispanic community. I repeat what I have said and written before. I was with county executive elect Steve Levy who was in a van talking to him about educating the Hispanic community driven by a former vice-consul of El Salvador. He really did not do a good job. The loss of GED diplomas by the people of New York since 2002 will show that I am right. There was really no strong advocacy for the GED by Latinos in the legislature. Even though Luis will not be in the legislature, he must be a great advocate for all of the people and that means sharing the best ideas and the best resources. Brentwood lost and never got back its GED testing center and that has hurt the Hispanic community. If Luis and the other Steve (Steve Bellone) think that this diversity thing is all about respect, they are wrong. The future is in education. The large Asian population that has developed all over New York is an educated population. The Hispanic population cannot compare to this group, whether they are immigrants or not. Everyone is entitled to respect from Lucero to Lee to Lahiri. Education is the key again and Luis Montes Amaya just wrote and published an article about that on the internet. Here is where we separate the talk from the walk. The entire Hispanic community has to be part of the solution, because it did not do enough in the right areas to make a bigger difference. I have been very critical of Brentwood and its community. Steve Bellone may see the rich diversity there, but I have encountered ignorance and bad decisions. People at the recent community meeting with Bellone were fighting for educational programs and bringing school districts together. Not a single member of that community has worked closely with me since the F.B.I. arrived in the community. I guess the reason is that people are working on building up their power and trademark.

In New York City, there are several people making a difference in the area of GED. Mayor Bloomberg now stands at the top of the list, followed by people like Councilman Robert Jackson, the chairman of the education committee and Speaker Christine Quinn, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., and Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo. There is no such commitment in Suffolk County and there may never be that kind of commitment. Councilman Robert Jackson is the man who took time away from an important labor hearing in City Hall to speak for 8 minutes at my Save The GED Rally At City Hall and then he followed that up by publishing comments about my GED campaign in his newsletter. In Suffolk people are more conservative and they do not have those convincing reports about the GED that have been published in the city. Ignorance is bliss! The office of former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion helped me plant my GED Conference there years ago and in Suffolk County I have received help from a librarian, two consul generals, a new non-for profit that had just opened, and a restaurant owner. All of this points to one example of bad government, not good government. When your children do not earn diplomas, they spend most of their time being less competitive in this competitive world and less successful. I am glad Levy is gone, but I am unsure about Bellone.

My friends, Steve Bellone heard community people speak out about doing things that are going on in New York City. They spoke out about having Steve Bellone do something historic by bringing the school districts together. My dear associate Queen Makkada is about to do that with the support of elected officials and the staff of the Department of Education in New York City. The director of Family Engagement there has been notified that the new $50 million annex of PS/MS 42 in Far Rockaway could be used as the venue to bring all of the school districts together. Sure they have the power to do that and we will soon see if and when they will do it. This is what all of Suffolk has to do, but I can tell you that school districts do not easily cooperate with change from the outside.

There is a big crisis brewing in relation to the GED in New York. The test will change in 2014. The GED has accounted for between 27,000-39,000 diplomas a year and that is a large fraction of diplomas earned. The Spanish and French GED testing have been underutilized for many years. This has hurt minorities in our state. What is worse is that chaos may be coming in 2014! I wonder if the elected officials know about that, elected officials on all levels. The loss of tens of thousands of diplomas each year will be an educational tsunami. But you know something. This is America and life will go on.

Now let me get back to the $127,000,000 New York City initiative that I alluded to in praising Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He made serious mistakes in his 11 years. By putting up $30 million of his own money and enlisting George Soros to match those funds, he acknowledges that something has gone wrong in the schools that he controlled as mayor and in the communities that are his responsibility too. He is about to get things right. Suffolk is wrong, wrong, wrong!
Let me get back to Steve Bellone and Luis Montes Amaya. I noticed the Hispanics telling their people that County Executive Ed Mangano has given them the green light to get things done. Well let me share this hot item with you. The Hispanic community was given citizenship classes, but they were not given GED classes. The need for GED has always been greater than the need for citizenship classes. The same is true for English and literacy classes. Millions of people are not knocking at the door for citizenship, especially not undocumented people and people with the TPS status. Sure people working under Mangano are upset that he did not deliver GED classes during the worst economy we have known in my lifetime. So what I am telling you is this. We have to be careful about the statements made by appointees. Luis Montes Amaya has not made any statements to scrutinize, but the truth is the truth. You already know there is not too much money available and the help that the Hispanic community will often mean thinking outside the box. Let us now get on with the Bellone administration. I am tough on people, but as you know my strongest positions against people in power are because they keep messing up GED-wise. I have recently brought important things to light in Newark, New Jersey. I can do that because I know GED and I know the way people keep messing up.

Both Bellone and Amaya deserve time to learn and execute a plan for the community. How much? Not four years. They have to learn from the mistakes of other jurisdictions. The faster they learn the better off the Hispanic community will be. We need jobs now, true, but in a competitive world we also need an educated population. Education is one of the key factors in establishing businesses where job creation will be plentiful. It is a precondition. This makes it imperative to focus on the people and not, for example, on putting up new expensive office buildings that run over the budget. The nature of competitive business means that if California, Tennessee, and New York are being considered by a company that wants to relocate, the education of its population may be one of the major considerations. Improving conditions in Suffolk goes way beyond balancing the budget.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
WWW.MYGEDHOTLINE.COM
martin@mygedhotline.com

I have never heard from one. I spoke to one. One is gone. But here is what I realized while writing this article. They will give tax credits to the small business so that they can create jobs and they will reduce the minimum wage by taking your money away from you. College students, high school students and all others will have money taken away from them. Then you the parent will have to put up the difference to support your loved ones. So you lose, too. The children lose and you do, too. See the write up about Michelle Bachmann and there are others who either feel the same way or who will quickly take sides if they see the idea catches on. You know what here is information from Wikkipedia. Fiscal policy of Senator Bachmann. Eliminating the minimum wage is what Milton Friedman stood for. See the You Tube videos of Milton Friedman, the well known economist.

If we are going to wipe out unemployment by redistributing wealth to others, we can democratically redistribute it from the rich to the middle and lower class. See what Michelle Bachmann is about.

In the Minnesota Senate, Bachmann opposed minimum wage increases.[155] In an interview in late June 2011, Bachmann did not back away from her earlier proposal to eliminate the federal minimum wage, a change she said would "virtually wipe out unemployment."[156]

Here is how the Bachmann's have received federal subsidies and enjoyed all of the benefits of it. In personal financial disclosure reports for 2006 through 2009, Bachmann reported earning $32,500 to $105,000[44] from a farm that was owned at the time by her ailing father-in-law, Paul Bachmann. The farm received $260,000 in federal crop and disaster subsidies between 1995 and 2008.[49] Bachmann said that in 2006–2009, her husband acted as a trustee of the farm for his dying father and so, out of "an abundance of caution", she claimed the farm as income in financial disclosures, though it was her in-laws who profited from the farm during that period.[50]

The GED affects 40 million people in American and their loved ones or at least 80-135 million people. Taxation affects almost all of the 1 percent people and many of the 99 percent people. Maybe there should be a GED Party instead of the Tea Party. You know if we cannot create jobs that pay good money, if we cannot fight a war well to its finish, if we cannot agree on helping the world and decide to help our own, those 40 million people need help and people ought to know the truth about the state of education in this country. A large percentage of them can become Democrats and Republicans. A couple may even become Tea Party supporters. It is never too early to think about going to college (for our children) and it is never too early to earn a GED after dropping out of high school (for our children).

The political parties and the elected officials and candidates are making failing us, the news media is failing us, including the moderators of presidential debates and news, and community leaders are failing us. Why? Their message is so incomplete still. Their message is weak. Their message and their actions cost the tax payer unnecessary billions of dollars each year. Their message hurts families and the improvement of the services that people badly need. As a quick example: 700,000 gang members did not suddenly spring up overnight. Oh that number is accepted. Another example is the prison population over these last forty years. The conservative with his law and order campaign helped increase the incarceration of youth. That bill has been paid ever since and it is a very expensive bill to pay. Now there is movement among conservatives to let people out of jail because it cost the American tax payer too much money to keep low risk offenders in jail and it is cheaper to rehabilitate people out of jail. Things have become unsustainable!

Thing are getting worse as the gap gets bigger between African-Americans and Whites and Hispanics and Whites in the state of Texas. This is from the new IDRA report of Texas in 2010-2011. The White House and Univision must take a closer look at what they are doing together. These annual results do not look good, but to me they were predictable, especially during the worst recession we have known. The game plan is wrong, wrong, wrong! The kind of help that Texas should have been getting was drying up as the number of GED diplomas declined and over 100,000 students dropped out of school in Texas.

You have read the part about Newt Gingrich and apparently he is comfortable with firing union help in schools and replacing them with youth to clean up the schools. Of course he is against unions. Of course he is for competition. Of course he is for putting the youth against the older worker and both need jobs, especially these days. Fire the father and hire the son. Amazing politics, indeed. Is that the solution to the high unemployment among our youth? Maybe he will revise his plan and just fire only the young union workers so the fathers in the unions will be spared? What's really amazing to me again is that I told him that forty million adults do not have a GED and there was not a single comment to me. Maybe we can make them all apprentices when Newt Gingrich becomes president. The 21st Century Contract with America lacks an educational component. I guess he feels that educational improvements will just fall into place because of the 26 pages in his contract. Maybe we can trade the Yankees, Packers, and Celtics for some great Indian and Chinese scientists to make America great and improve education in this country. A good business deal would work well to improve education here. Gingrich wants to pay good students and who will subsidize this? Private companies or the middle class? On Meet the Press Gingrich said, “Education is the number one factor in our future prosperity, it’s the number one factor in national security and it’s the number one factor in [our] young people having a decent future. I agree with Al Sharpton, this is the number one civil right of the 21st century.” He does not seem to say anything new about education that he has not learned from Al Sharpton or his staff.

The debate took place tonight on December 10, 2011 and Ron Paul and Michelle Bachman do not want what I want. I want every member of every family to have a diploma. The conservatism of these people and all others, including Democrats, shows me each year that they all believe in slow progress. They just do not get it. Americans need to be educated and the states are doing a poor job. The current Texas report and the GED report for 2010 reveal all of it. As much as they talk about making America more powerful, they are all off the mark. I am sure none of the candidates know those numbers and they do not even care. All of the talk about vouchers and charter schools is inadequate. We can move faster if people were not so conservative or ignorant. Yes ignorant!

Getting back to the elimination of the minimum wage. I feel that we are all in competition with each other. We were in great competition with the Soviet Union. I recall Premier Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on a desk and telling America that Russia would bury us. Well China is currently doing what Russia did not know how to do. In Soviet countries unemployment was not a major problem because people were put to work by the government. They did not have much work to do either. Here we have been and we are more productive as people are not hired. If we eliminated the minimum wage and hired everyone, would we be just like the Soviet Union was. Everyone would be working but not everyone would be as productive because the work would be split. The net effect of the whole system would be that everyone would be poorer. Where would we find the money to pay the rent and other bills? The answer must be obvious. In the Soviet Union, people could not find apartments and buy cars and other things they needed.

The people in the Soviet Union remained poor and that is where the elimination of the minimum wage would take most people. But this is the United States and we are always supposed to be happy living here, because it is the greatest nation on Earth. The similarity with the Soviet Union is incredible and when we factor in the political parties and all the wealth they have derived because of belonging to the parties, things get even closer. We are expected to accept the growth of free market economies, because people would really be free, we are told. We went through great periods of our history where government did not limit the freedom of people and guess what. There was a Great Depression. There was crime and violence that had to be rooted out. Banks were being robbed. Okay some get robbed even today.

There was tremendous insecurity, but there were also Jim Crow laws, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan. My late grandmother referred to it as the Ku Ku Klan. Guess what! The Klan is active in North and South Carolina, assisting in a return to segregation, I am being told. The South is rising and it now has the jobs that New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit once had. When New York had the jobs, people from the South moved up north. We protest when Mexico and China get the jobs and we do not, but as one nation we have to remain silent when another region or state gets the jobs. The unemployed in Detroit, for example, by design or by their own fault are stuck today with homes that have no value and no job in sight. Neither China nor Mexico caused that. Businesses in our own backyard caused it.

I would love to hear from them now. Is it possible?
I guess if I am going to start a GED party in the United States, I will need the help of Simon Cowell and J Lo.

Martin Danenberg
7 Blazer Drive
Islandia, New York 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
www.mygedhotline.com

Trade guns for the GED should be the theme in communities that have been hit hard by gangs and violence for years. Wyandanch is clearly one of them. Communities have to learn more and one of those things is that the schools are not entirely responsible for the GED. Over half the people who take the test say they have had no preparation (this costs New York State a lot of money as about half of them fail). Also, the Boys and Girls Club has an important GED project with the Justice Department outside of New York. Mayor Bloomberg has his $127 million dollar project which is outside the school jurisdiction. I taught in the Consulate of El Salvador and that had nothing to do with the school district. After being involved with the community over the years, the community has to take a long, hard look at itself. I hope to see change and people thinking outside the box now. There are good things going on in the Town of Babylon, but they could have been much better. Elected officials, community organizations, and churches must take responsibility for not providing the very best to communities. Back in my day, people would joke around about politics. "What is a conservative," we were asked. The reply was a "liberal who gets mugged." And there was obvious truth in the response. I recently heard a conservative talk show host using that material. But there is obvious truth to this too. What is a liberal? A conservative who gets mugged. This should show people that we in we are in all this struggle to keep communities safe together. There are liberal answers that conservatives are employing all over our nation. All of us must help the at-risk youth on Long Island and employ much better ideas than current and past administrations have used. A quick example is that every recreation center needs a GED program.

I guess Antonio Martinez and Steve Bellone know about the sea of Salvadorans that attend the festival in Brentwood. Most of those people need education. Sure diversity is important and diversity programs are being initiated and assisted by those who before did nothing. In the struggle to achieve civil rights, the leaders have neglected the education of millions of people. We do have to respect the immigrants and others, but I have heard nothing really or very little that is vital to the interests of those communities. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, after failing to reach the youth in New York City, has the new Young Men's Initiative. As of this moment, what does Steve Bellone have in mind? This is the kind of thing that Joie Brown is writing about in her article about Walking the Walk. How about this Trade Guns for the GED in Suffolk County. We have seen trade guns for toys and trade guns for money, but what about finally educating the people so they can fish for themselves. There are also things that I will reveal about minimum wage jobs for people into reentry and others who are participating in a program where the pay is not that good.
I am closely associated with the Sean Bell Foundation, not with Steve Bellone. What a difference a few letters can make! Bell-Bellone! Still worlds apart. The Sean Bell Community Center is actively helping people with the GED. William Bell has spoken to youth over the years and they recognize how important it is to get on track. Anyone who left GED help up to BOCES did not keep tab of what was going on all those years. I would imagine that that did not help Wyandanch too much.

I recently watched the video of Steve Bellone, the candidate, and I noticed that he has been helping people coming out of jail. Now that is one of the things that I am committed to, but I am not so sure that people connected with Bellone that know me can get things done with the scarce resources left after eight years of Steve Levy. Here is a valid point. The people under Edward Mangano are providing citizenship classes, but are frustrated that no GED classes have been provided. GED diplomas are needed for jobs, better jobs for people who are in reentry programs. This was the principal point of Barack Obama's education platform as he addressed the GED issue and providing green jobs. Have you heard the same thing from the Steve Bellone campaign? Did they do their homework on providing green jobs or are they just providing jobs that nobody wants. You know it was the same way in the South back in the day as African-Americans did the jobs that were most dangerous and were not paid well to do those jobs. You can read about this in my article on Thomas Sowell. Okay the Bellone effort is not bad, but it does need great improvements. I have known Antonio Martinez for years, but I have not heard a thing from him over the years. No dialogue, no improvement!

I helped a Salvadoran who escaped the Civil War obtain his GED in the Consulate of El Salvador. It made me famous in the Salvadoran community all over the world. It later resulted in my collaboration with the Foreign Ministry of El Salvador, providing an educational initiative for the consulates of El Salvador in the United States. As I watched the Bellone video, I really did not see an educational platform and I think this is the kind of thing that Joie Brown was referring to today in her article in Newsday. It is very important to receive the suggestions of people to help the government and we should never give up trying to make improvements; however, after calling the Bellone campaign and talking to the Democratic chairman and not even receiving their input or their request for more information, I feel that what is going on in New York City and across New York State is not happening in the conservative county of Suffolk. A t-risk youth need education and jobs. We only have to find out about what other counties are doing to know what is wrong. On top of that poverty has increased on Long Island recently and that should impact greatly on families and the youth. Come on Bellone Transition Team! Tell us you are ready now to make a great difference and do not make us wait until January to find out what we should have known last month.

Martin Danenberg
7 Blazer Drive
Islandia, New York 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
www.mygedhotline.com

Conservatives on the radio still refer to the failure of the War on Poverty and to high spending in schools that has not improved things much. Sure there were failures and progress has not been what most people expected. There are reasons. Yes the War on Poverty could have been much more successful and the truth is that I was not in a position to help then, but I know that I can help now and bring all reasonable people together. Andy Rooney has passed on and it happened only days after his retirement announcement. I have my complaints just like this great journalist had his and my complaints are focused on the schools and the their communities. Television can do much more to transform schools and communities. I am thankful that I had a chance to talk to Joe Frazier years ago and he has a place of honor on my website because of the wonderful discussion about the GED. In that photo the champ was throwing a right hook at my midsection.

My time was well spent at the Conference as I moved around, taking part in the high school to college workshop and later in the bullying workshop. Upon entering the hotel and seeing the people at the conference, I was not sure if this event was going to be a successful one for me, but I quickly saw that I could impact on the people. In the high school to college workshop, I asked a speaker from the City University to inform us how we can help the children of parents with a parent involvement program that would insure that more students entering the college would pass their placement exams. In other words how can we help the poor with ideas and resources that benefit the middle class and the wealthy in the city? The question was not answered. I think it was not answered because the representative of the university does not know that much about parent involvement. She did say that this was the problem of the schools and not the university, but the university has a course that could be taken to pass each placement exam. I was really disappointed by the answer, but, hey, if people are not prepared to help that is what we get. A UFT member commented that the high failure on the placement exams is the fault of the mayor who is in charge of the schools. Yes and no. Statistics that have been released show that the failure has fallen slightly and those figures are from the university, but I think that the mayor could have done much, much more and things would have been much much better. We will move forward in the following weeks to provide those schools and possibly all Title 1 schools with a plan of action to inform the parents about this process well in advance of graduation from high school. In this way, their children can me more adequately prepared to take and pass the placement exams instead of setting those high school graduates up for failure on the placement exams and creating a negative environment for them.

In the bullying workshop, I told the audience about the bullying workshop presented by Brett Scudder and the article that I wrote and presented to Deputy Chancellor Eric Nadelstern. You can go back to that article on the website where I publish my work....ahorre.com/ged. I asked the instructor to name a school or schools where bullying was greatly diminished by the school and that school is the Council for Unity. If that school has a model for success that can be replicated immediately, it should be presented to schools all over the city to transform the city.

Here we have a city where people often want more help in important matters and we remain divided on so many critical issues. There are advocates who say that we can arrest fewer people on low level activities and then there is evidence that arresting people limits violent crime. The community has never maximized its effort by thinking out of the box. Title One Parent Involvement programs have to be checked out. It may be likely that parents are doing other things besides drug prevention and that members of their own family are being arrested for selling pot and going to jail. Taking into account that drug prevention can be and should be an important part of parent involvement in the schools everywhere, communities can do much more to prevent young people from going to jail and ruining their future. The word has to be spread throughout the city and it cannot be done by proud individuals that say that the parent is the first teacher and it is the parent's responsibility. The expression "It takes a village to raise a child" is important in this matter and I believe that the city of New York can be transformed by people other than the police. The police have their role like everyone else, but things can be much better in our schools and in our streets.

Queen Makkada was the catalyst for bringing me to this conference in Queens. She has been the catalyst for many things that I have done, including speaking in Birmingham, Alabama at a national conference. She impacted successfully on parents in other schools who have been led astray by staff of the Department of Education of the City of New York.

This was taken from Steve Bellone for Suffolk County Executive. I spoke with the Police Commissioner a few days ago and he assured me that we need parent involvement in fighting drug use in Suffolk County. There is a dog sniffing initiative in Suffolk County and it needs greater parent involvement to produce great results. The parents woke the police up to take greater action and the parents must play a greater role in the process. I have reported that girls are being raped by gang members after giving them drugs in clubs out where I live in the same county and I see no effort to produce great change through informing the parents who have a right to know the truth. This effort of mine started in 2004 and I learned from a teenager that the same thing is going on today in Central Islip. This is the fault of individuals who commit these atrocities. True! But much more could have been done to help and there are people in my community that turn their backs and say that many problems are Latino problems. So there is a division, a great division, and nobody seems to be able to bring people together to fight the problems with new ideas. There are drug prevention programs in place, but much more is needed and now.
Improving Public Safety. Gang violence and drug use threatens residents and dampens the business environment. Bellone knows we must focus our police force solely on fighting crime, and empower precincts captains to improve neighborhood safety.

Queen Makkada impacted on parents outside the conference workshops by explaining things she has learned by being trained in parent involvement. This is what happened. She shared information with parent leaders who are elected as Title 1 Reps to PA/PTA the difference between Title 1 Parent Advisory Councils, (NCLB mandates PACs) and PA/PTA responsibility and with Thomas Edison's Title 1 Rep and a Parent Leader from P.S. 30Q things to help them build their parent involvement capacity. Both parent Leaders thanked her for helpful information that Title 1 in the PA/PTA setting does not allow for true legitimate Title 1 conversation, consultation, or engagement because after the parents have sat through the hour or hour and a half of a PTA Meeting they are exhausted and do not want to hear more. They also agreed that Title 1 engagement deals with data that parents do not like to review. In my opinion this makes the typical Title 1 school much less effective than it should be. This is a condition that the chancellor has permitted for years and this is one of the things that leads a school to a poor rating linked with either a school closing or possible closing. The recent emphasis by Chancellor Dennis Walcott and the Department of Education on parent engagement is way too late. What were the signs of this kind of effort under Cathie Black? You tell me. Parents were frustrated by Cathie Black, but what was being done behind the scenes in the office to promote parent engagement? This kind of catch up education is the result of weak and harmful policies that any true investigation made would reveal that there has been chaos, confusion, fear, and many other unacceptable practices tolerated by the DOE all those years, damaging the claims made by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Martin N. Danenberg
7 Blazer Drive
Islandia, New York 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com

www.mygedhotline.com

Gang related shooting on Brighton Beach boardwalk in New York City last week. Teen killed.
Gang related shooting in East New York, 20 shots fired, one person killed and at least eight wounded. Gang members arrested all over New York City, including Far Rockaway where 18 were locked up after a 14 month investigation. Juan Otero was shot in the hand last year, but killed last week and it was reported that his family says he was involved in a gang. Eighty-four gang members arrested in Far Rockaway last year and of course among them were members of Far Rockaway and South Jamaica Public Houses (I was the last GED teacher in the South Jamaica Public Houses). Youth who could have gotten a GED and gone on to college ended up in gangs in the South Jamaica Public Houses. I was making decisions that the administration could not handle back then. I transferred a student from South Jamaica to Far Rockaway. Yes to Far Rockaway. He was upset at first, but he soon came back and thanked me because he was able to earn his GED faster the way I chose. Honestly, I never even expected that youth to come back to see me, but he did and that tells you how we can transform disruptive youth. All of the GED programs should be reopened in those public houses now to help communities and not just help the twenty or so students in classes. My ideas can produce much greater results than ever before!

Newark has 23 gangs and 2,600 gang members. Wow! Operation Snug is on the streets of New York City, but tell me this. How many people has Operation Snug helped earn the GED or get back into high school? Where is the evidence that they have helped in this critical age of education or is education in the 21st century about teaching youth only about the hazards of a life of crime and gang banging? You see that Operation Snug told the New York State Assembly in meetings that they were going to get the youth back into studying during meetings there. Has that promise been kept? Let's do the "right thing" for a change. Even District Attorney Kathleen Rice had a GED component in her initiative in Nassau County, an initiative that has had some success. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hines, I have been told, is interested in my GED initiative, and I plan to move forward to make things work and help Brooklyn. SNUG could have been much better from the start.

Even in the great GED year of 2001 when there was a national increase of 39.2 percent, New Jersey had only a 1.6 percent increase. There were 43 states that increased more than New Jersey. As a GED teacher in New York City, I taught youth who had been incarcerated, youth who had shot a gun at people, and a three time loser called a "menace to society" by a judge. I taught GED in New York City Housing projects and I was sometimes alone. There were lots of comments made to me about shoot outs in the projects at that time. I know someone who hired an ex-convict to teach GED in D.C. and someone else who announced a GED class in Wilmington, Delaware for his barber shop and 300 people applied for the class (and he shot and paralyzed weeks later). It is time for America to step up to the plate to help and prove that education is the key to success. Guess which candidate for president in 2008 wrote about the 4 million disconnected youth who were unemployed, underemployed, and who had no diploma? What happened to that? Where does Mayor Cory Booker fit into this? Did he have a GED plan on day one? Is he ready to cooperate and tell all of the other mayors in the United States where things have gone wrong?

Notice that the educational gap gets bigger as students do not graduate and people of color do not earn a GED. The GED programs under the NYC DOE did not perform well in terms of diplomas and the people of Newark should not be fooled by the presentation of higher GED passing percentages for New York City. The people that are responsible cannot escape the heat on this and I hope that the same things do not happen during the next school year in Newark There is much more to this story which I can share another time.

The business community is calling for all kinds of new efforts and the police are complying on many levels. I am calling for a doubling and tripling of GED diplomas for adults in those communities. The businesses can help a lot because the bodega is the heart of the community and the councilmen know there are no supermarkets in those areas. Councilman Ras Baraka acknowledged this and much more, expressing that the bodegas make lunch and dinner for people.

The pipeline to prison has to either be clogged up or shut down. That happens by better policing in communities, including mentoring of all police as they perform their duties (mentoring about the GED, mentoring of the clergy task force that includes quick action to help youth and gang members with the GED), workforce projects need the GED program, child-care programs where the parents lack a GED need this help, and detectives who interrogate gang members, others who are arrested need the program to help hundreds of youth each year who are not educated, and people who are coming out of jail after serving their time need the GED program immediately to keep them on the right road of reentry. The program will not be limited to gang members and reentry. Victims of domestic violence and their perpetrators will receive the same help. There are ways to do the same thing to help the youth stay in high school and not drop out.

New Jersey GED is slightly different from and harder than New York's GED. The marks are now the same (they were higher for many years and this hurt law enforcement agencies as the youth who failed sometimes turned to crime, gangs, and drugs). The problem is the sixth part of the GED which should be eliminated. By the way, if New Jersey residents pass the Writing, Mathematics, Social Studies, Science, and Literature and the Arts and move to New York, New York will accept all of the passing marks and if the score is 2,250 it will grant a diploma without even retesting people. I know a Spanish pastor who is 70 years old who may soon pass all five parts in Spanish, but he may fail the sixth part which is in English and not earn a diploma. Okay he may never join a gang or sell drugs, but he should not have to move to New York to realize his dream of earning a GED.

I had the opportunity to tell the new Director of Newark police that there has been a pipeline to prison in Newark, New Jersey for a long time (decades of course). There are people coming out of prison and gang members that have created the climate of delinquency in communities that terrorize store owners and residents. I told the audience that there have been three reports about GED in New York (GED is on the radar of the city council there, but much has to be done because members still have not done things they should have done). Since Newark has such a high dropout rate from school, it is important for everyone to know how many GED diplomas are being earned by residents in their zip codes. New Jersey state figures for GED passers are not good, but those figures probably would reveal that the suburbs are benefiting most and the urban sectors are not. White people have an 81.2 percent passing rate, African-Americans have a 52.0 percent passing rate, and Hispanics have a 57.5 percent passing rate. If Hispanics and African-Americans had the same passing rate as Whites, there would be more opportunities for Hispanics and African-Americans all over the state. Those figures and the lack of a "buzz" about the GED in communities impacts on jobs and parental involvement in the schools of Newark. That is why the Title One schools of Newark need my GED program in English and Spanish, transforming communities as federal funds are used saving Newark money and putting the "buzz" on the streets about education.

There were 6,962 diplomas issued in 2009 in New Jersey. Any businessman or resident knows that the delivery system for services has to be good. Newark knows that police often do not respond quickly and the police are working on improvements in the system. The national average for GED is 0.9 percent and New Jersey was 0.6 percent in 2009. Although New Jersey does well on national exams for school children, it is doing very poorly right now GED-wise, making New Jersey less competitive than people think. Only 766 people took the GED in Spanish in 2009 across New Jersey and 4 in French. These figures indicate to me a great disconnect between the Hispanic, Haitian, and French speaking African communities and the GED administration in the state. Keep in mind that the passing rate on the Spanish GED may be lower than 57.5 percent. Based on the statistics that I see, North Carolina may be testing more Hispanics than New Jersey soon. Wow! Since you now know how poorly New Jersey is doing, the minority percentage in the cities may be as low as .03 percent. There were 8,430 diplomas in 1991 and 9,077 diplomas in 1999. So tell me this. Why can't we bring up the numbers again and make sure that a large percentage of the increase is among at-risk youth and adults?

One last point about Nassau police and the Hispanic community. I just read about a "forum" related to seeking the hiring of more bilingual police officers there. I know one of the women mentioned in the article, but I have not really been in touch with her for years. There were other Hispanic community people mentioned in the article. If they could reduce the educational requirement for the job, they could get more Hispanics interested in becoming police officers, meaning hiring men and women who have not graduated from high school or attained a GED. There are people whose parents were in the military in Central America who may aspire to the paramilitary police work, but they may not have a diploma or speak the English language well enough to perform their duties among English language speaking people. Again, as I mentioned about Operation Snug above, where is the dedicated work and initiatives of those critics who attend these events. Aside from criticisms and suggestions, where are the initiatives in place that produce change? In a city like Newark or in communities like Hempstead and Freeport in Nassau County, New York, the likelihood of finding qualified people who want to be police officers is highly unlikely. That is where the GED or a return to high school for youth and some concrete workshops or courses for youth where they could be informed and trained so that they could realize their dreams would be useful.

In the South Jamaica Public Housing program I helped a student obtain her high school diploma by helping her pass the regents exam.

After the GED program was closed and the students were dispersed to another program, I noticed that Offsite Educational Services did not register an underage student into a regular high school program. He was 15 and not eligible for GED instruction. A young man called me the other day and he told me that at the age of 15 he was shot in the back and his high school in Brooklyn would not permit him back into school. Now at the age of 19, he called the GED Hotline to find out if he passed the GED. Within minutes I gave him the right GED Hotline to call for that and he later told me passed his GED. It is just too bad that his rights were violated by the Department of Education about four years ago. Crooklyn, I mean Brooklyn, is a tough place sometimes to get an education.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
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Here are the new numbers for perhaps the schools that are doing the poorest on Long Island. There may be progress or even good progress, but there is a lot of work to be done. A closer look at what the schools are doing will be helpful, but the communities probably need much greater help. Hempstead has returned to higher crime after the FBI was called in, for example. The FBI did not give any guarantees that things would remain better and they did not.
Freeport, Hempstead, Roosevelt, Uniondale, Westbury
Graduation rates for each 71%, 46%, 54%, 67%, 78%
Advanced regents passed 23%, 4%, 2%, 22%, 13%
State regents mark 18%, 5%, 9%, 20%, 15%
Two year college admission 27%, 24%, 35%, 41%, 44%
Four year college admission 28%, 41%, 29%, 40% 40%

Amityville, Brentwood, Bridgehampton, Central Islip, Copiague, Wyandanch
Graduation rates for each 78%, 72 %, 90%, 58%, 79%, 52%
Advanced regents passed 20%, 21% 15%, 9%, 24%, 3%
State regents mark 20% 21%, 15% 15% 16% 5%
Two year college admission 45%, 43%, 30%, 42%, 49%, 50%
Four year college admissions 46% 21%, 50%, 25%, 28%, 24%
As you can see some areas are weak for these high schools and other areas are better. I guess people can pick or choose what the determining factors are. Will it be the low passing rates on regents or graduation rates or college admission rates. The greatest weight for me was passing the regents.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
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www.ahorre.com/ged
www.ahorre.com
www.aspira.org

I want to thank Juana Edmond for inviting me to Newark and introducing me to the youth in her boxing gym over a week ago and to lots of business people and community leaders on Friday. Let us form the Generation of Sports and Education together with players from the Texas Rangers and other professional teams. Let us make sure that all recreational programs have a GED component for those youth who have dropped out of school.

766 people took the GED in Spanish in 2009 in the entire state of New Jersey and probably 450 passed. That's it! That's it! 26 percent of passers were Hispanic compared with 42.2 percent for White people. Remember this when you read the rest of the article, because there will be more explained there. Newark's leadership has failed its people for forty years or more and it is failing the people as I write this article. It is time for change. Es el momento! There are probably 800 people who should take the GED in Spanish in Newark each year. The communities affected by delinquency can triumph as gang members are led to GED acquisition and/or their return to high school and English language acquisition. Bad decisions are hurting life in Newark and no amount of rhetoric by President Obama, Governor Christie, or Mayor Booker can help get the city of Newark out of the mess. I would be happy to address the solutions needed, solutions other than locking up everyone. Something that is not going to happen.

Education has to be improved for everyone. In the last decade, I have learned that a huge portion of the Hispanic dropout rate occurs around the ninth grade of school. Surely a large portion of that dropout rate is caused by Mexican immigrants in the United States because the Mexican immigrant migrates more quickly and more easily. Almost all those who spoke said that they spoke as people who want to unite all Latinos. I hope we can all unite around this. New Jersey is not a good GED state and the people of Newark can ask for the numbers of people in Newark who earn a GED. It would not shock me if the Hispanic community earned between one-quarter and one half of the state percentage or in other words Hispanics keep falling behind in numbers. Spanish GED testing may be insufficient because of state administrators who do not provide appropriate access to Spanish GED testing. Only 25,000 people take the GED in Spanish across the whole United States in a year. So the problem is national and nobody is doing anything about it. I am sure that there are lots of Hispanic youth who have been introduced to gangs or their friends are in gangs (even introduced in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, or in other countries such as El Salvador and Mexico) who could profit by taking the GED in Spanish, but they are blocked from doing it by certain conditions that have to be addressed now by Mayor Cory Booker and other leaders in Newark. In a city in Texas over 900 gang members are being educated with Justice Department funds granted to the Boys and Girls Club. This is not happening in Newark, New York City, Brentwood, and most places around the country. There is nothing even approaching it in other localities and the reason is that the elected officials are putting all of the money needed into extra police. You would think that they could use the police more effectively, even if they put no money into GED programs. Housing police and police on the streets, for example, could have a project directed by the commissioner to provide an outreach to problematic youth where those youth would be encouraged by all police to return to school or study for the GED immediately. Much of Puerto Rico needs the same initiative and the police in the Dominican Republic could help youth get back in to school in the Dominican Republic. E palante que vamos por educación. Hey Mexico needs to do the same thing to restore security and bring back the tourism it once had.

Since the Hispanic community has a much higher dropout rate from school, it is important for those communities to realize this important fact. If half the students who drop out are Hispanics, the percentage of Hispanics taking the GED and passing the GED has to be much higher than it is. The annual GED results will clearly show everyone that although many Hispanics are taking the GED, due to high numbers of Whites who take and pass the GED, the gap keeps getting bigger. People can research this by looking at the American Council on Education's annual GED statistical report for each year. The report for 2010 is not available yet, but check 2009 and years before.

The record speaks for itself. I have conducted events and spoken at events.
World Convention of Iglesias de Asambleas Cristianas
World Convention of Salvadorans
Congress of the United States
Conferences with Aspira of New York
Conferences in the Consulate of El Salvador and the Central Islip Public Library
Conferences in the New York State Assembly and Senate
A.F.L.-C.I.O. Building in Washington, D.C. with L.C.C.L.A.
Television appearances including HITN-TV the Hispanic network, Alma Visión in New York, and Metro del Norte in Sosúa, RD

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
www.mygedhotline.com

www.geocities.com/gedhotline
www.ahorre.com/ged
www.ahorre.com
www.aspira.org

It was difficult to educate many African-Americans under gross racial discrimination and it is difficult to educate many of them under a system that is largely different. It has been difficult to educate other ethnic groups as well. I could rewrite history, including Black history, with my knowledge of GED. Just as the Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years and Blacks looked for 40 Acres and a Mule, the last 40 years have really been a great disaster for a large fraction of the Afro-American community. The lack of GED diplomas and getting on the wrong side of the law have driven the "pipeline to prison" as much as Black NBA stars have driven to the hoop to dunk or rap artists have affected our youth worldwide. We do not have to rewrite the history, but we have to do much more to change that written history through the cooperation of those who write it. I hope that my efforts are sending a new, powerful message out across America and I am thankful to everyone who is helping get the word out. I thank Champions 4 Champions and other organizations.

These are items that I extracted from the Sowell article:
Higher black unemployment
Racism keeping Blacks out of unions (not a government program at all)
Prevailing wages or union wages instead of lower wages
Loss of jobs to union workers (not a government program at all)
We would be shocked to learn that the unemployment rate of Black youth was a fraction of what it is today
The Walt Williams book will be an eye opener for its readers.

I do not think it will be an eye opener when other factors are revealed. One of those factors is education. When mayors and other elected officials talk to recent immigrants about working hard as the immigrants of other generations did, I cringe because this is no longer a world where back breaking work itself matters. Education is the critical thing and has been for decades. African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native-Americans have fallen farther and farther behind because of the lack of diplomas. You will not hear this in the You Tube lessons of conservative economist Milton Friedman.

My own comments about what Thomas Sowell says about the Walt Williams book:
There was racism for sure but by 1935 Blacks were on their way into unions where they were not before. Whether there were unions or not, Blacks were going to pay the price for racism and a heavy one at that.
Early census dates did not reveal the extent of education and by 1940 education was included in the census.
Ninety percent of African-Americans lived in the South around 1900 and most of them on farms, where life was different. They were also concentrated in rural areas more, and their children were not as likely to attend school as white children were.

Black workers were hired before 1930 because they were less likely to join a union.
You can see that African-Americans were forced into jobs that others would not do, dangerous jobs at lower pay. Milton Friedman must have glowed seeing his theory taking such a strong hold.
In the 1930's there were head hunters seeking out African-Americans in the South because of the demand for products at that time. There were also disastrous conditions affecting farms in the South.
You can see that employers were hiring Whites instead of Blacks first and the government tried to change things in 1941.

This is what I found after researching the problem and it took about one minute. I have underlined what may be critical information that will help explain things in a way that does not appear in the Thomas Sowell article in the New York Post.

Thomas Maloney says "correlation is not causation.
The fact that the government is larger now, and that black relative unemployment rates are
higher now, doesn't mean that big government causes high black relative unemployment.
If you think about the big picture (as outlined in my essay), the 20th century has been a period
of remarkable transformation in the place of African Americans - their place in the labor market,
their geographic place, etc. Their main initial locus of employment - agriculture - has collapsed in terms
of the number of jobs involved (mainly for good reasons, I'd argue - we're now able to produce more
agricultural products with fewer people). Their next main locus of employment - heavy industry in
the North and Midwest - has also collapsed. These things, plus the upheaval of the great migration,
plus ongoing racial animosity, have created challenges in the black community. I don't think government
regulation is the main driving force behind this process."

Thomas N. Maloney, University of Utah
The nineteenth century was a time of radical transformation in the political and legal status of African Americans. Blacks were freed from slavery and began to enjoy greater rights as citizens (though full recognition of their rights remained a long way off). Despite these dramatic developments, many economic and demographic characteristics of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century were not that different from what they had been in the mid-1800s. Tables 1 and 2 present characteristics of black and white Americans in 1900, as recorded in the Census for that year. (The 1900 Census did not record information on years of schooling or on income, so these important variables are left out of these tables, though they will be examined below.) According to the Census, ninety percent of African Americans still lived in the Southern US in 1900 -- roughly the same percentage as lived in the South in 1870. Three-quarters of black households were located in rural places. Only about one-fifth of African American household heads owned their own homes (less than half the percentage among whites). About half of black men and about thirty-five percent of black women who reported an occupation to the Census said that they worked as a farmer or a farm laborer, as opposed to about one-third of white men and about eight percent of white women. Outside of farm work, African American men and women were greatly concentrated in unskilled labor and service jobs. Most black children had not attended school in the year before the Census, and white children were much more likely to have attended. So a typical African American family at the start of the twentieth century lived and worked on a farm in the South, did not own its home, and was unlikely to have its children in school.
By 1990 (the most recent Census for which such statistics are available at the time of this writing), the economic conditions of African Americans had changed dramatically (see Tables 1 and 2). They had become much less concentrated in the South, in rural places, and in farming jobs and had entered better blue-collar jobs and the white-collar sector. They were nearly twice as likely to own their own homes at the end of the century as in 1900, and their rates of school attendance at all ages had risen sharply. Even after this century of change, though, African Americans were still relatively disadvantaged in terms of education, labor market success, and home ownership.
Table 1: Characteristics of Households in 1900 and 1990
1900 1990
Black White Black White
A. Region of Residence
South 90.1% 23.5% 53.0% 32.9%
Northeast 3.6% 31.8% 18.9% 20.9%
Midwest 5.8% 38.5% 18.9% 25.3%
West 0.5% 6.2% 9.2% 21.0%

B. Share Rural
75.8% 56.1% 11.9% 25.7%

C. Share of Homes Owner-Occupied
22.1% 49.2% 43.4% 67.3%
Based on household heads in Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Census samples for 1900 and 1990.
Table 2: Characteristics of Individuals in 1900 and 1990
1900 1990
Male Female Male Female
Black White Black White Black White Black White
A. Occupational Distribution
Professional/Technical 1.3% 3.8% 1.6% 10.7% 9.9% 17.2% 16.6% 21.9%
Proprietor/Manager/Official 0.8 6.9 0.2 2.6 6.5 14.7 5.4 10.0
Clerical 0.2 4.0 0.2 5.6 10.7 7.2 29.7 31.9
Sales 0.3 4.2 0.2 4.1 2.9 6.7 4.1 7.3

Craft 4.2 15.9 0 3.1 17.4 20.7 2.3 2.1
Operative 7.3 13.4 1.8 24.5 20.7 14.9 12.4 8.0
Laborer 25.5 14.0 6.5 1.5 12.2 7.2 2.0 1.5

Private Service 2.2 0.4 33.0 33.2 0.1 0 2.0 0.8
Other Service 4.8 2.4 20.6 6.6 18.5 9.0 25.3 15.8

Farmer 30.8 23.9 6.7 6.1 0.2 1.4 0.1 0.4
Farm Laborer 22.7 11.0 29.4 2.0 1.0 1.0 0.4 0.5

B. Percent Attending School by Age
Ages 6 to 13 37.8% 72.2% 41.9% 71.9% 94.5% 95.3% 94.2% 95.5
Ages 14 to 17 26.7 47.9 36.2 51.5 91.1 93.4 92.6 93.5
Ages 18 to 21 6.8 10.4 5.9 8.6 47.7 54.3 52.9 57.1
Based on Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Census samples for 1900 and 1990. Occupational distributions based on individuals aged 18 to 64 with recorded occupation. School attendance in 1900 refers to attendance at any time in the previous year. School attendance in 1990 refers to attendance since February 1 of that year.
These changes in the lives of African Americans did not occur continuously and steadily throughout the twentieth century. Rather, we can divide the century into three distinct eras: (1) the years from 1900 to 1915, prior to large-scale movement out of the South; (2) the years from 1916 to 1964, marked by migration and urbanization, but prior to the most important government efforts to reduce racial inequality; and (3) the years since 1965, characterized by government antidiscrimination efforts but also by economic shifts which have had a great impact on racial inequality and African American economic status.
1900-1915: Continuation of Nineteenth-Century Patterns
As was the case in the 1800s, African American economic life in the early 1900s centered on Southern cotton agriculture. African Americans grew cotton under a variety of contracts and institutional arrangements. Some were laborers hired for a short period for specific tasks. Many were tenant farmers, renting a piece of land and some of their tools and supplies, and paying the rent at the end of the growing season with a portion of their harvest. Records from Southern farms indicate that white and black farm laborers were paid similar wages, and that white and black tenant farmers worked under similar contracts for similar rental rates. Whites in general, however, were much more likely to own land. A similar pattern is found in Southern manufacturing in these years. Among the fairly small number of individuals employed in manufacturing in the South, white and black workers were often paid comparable wages if they worked at the same job for the same company. However, blacks were much less likely to hold better-paying skilled jobs, and they were more likely to work for lower-paying companies.
While the concentration of African Americans in cotton agriculture persisted, Southern black life changed in other ways in the early 1900s. Limitations on the legal rights of African Americans grew more severe in the South in this era. The 1896 Supreme Court decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson provided a legal basis for greater explicit segregation in American society. This decision allowed for the provision of separate facilities and services to blacks and whites as long as the facilities and services were equal. Through the early 1900s, many new laws, known as Jim Crow laws, were passed in Southern states creating legally segregated schools, transportation systems, and lodging. The requirement of equality was not generally enforced, however. Perhaps the most important and best-known example of separate and unequal facilities in the South was the system of public education. Through the first decades of the twentieth century, resources were funneled to white schools, raising teacher salaries and per-pupil funding while reducing class size. Black schools experienced no real improvements of this type. The result was a sharp decline in the relative quality of schooling available to African-American children.
1916-1964: Migration and Urbanization
The mid-1910s witnessed the first large-scale movement of African Americans out of the South. The share of African Americans living in the South fell by about four percentage points between 1910 and 1920 (with nearly all of this movement after 1915) and another six points between 1920 and 1930 (see Table 3). What caused this tremendous relocation of African Americans? The worsening political and social conditions in the South, noted above, certainly played a role. But the specific timing of the migration appears to be connected to economic factors. Northern employers in many industries faced strong demand for their products and so had a great need for labor. Their traditional source of cheap labor, European immigrants, dried up in the late 1910s as the coming of World War I interrupted international migration. After the end of the war, new laws limiting immigration to the US would keep the flow of European labor at a low level. Northern employers thus needed a new source of cheap labor, and they turned to Southern blacks. In some cases, employers would send recruiters to the South to find workers and to pay their way North. In addition to this pull from the North, economic events in the South served to push out many African Americans. Destruction of the cotton crop by the boll weevil, an insect that feeds on cotton plants, and poor weather in some places during these years made new opportunities in the North even more attractive.
Table 3: Share of African Americans Residing in the South
Year Share Living in South
1890 90%
1900 90%
1910 89%
1920 85%
1930 79%
1940 77%
1950 68%
1960 60%
1970 53%
1980 53%
1990 53%
Sources: 1890 to 1960: Historical Statistics of the United States, volume 1, pp. 22-23; 1970: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1973, p. 27; 1980: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1985, p. 31; 1990: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1996, p. 31.
Pay was certainly better, and opportunities were wider, in the North. Nonetheless, the region was not entirely welcoming to these migrants. As the black population in the North grew in the 1910s and 1920s, residential segregation grew more pronounced, as did school segregation. In some cases, racial tensions boiled over into deadly violence. The late 1910s were scarred by severe race riots in a number of cities, including East St. Louis (1917) and Chicago (1919).
Access to Jobs in the North
Within the context of this broader turmoil, black migrants did gain entry to new jobs in Northern manufacturing. As in Southern manufacturing, pay differences between blacks and whites working the same job at the same plant were generally small. However, black workers had access to a limited set of jobs and remained heavily concentrated in unskilled laborer positions. Black workers gained admittance to only a limited set of firms, as well. For instance, in the auto industry, the Ford Motor Company hired a tremendous number of black workers, while other auto makers in Detroit typically excluded these workers. Because their alternatives were limited, black workers could be worked very intensely and could also be used in particularly unpleasant and dangerous settings, such as the killing and cutting areas of meat packing plants, foundry departments in auto plants, and blast furnaces in steel plants.
Unions
Through the 1910s and 1920s, relations between black workers and Northern labor unions were often antagonistic. Many unions in the North had explicit rules barring membership by black workers. When faced with a strike (or the threat of a strike), employers often hired in black workers, knowing that these workers were unlikely to become members of the union or to be sympathetic to its goals. Indeed, there is evidence that black workers were used as strike breakers in a great number of labor disputes in the North in the 1910s and 1920s. Beginning in the mid-1930s, African Americans gained greater inclusion in the union movement. By that point, it was clear that black workers were entrenched in manufacturing, and that any broad-based organizing effort would have to include them.
Conditions around 1940
As is apparent in Table 3, black migration slowed in the 1930s, due to the onset of the Great Depression and the resulting high level of unemployment in the North in the 1930s. Beginning in about 1940, preparations for war again created tight labor markets in Northern cities, though, and, as in the late 1910s, African Americans journeyed north to take advantage of new opportunities. In some ways, moving to the North in the 1940s may have appeared less risky than it had during the World War I era. By 1940, there were large black communities in a number of Northern cities. Newspapers produced by these communities circulated in the South, providing information about housing, jobs, and social conditions. Many Southern African Americans now had friends and relatives in the North to help with the transition.
In other ways, though, labor market conditions were less auspicious for black workers in 1940 than they had been during the World War I years. Unemployment remained high in 1940, with about fourteen percent of white workers either unemployed or participating in government work relief programs. Employers hired these unemployed whites before turning to African American labor. Even as labor markets tightened, black workers gained little access to war-related employment. The President issued orders in 1941 that companies doing war-related work had to hire in a non-discriminatory way, and the Fair Employment Practice Committee was created to monitor the hiring practices of these companies. Initially, few resources were devoted to this effort, but in 1943 the government began to enforce fair employment policies more aggressively. These efforts appear to have aided black employment, at least for the duration of the war.
Gains during the 1940s and 1950s
In 1940, the Census Bureau began to collect data on individual incomes, so we can track changes in black income levels and in black/white income ratios in more detail from this date forward. Table 4 provides annual earnings figures for black and white men and women from 1939 (recorded in the 1940 Census) to 1989 (recorded in the 1990 Census). The big gains of the 1940s, both in level of earnings and in the black/white income ratio, are very obvious. Often, we focus on the role of education in producing higher earnings, but the gap between average schooling levels for blacks and whites did not change much in the 1940s (particularly for men), so schooling levels could not have contributed too much to the relative income gains for blacks in the 1940s (see Table 5). Rather, much of the improvement in the black/white pay ratio in this decade simply reflects ongoing migration: blacks were leaving the South, a low-wage region, and entering the North, a high-wage region. Some of the improvement reflects access to new jobs and industries for black workers, due to the tight labor markets and antidiscrimination efforts of the war years.
Table 4: Mean Annual Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers
Aged 20 and Over

And I just took this off the internet as well.
At the request of The Huffington Post, the Economic Policy Institute analyzed several surveys conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure black unemployment both before and after the recession. The result: a veritable epidemic of joblessness that has undone decades of economic progress for millions of African Americans.
In Birmingham, Ala., the unemployment rate among African Americans was 5.3 percent in 2006, the year before the recession began. Last year it was 14.5 percent, according to the EPI analysis. In Miami, the rate went from 6.7 percent in 2006 to 17.2 percent last year. In the Los Angeles area, the black unemployment rate climbed from 8.6 percent in 2006 to 19.3 percent last year.

Meanwhile, in metropolitan areas where African American unemployment was already a major problem, levels now speak to a running depression. In Detroit, black unemployment last year reached 25.7 percent, more than four times the 6 percent mark seen in 2000 at the end of a technology-driven national economic boom. During the same decade, black unemployment in Las Vegas swelled from 8.2 percent to 20.1 percent, according to the EPI analysis.
Today, April 29, 2011, the New York Post had an article about the request by Educators4Excellence to poll the members of the United Federation of Teachers on LIFO. I have to tell all of you that sometimes democratic polls are the most ridiculous thing to do in a nation. I am sure that a democratic poll would have supported the return of the St. Louis to Europe and it would have probably supported not voting for formation of the State of Israel, among other things. Yes it probably would not have even permitted us to enter the Civil Rights Era that the leadership of President Lyndon Johnson expedited. I contacted the Educators4Excellence months ago and nobody got in touch with me.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
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Except for the fact that African-Americans are citizens of the United States and undocumented immigrants are citizens of other countries, is it not a fact that elected officials should protect all of the rights they have in this country and protect them from being harmed or abused?

The GED was not part of this symposium. It could have been. It should have been.

Thanks to Ed Roldan of the Long Island Latino Teachers Association, I was able to attend this important event. I almost fell off my chair when Ed mentioned Martin and the GED, Ed telling the audience that he, Ed Roldan, does not push the GED. Only qualified people should push the GED on communities because there is great danger, great danger because people do not want the youth to drop out of school. I am sure that Ed can find a way, the right way to push the GED.

The Brentwood School District really has to do much more for its students, especially the Hispanic students. Brentwood lost its GED testing center years ago, creating a hardship for the community and towns around it. This impacts on college registration as well as employment. The leadership in the school and outside the school must change its ways. Nobody has fought to regain a GED testing center in Brentwood or establish the GED testing in Central Islip. They can paint fences in Brentwood, but they cannot help the youth and all adults with much better access to the GED test. Brentwood gets a low mark in education from me. The gap between Latinos and Whites in education is caused by everything, including the GED and the insufficient Latino test takers and the lower passing rate on the GED by Latinos. This impacts on the parent involvement that people were talking about and nobody seemed aware of this problem among the panelists. From Brentwood to East Hampton, nobody seemed to know.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
www.mygedhotline.com

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www.aspira.org

By Profesor Martin Danenberg
"El Quijote del GED"

The tape of my question to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his response will be available for people to listen to and learn from, and I mean all over the country. There are over 900 gang members studying GED in a city in Texas through the Boys and Girls Club there.

The table in the Schuyler Report shows that 35,000 people in New York took the GED test without preparation programs and that only 20,000 took the test because of preparation programs. Could you imagine 35,000 students taking the Regents exams without courses? This my friends in government and in power positions is where your pipeline to prison has been. Where? In the elimination of GED programs and providing hope to people in communities (by not expanding programs). There is little or no hope. GED Practice Testing my way is the solution to this great problem. Those statistics are sick! I may have a big powerful announcement about a pending GED project that will finally put New York State on the right track. The last nine years have been terrible for communities.

The GED system has been restructured under the Department of Education a couple of times, quality of instruction was assured the City Council in testimony a few years ago (it seems that quality was not the real quality and the city is looking again for the quality), and GED programs that were in communities where there was great need were closed down in favor of centrally placing GED programs away from the community. Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo, in her style of provoking racial and ethnic thought, accurately protested a year ago as people from another section of the Bronx reported their findings about GED. We may object to her style, but the lack of GED services to her community may be either fatal to people or costly (if the youth are entering the criminal justice system in great numbers) to the state or both.

If the United States governments and its people are truly serious about education, the GED should be funded by the federal government with guarantees that as many people who want to take the test can take the test. In other words, fund the testing in fifty states, Puerto Rico, and territories so that we can help tens of millions of people earn the GED within a decade instead of having around 4 million diplomas in a decade. This will require more GED testing centers in depressed areas of cities and states and the test will be given in all states and in all centers in English, Spanish, and French.

There is a lot of powerful information to share here and to show to Republicans, Conservatives (any Tea Party elected officials in New York), Democrats (including progressive-liberals), and others in the community. I was able to attend one workshop and was I glad I walked into this one. This workshop was put together by the office of Attorney General Eric Schneideman and Senator Adriano Espaillat (my mistake in calling him senator years ago instead of assemblyman will be duly noted here, but he got there anyway) was one of the moderators of the workshop. I had the opportunity to provide some new news and some general information that should impact on the rest of the New York State Legislature and Governor Cuomo's office (Cuomo's office has known about this for several weeks). I told the audience that I called in to the John Gambling Show yesterday and I got to ask Mayor Michael Bloomberg "Why can't we mobilize the gang members into GED testing seats faster than anyone in the state," keeping in mind that this is an important budget item as youth move into the very costly criminal justice system. The mayor told me that we cannot get most of them into preparation programs. I, then, told the audience in Albany that we don't have enough preparation programs for the general population, explaining that one out of every hundred people earns a GED in a year (about 13,000 out of 1.6 million in New York City and only about 28,000 out of 2.85 million in the state). For gang members it may be about a half person per one hundred. I hope my readers learned about the 2/3 compromise in United States history (sometimes called American history). A slave was considered less than a whole person and here we see that gang members may be a 1/2 of a person statistically. I have done this part to emphasize just how bad it may be to remove gang members away from crime and drugs and into education, jobs, and college. The pipeline to prison and the gangs are part of "New Jim Crow" of America.

About an hour after the workshop, I shook hands and spoke to the man who has become my adopted Jewish cousin from Sosúa, Dominican Republic and that is Attorney General Eric Schneideman. I did not have enough time to tell him about what I said at his workshop, but things will be moved forward to help New York.

These are other things that happened that I will share. This event was possibly the greatest event for me and the decade long battle that I started to help New Yorkers. I guess we can begin with Adolfo Carrión. Upon seeing my face, Adolfo did one of his classical moves calling me the "Big Trouble Maker." We were smiling at each other after not seeing one another for years.

Later on I saw Senator Malcolm Smith and we hugged each other, walking into a party and explaining to him that for ten years I have been telling people that there are not enough GED preparation (they have been gutted for over a decade) and we must practice test gang members to get them into GED testing seats. He agreed, of course.

I had already seen a GED friend, Assemblyman Nelson Castro of the Bronx (member of the Higher Education Committee), where we discussed charging $50 as an administrative fee to take the GED in New York. This is now the moment to share, in writing, critical information about my thought and what people think. Charging a fee to people means to many that the person paying will take the GED more seriously. In Connecticut the charge is only $13 right now. Thirteen dollars is throw away money, meaning that if you feel you can pass you can take the chance and pay the $13 easily (in most cases). If the test were $1,000 few people would take the test and if they did take test they would prepare much, much, much, much longer because they do not want to throw away the $1,000 and fail the test. In between $13 and $1000 is $50,but we really do not know what the success rate would be. Even though I am "El Quijote del GED" I really do not even know what the passing rate was on the GED prior to 1994 when there was a $35 charge. Immediately you can see that the cost at $50 would have to be subsidized by the state because of inflation since 1993. I am content with the $50 price though. When the GED was $35, the state paid for people on public assistance. I would recommend the expansion of free GED for gang members, people with mental illnesses, and others, providing them with aggressive intervention so we can help them, help society, and provide a system that even the great conservative economist Milton Friedman would have been proud of. Friedman was only against bad government programs, not all government programs. The critical thing about the passing rate is not the money charged. It is about the knowledge of the persons taking the test. GED preparation programs are often scam artists who push test takers away to bring up the passing percentage. They push them away by making the practice test score so high that few people will fail and by pushing the potential test taker away from their testing jurisdiction into someone else's. This was just happening last week to a woman I was helping in Connecticut. This type of behavior is very much like the police action that pushes crime out of one neighborhood and into another.

Very important. This is something important about GED testing, comparing when people paid and when it became free. There were more diplomas issued under free GED testing than under the system when people paid to take the GED. Everyone in the assembly must take this into consideration and not be misled by current statistics only. The current statistics really have resulted from not putting enough money into testing and from the harder test that came out in 2002 in English, and the harder Spanish and French tests that came out in 2004. Also, there probably have been far fewer testing sites offering the GED in those foreign languages, contributing to fewer diplomas in those communities where the need is great. That means that all elected officials are responsible for not helping their constituents. I predicted losses of GED diplomas and nobody was paying attention the right way. Locally, nationally, and globally we have hurt our people and our nation. We have not educated enough men and women and families have been adversely affected. A transformation is needed.

I saw Chief of Staff Danny Figueroa the other day and again yesterday. He called me "a warrior." His boss Assemblyman Peter Rivera was happy about reading my work.

City Councilman Robert Jackson (Chairman of the Education Committee)and I talked some. He is critical of Governor Cuomo and Cuomo has taken office at the worst time in recent state history. He is proud of his work in getting the budget through, but that is certainly not the only thing we expect from the governor. We want intelligent leadership from the governor. Education has to be a top priority. At this time, Governor Cuomo appears headed for bigger problems unless he can show top leadership skills and reveal a much greater vision to the people of New York. Although he has not formally aligned himself with the Republicans, as Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy has done, he is heading in a direction that is really unstable for someone who wants to help the people. Robert Jackson is one of my great education partners and I thanked Robert again for the presentation outside City Hall at the Save the GED Test Rally (You Tube video account mygedhotline for viewing). Any future speeches by Governor Cuomo have to be monitored within the context of the statement made by Robert Jackson about educating immigrants in New York) for you to understand. I would recommend that Governor Cuomo take a look at the video.

I got the opportunity to meet Brent Wilkes for the first time at Somos El Futuro. Brent Wilkes is the Executive Director of LULAC in Washington, D.C.

This is from the Schuyer Report and El Quijote del GED says that this information is highly misleading because the top GED test scores do not belong in the 69.3 statistical group because those people learn little or nothing in GED preparation programs. The actual final statistics would be much closer than the wide gap that you see:

The 2008 pass rate for candidates who took a prepara¬tory class before attempting the GED was 69.3%, far higher than the 51% pass rate of non-prepara¬tion program candidates who study on their own or not at all.12 Unfortunately, non-preparation program candidates are more common. New York State does not require GED preparation for students 19 or older.

IMPORTANT POINTS
PRACTICE TESTING IS IMPORTANT TO EVERYONE BUT IT SHOULD NOT BE REQUIRED.

THE LARGE DROP IN GED DIPLOMAS UNDER THE CURRENT NO CHARGE SYSTEM IS DUE TO THE SAME FUNDING OR LESS EACH YEAR, THE HARDER TEST STARTED IN 2002 AND 2004, AND THE LARGE LOSS OF DIPLOMAS EARNED IN SPANISH AND FRENCH AFTER 2001 AMONG OTHER THINGS.

GANG MEMBERS CAN BE EASILY MOBILIZED BY MY PRACTICE TEST PROGRAM AND THERE IS A WAY TO GET THEM TO TAKE THE TEST AS FAST AS STUDENTS IN GED CLASSES WITH THE TEST CODE. THIS CAN HELP BRING THE PERCENT UP FROM ABOUT 1/2 TO FOUR OR FIVE PERCENT OR MORE. IN OTHER WORDS ALMOST A THOUSAND PERCENT INCREASE.

MAKING PEOPLE PAY FOR THE TEST CAN BE A GREAT THING FOR NEW YORK IF WE CAN BRING NEW YORK ABOVE THE NATIONAL AVERAGE OF DIPLOMAS EARNED. BETTER INSTRUCTION WILL ONLY LEAD TO A SMALL IMPROVEMENT IN THE NUMBER OF DIPLOMAS BUT MOBILIZING TENS OF THOUSANDS MORE PEOPLE AMONG THE 2.85 MILLION PEOPLE IS THE REAL SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
www.mygedhotline.com

www.geocities.com/gedhotline
www.ahorre.com/ged
www.ahorre.com
www.aspira.org

A conservative is a liberal who gets mugged.

Interesting and sometimes people even laugh.

A liberal is a conservative who gets mugged.

The police cuts and the additional crime that often follows are nothing to laugh about and education is the key to solving the puzzle.

Let me share some great news. Haiti is interested in GED testing and it is highly possible to bring the Spanish GED to the Dominican Republic this year. Great things can happen for all people when leaders do the right thing and not just what they think is right.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
www.mygedhotline.com

www.geocities.com/gedhotline
www.ahorre.com/ged
www.ahorre.com
www.aspira.org

Cuando Va A Promover La Casa Blanca La Educación De Todos, pregunté en El Imparcial en Chicago en 8-18-2004 y el día está llegando. Tenemos un nuevo presidente y un nuevo director de la Comisión Especial de la Casa Blanca y todo esto es importante. Necesitamos una conferencia internacional por la comunidad hispana ahora. Es mi intención de dar esta conferencia porque tengo una visión mucha más amplia y creo que podemos transformar muchos países dentro de 10 años. Ya estoy muy involucrado con la República Dominicana en muchos niveles haciendo esta tarea. Hay más de 1,200 instituciones participando con la Casa Blanca este lunes con la Universidad de San Bernardino en California. El mensaje de esta conferencia llegará a 6 millones de personas. El mensaje de la conferencia National Latino Congreso llega a muchas menos personas. El Presidente Barack Obama tiene su propia conferencia el lunes con Univisión. Sí la Casa Blanca está promoviendo la educación y sí es el momento.

CUANDO VA A PROMOVER LA CASA BLANCA LA EDUCACION DE TODOS?

Por Profesor Martin N. Danenberg “El Quijote del GED”

En el año 2002 había un tremendo descenso en el número de diplomas del GED en inglés (predije todo esto en 2001 y compartí mi punto de vista con la directora del GED en los EE. UU.) y ahora mismo que es el primer año del nuevo examen en español estoy casi seguro que la comunidad hispana que toma el examen en español va a tener la misma experiencia. Es malísimo para ambos comunidades pero es peor para los hispanos. Porque es peor? Los hispanos necesitan un nivel más alto de educación muchos más que ningún otro grupo. Los inmigrantes deben tomar el examen en español, su idioma mejor. Aunque los jóvenes normalmente toman el GED, alrededor de cincuenta por ciento de los candidatos son adultos y con menos diplomas en las manos de inmigrantes hay menos esperanza para un futuro mejor.

Como muchos hispanos saben, tenemos aquí una parte de la clase media del Latinoamérica porque ellos no tienen un futuro en sus países. Yo conozco dos dentistas salvadoreños, muchos maestros, algunos reporteros y contables y todos son inmigrantes ilegales. La industria más grande de México es el dinero que mandan los residentes en el exterior a sus familias y la economía mexicana depende y continuará a depender en las remesas. Me parece que el Presidente Bush y sus consejeros no saben que las remesas han contribuidos al establecimiento de una clase media más grande en México y los Mexicanos saben más que ellos.

Estoy seguro también que decenas de miles más de Hispanos que están desesperados por el hecho que no han pasados el GED en inglés en 2002 y 2003 y realizan que tienen menos esperanza para un obtener un futuro mejor, van a abandonar sus estudios. Es una crisis para los Estados Unidos y ambos candidatos tienen que despertar. Como podemos desarrollar nuestro propio clase media de hispanos cuando millones no tienen un diploma de la high o el GED y solamente diez por ciento de los hispanos completan los estudios de la universidad? Quizás el Presidente de México tiene consejos para George Bush? Tengo avisos para los dos y el GED es la respuesta.

Estoy luchando para la comunidad hispana pero necesito la cooperación de los líderes políticos. NALEO, la NCLR y otras asociaciones deben ayudar las comunidades. Quiero que los hispanos interesados en unir en mi campaña me contacten a mí lo más pronto posible. Mi conocimiento del GED es un requisito para el mejoramiento de cada comunidad.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
www.mygedhotline.com

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Mayor Bloomberg has been misled for years by people in education and he is now paying the price in lower approval ratings. What those people did not tell him is this. As mayor and as mayor in charge of the school system, he had to make education better in the schools and outside the schools by educating the adults in those communities at monumental levels. Communities that are experiencing violence are the result of the sum total of the impact of his administration. Take a look at the video made outside City Hall in my You Tube mygedhotline account. The video says Save The GED Test Rally At City Hall and a youth speaks out. This youth is telling about his friends who want to get involved in criminal activities. He has failed at both, but his own attitudes prevent him from recognizing it. He is responsible for it all and nobody was able to guide him properly. His fall is not about the Cathie Black appointment, as some suggest.

I have opposed many of the things that have been going on for years in New York City and around the nation. Neighborhoods have not been improved by my standards, parental involvement has been minimal, and schools have suffered because of these decisions. Now the police force may be reduced at a time when we need even more police. Crime has increased a lot in many places and it may be inching its way up or escalating in areas of New York City. In my eyes, the chancellor failed because his plan was weak. Teaching to the test is really not hard. I know how to do it well and other GED teachers knew how to do it long before elementary and intermediate school teachers were trained in the process. That process has probably taken way too long and the whole system has suffered. Blame the people in charge. A report could be written on the evolution of teaching to the test over these years and you will see what I mean. That evolution in teaching to the test was written about in the Geoffrey Canada book about the success of the Harlem Children's Zone.

Governor Cuomo has become governor at a time when things are so bad that he will not be able to help much. I have more confidence is my own ideas than I do in the ideas of others. The state has to help the parents and the children at the same time. Instruction must be improved for most teachers, including the new ones.

Steve Malzberg , on his radio show, was amazed that in a bullying incident, both the person doing the bullying and the person being bullied were suspended in a school. He could not believe that the person being bullied was suspended and I do not have that much confidence in principals. I see them performing their duties okay when I visit, but at critical times I have known principals to mess up. No need to wonder why. We have to hold superintendents responsible too. It was reported to me by Brett A. Scudder, President and Chairman of SISFI who is helping the Department of Mental Health with information to bring awareness and prevention training to all schools, that over 70% of schools have unreported bullying problems that are intense and he wants on-going training and help for schools and not a one-time fix. I could accuse the Department of Education of deliberately not fixing this problem in order to close the school s down or put a charter school into the building, but without evidence I cannot. Calculate that into LIFO and get on board to bring about a change in the Department of Education, a major change. These are things that affect the performance of the youth more than the performance of the teacher. Wake up everybody to the truth. The administration must change or leave. See my article of last year called Deputy Chancellor Misses Revealing Comments Made in Far Rockaway.

A couple of years ago, I told one of the best known people in New York and across the country that there were 2.85 million adults in New York who do not have a diploma and he replied "I didn't know that." People in power do not know a lot of things. The ending of Last In First Out or LIFO, may be similar to trying nuclear power or any other change that the public polls want. No pun was intended by the use of the word power in both examples. I want to know how the Reverend in the Bronx will feel when a close member of his congregation is let go because of the ending of LIPO, because of his power decision as Senator. It then becomes a moment in time when a man who sees a family disintegrate before his eyes and he says to himself that this is a country that has been made great by individualism and that teacher (friend) has to rise up on his own because of the new circumstances. Hmmmmm. Pontius Pilate knew how to wash his hands clean and so it goes. The LIFO system has benefited the school system and it is not perfect, but the polls supporting the ending of LIFO are inconclusive to me. Ask anyone on the job anywhere in the city if individual circumstances should be part of the process or should people just be let go and you will find out the truth. Nobody wants to be fired from a job without just cause and arbitrators will back that up, for sure. The debate goes on and I just feel that the new system will fall apart just as the reactor in Japan has. If those good, new teachers are offered higher paying jobs within the first two or three years to do other things, the entire system will collapse like the Japanese nuclear plant. And that may happen. Mayor Bloomberg will be gone by them and the problem would be the problem of some new mayor. I feel that the people need guarantees which the public officials do not give us.

It would be really interesting if a court case developed in which all those teachers who were let go won a suit in which they would be rehired and had all benefits restored, including back pay, vacation days, sick leave, and seniority. People in power have been known to do things that they should not have done. They take the risk and then "pow" it all backfires. In fact it costs New York City $500,000,000 dollars a year in litigations. That's a half billion dollars.

This is a cold, cruel world and the school administration is largely responsible for the problems. The Department of Education has been boasting about how it knows how to write up teachers and it has still failed to get rid of more teachers. Without even investigating all of the cases (and we should), I would predict that the administration could not give proof or enough proof of its allegations and that is where the problem lies. I just heard of a matter where a parent was given limited access to a school and I am reasonably sure that the principal had no evidence to cause this to happen. I know of another matter outside the school system where an employee's rights were being violated for weeks. Finally the staff at this agency came to its senses and did the right thing. The person is not going to be terminated.

In looking at the polls on the LIFO issue, it makes me think of the polling against Jews in Germany and in the United States during World War II. It makes me think of the anti-immigrant polling that takes place today. In other words , it may be doing more harm than good. Some of these same people in power are preventing members of our families from achieving the things they want, such as homosexuals. It is easy to drum up opposition against a few thousand teachers, as it is being done, by not presenting the whole case. Remember the comment above of that well known leader who just did not know the facts. The people being polled just do not know the facts well. The choice seems fair, but the cost to society will be great and I believe that the children will not benefit. Individual children do benefit, but the children who need the help the most apparently do not benefit. Earlier this year, I was informed that little or no learning was going on in a school and that the school was out of control. The big question is what is the Department of Education really doing, both good and bad, and I think we need a complete report. We need a complete report before the legislature takes action in changing LIFO.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
www.mygedhotline.com

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www.aspira.org

Por Profesor Martin Danenberg

"El Quijote del GED"

Unos de mis estudiantes en el estado de Virginia dice "Necesito mi GED para poder continuar (mis estudios y progresar). También, quiero agarrar mi certificado para trabajar en seguridad. Tengo otras metas que necesitan inglés, como pasar el examen de motocicleta y el de camionero. Pues voy a la clase de inglés cada semana." Mi estudiante es del Argentina. Tengo otro en México que estudia el GED en inglés porque hay algunos centros de exámenes en México. Hay uno en Santo Domingo, pero ninguno en El Salvador, ninguno en español. Tenemos que rescatar los adultos y los jóvenes por el GED. Ayer estuve con un ex-miembro de una pandilla en Paterson, New Jersey y él obtuvo su GED fácilmente y ahora está estudiando en la universidad (tiene 18 años de edad ahora).

Esta conferencia educativa fue en colaboración con el Cónsul General de El Salvador Dagoberto Torres y el Director de la Biblioteca Pública de Central Islip Paul Facchiano. Hace varios años en la Prensa-Gráfica dijo "Biblioteca puede ser escuela para salvadoreños." Sí hay programas de ciudadanía, programas por los niños, el programa del GED y mucho más. Ahora solamente es necesario movilizar ellos que vienen al consulado directamente a la biblioteca y no importa donde vive. El convenio está bien establecido.

La conferencia fue el principio de una nueva iniciativa: la colaboración del Consulado de El Salvador con la Biblioteca Pública de Central Islip. Tuve la oportunidad de presentar mi visión de una comunidad diferente aquí y transformar comunidades en El Salvador y la República Dominicana. La educación es la clave.

Más acceso al GED en la comunidad y el establecimiento del GED en español en todos los países hispanos. El GED será una bendición durante la nuevas iniciativas de la República Dominicana, la educación básica de adultos y el universal bachillerato. El cónsul hablaba del bachillerato a distancia y otro programa de equivalencia en el Salvador, pero todos reconocen que el GED en español es muy importante. Estamos en la misma página con el Presidente Leonel Fernández, unos de mis amigos mejores del GED en el mundo.

La adquisición de inglés por la comunidad aquí y la movilización de todos en El Salvador y La República Dominicana es algo recomendado en la República Dominicana por el Presidente Leonel Fernández. El cónsul general dijo que le gusta mucho el sitio de web www.usalearns.org por sus estudios de inglés. Todo el cuerpo diplomático debe comenzar sus estudios por el sitio y las fuerzas armadas y el policía pueden aprender inglés fácilmente. He enseñado dominicanos, vendedores en las tiendas del aeropuerto que la adquisición de inglés puede ser fácil. Una salvadoreña, madre que vive en los Estados Unidos por nueve años no habla inglés y no tiene su GED entró en la conferencia (con sus hijos que hablan inglés). Su nivel de educación fue el quinto grado de primaria y ahora sabe que es factible ser graduado por el GED con solamente el quinto grado de educación. Tuve un graduado del GED que completó solamente el segundo año de primaria en El Salvador.

Los programas del GED en español e inglés fueron cancelados por el distrito escolar, la del estudio de inglés fue cancelada en la misma biblioteca.
Una estudiante doctoral de Dowling College, profesora de las escuelas públicas de la ciudad de New York y madre me dijo que mi labor es tan importante a su tesis doctoral que consiste en los sentimientos o pensamientos de estudiantes inmigrantes sobre sus escuelas. El tesis consiste en sus reacciones al apoyo que reciben en la escuela y en la casa. También consiste de sus observaciones. Ella es de padres salvadoreños, pero nació en Beliz. Ella se graduó de un community college en su país y ha tenido éxito en este país porque su educación fue en inglés. Su hijo, un estudiante de 17 años de edad, dice que las pandillas son poderosas dentro y alrededor de la escuela. Yo creo que los miembros de las pandillas ganan dinero por vender drogas a los estudiantes. Y claro hay luchas casi todos los días.

Yo hablaba de mis raíces judías y nuestra historia y como los judíos establecieron programas después de la escuela durante el siglo 19 (los 1870) en la comunidad judía en Europa, para que los jóvenes puedan tener más instrucción. Y en 1939 cuando nosotros los inmigrantes fueron pobres en los Estados Unidos, noventa por ciento de los médicos en las ciudades grandes de Polonia fueron judíos, gracias al trabajo de líderes judíos 70 años antes.

La biblioteca ha tenido mi programa de GED por años y hablé con el director y las participantes que la ciudad de New York tiene un nuevo proyecto de GED (actualmente dos proyectos que los condados de Long Island no tienen). El examen de práctica es importante de ayudar las personas que buscan trabajo donde el GED es un requisito (sin asistir una clase donde su progreso puede ser lento). El programa de la ciudad tiene $1.2 millón en fondos y tenemos que proveer la misma oportunidad a nuestras comunidades en Long Island por estas pruebas de práctica.

El Cónsul General habló del analfabetismo de El Salvador, un nivel que se espera eliminar durante las próximas décadas. La graduación del colegio es mucho menos que acá. Entonces hay que hacer mucho allá y la importancia del GED no se puede negar.

MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
martin@mygedhotline.com
New:
www.mygedhotline.com

www.geocities.com/gedhotline
www.ahorre.com/ged
www.ahorre.com
www.aspira.org