Abogados de Inmigracion

mouth is, but if I had had my way, he would have invested five percent in GED, cleaning up a major a major part of the educational problem in this country. He would have gotten more “bang for his buck” and it is not too late. The wealth of Bill Gates is enormous, but will this famous graduate of the GED find the will to help ten million or more people earn a GED, making Americans more competitive as they go on to higher learning and improve their families by setting an example for their children and others. Gee! If Bill Gates had been Salvadoran or Bolivian, his great wealth would not be in America helping Americans. I shutter to say if he had been French, fearing a great backlash. I also wonder if his earning a GED helped him in any way in life and if it contributed to knowledge he obtained in creating his wealth.

Growing up on the Lower East Side of New York City in the late nineteen fifties, it was evident to me that Asians could excel in school and not much has changed since. My Chinese students used to read the text three times before a test and almost memorize the text word for word. Sometimes they were accused of cheating by teachers, but they were not cheating. African Americans were living under desegregation and other second class living conditions around the United States. Chinese who lived under difficult living conditions excelled in school. Those immigrants have been able to pass on a tradition of excellence to their children. One generation after another has succeeded. I sometimes explain it by telling people, especially minorities, that Asians take their toddlers to Harvard, walk around the grounds, and tell them that this is where they are going to go to college one day. Of course I really do not know what the parents are saying, but the point is well taken. A dentist on the Lower East Side told me an interesting story about thirty years ago. He said that a Jewish member of organized crime who he used to chat with stopped him and asked “Doc, guess which school my son got into.” Thinking for a moment about this crime boss who had only completed the fourth grade of elementary school and knowing that he was well “connected” he replied “West Point.!” His answer was correct. This crime boss had used his influence to get his well educated son into the prestigious West Point. That is what Asians can do too, Asians who abandoned their education to work hard to make sure that their children advanced in life.

Someone I know attended a school in an upper middle class community required some improvement in reading skills and was given tutoring. The tutoring and other efforts did not result in the attainment of the SAT score needed to get into one of the top colleges, but we are proud to say that she completed her BAA recently at Emory College. I wonder how many African Americans and Hispanics make no effort to enter college, people who probably could do well or excel.

In the high schools we know about students who only show up to take final exams and who pass and receive credit. There could be students in the African American and Hispanic communities who could do the same thing, but they do not show up to take the examination.
In addition the vast majority of students of all races and ethnic groups who pass the GED are not encouraged to do what I call “finish the course” by studying the things they still do not know to make themselves more qualified to pass college courses. I have told my GED students to study before taking the college entrance exams so they will not be required to take remedial math and writing, impacting in many cases on their financial aid. Many GED graduates probably rush right into college poorly prepared and exit quickly and forty percent of the high school students expected to graduate on time fail the GED. That is how the GED test is prepared and its validity is upheld because of this. Wouldn’t it make sense to identify, at least, those weaknesses for the hundreds of thousands of our high school graduates, especially African Americans and Hispanics through the battery of Official GED Practice Tests and make them stronger before they enter college? Many of these skills may just be skills that the students have forgotten and they may just need a quick review. If I had a dollar for all the things I have forgotten, I would be a multi-millionaire.
Empowerment of individuals may be just as great a factor in changing the African American and Hispanic communities as the reform of K-12. Forty three percent of the adult Hispanic population has no diploma and a large percentage of people are illiterate in Spanish. By studying toward a GED, most of those people can set an example for their children which they are not presently doing. This striving for education will filter down to their children and help promote learning from K-12. This intangible has been neglected by a system that concentrates on the child only and by a system that has largely been forced to accept No Child Left Behind when No Person Left Behind would have been more complete, more democratic, more sensible, and probably less expensive overall.
The Spanish speaking immigrant lives in a world that is different from that of my grandparents and their children. This is the major problem for the Hispanics who have been left behind. If Bill Gates can convince twenty billionaires to invest in smaller class size they way he has done, he can accelerate the process of helping people his way and really, really make a difference. I just hope that at the end of ten years, he will not see that Hispanics are still dropping out because of poverty, which is increasing in their communities. Not knowing all the details of his invest in the New York City school system and the investment made the Annenberg Foundation, it appears to me that he has done something that will really impact on more people and that is praiseworthy. If all of the foundations and scholarship funds, including the United Negro College Fund had invested five percent in GED, we could have kept more African Americans out of the prison system, which drains off potential college graduates and revolutionized the educational process for the poor.