Taking “I Have A Dream”® To The Scale Required

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There is posted in the Third Section of this Bulletin Board entitled “Inner-City Holocaust and America's Apartheid "Justice" System (In Honor of Jonathan Kozol and In Memory of John Howard Griffin)” a Reference J entitled “Offer to the National ‘I Have A Dream’® Foundation."

It contains the offer to assign gratis to IHAD-National all right, title and interest to the lawsuits that John Karls had instituted against the world’s 15 largest financial institutions for the $84 billion that they owed him.

[Any proceeds from those lawsuits had long since been pledged in legally-binding fashion to benefit 10 million inner-city children with IHAD or IHAD-style programs.]

The penultimate paragraph of that offer addressed to the General Counsel of IHAD-National had said --

“For your information, I am attaching a paper entitled “Taking I Have A Dream To The Next Level” to implement IHAD programs on the scale needed for all of our American inner-city children. I think you would agree that the description of the project would comport with IHAD guidelines if it were done within the IHAD framework. It appears on the bulletin board for a monthly political-discussion group that I lead in the location of my Utah ski house. The group is patterned after 2-3 discussion groups of the NYC Harvard Club in which I participate, though my group sends six-degrees-of-separation e-mails to US decision makers, such as the President. (The paper appears on our bulletin board = http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org as part of our six-degrees-of-separation e-mail campaign following our January* meeting – the concept had been proposed to President Obama in a previous six-degrees-of-separation e-mail campaign following our May 2009 meeting.)”

* The meeting occurred in January 2010.

Here is a copy of that paper --

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TAKING "I HAVE A DREAM" TO THE NEXT LEVEL

In 1981, a self-made multi-billionaire returned to his alma mater, Harlem Public School 121, to address the graduating sixth graders and, on sudden inspiration, promised them their college tuition if they would stay in school. Eugene Lang then provided tutoring and mentoring for the next six years.

“Identical twin” studies consistently show that inner-city children have the same average I.Q. as suburban children. It is their environment (typically 99% single-adult households, 90% of which are headed by a druggie, almost all of whom turn any receipts such as welfare checks over to the pusher so that the kids have to steal just in order to eat) that produces the typically SINGLE-DIGIT inner-city H.S. graduation rates (if measured correctly by including everyone who has dropped out before the beginning of H.S. and including everyone incarcerated or killed).

Eugene Lang’s original program and the follow-on 180 "I Have A Dream" Programs in 51 American cities by the 1990’s demonstrated that the typically SINGLE-DIGIT inner-city H.S. graduation rates typically increased to 65%-70%.

The key to success is a “surrogate parent” (typically a tutor or mentor) who cares about the “Dreamer” and makes clear to her/him that s/he could make something of her/himself with the IHAD Program and it “would break the heart” of the “surrogate parent” if the “Dreamer” failed to do so.

Indeed, it was discovered that about 50% of the female “Dreamers” typically became pregnant and, as a practical matter, did not graduate from High School and proceed to college. And that the difference was that a “surrogate parent” of the females who had not become pregnant had made clear that it would break the heart of the “surrogate parent” if the “Dreamer” had not taken advantage of the IHAD Program, while the females who had become pregnant felt there was nobody in their lives who cared what happened to them and they were going to create a human being who cared. Following the discovery of the importance of a vocal “surrogate parent,” Dreamer pregnancies became very rare and High School graduation/college matriculation rates reached the 90% level.

In contrast, virtually all other “good ideas” (incentive pay for teachers, charter schools, early-intervention programs such as “Head Start,” etc., etc.) have only a negligible impact.

From 1992-2008, IHAD was the darling of national politicians. Hillary Clinton had served on Gene Lang’s national advisory board until the 1991 Iowa caucuses and Gene Sperling, Bill Clinton’s chief domestic adviser, had done his PhD thesis on IHAD. Meanwhile, both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush did extensive fund-raising for both IHAD-Houston and IHAD-Boston (the latter was led by their nephew/cousin Jamie Bush) and George H.W. Bush was fond of saying that his famous “1,000 Points of Light” speech was inspired by IHAD.

However, it has become clear that relying on wealthy individuals to found and fund an IHAD Program and relying on sufficient volunteers to step forward as tutors and mentors will never amount to more than a “drop in the bucket”!!!

The only way to obtain “surrogate parents” and “surrogate siblings” on the scale needed is to bring to reality “magnet schools” that are so outstanding (and for whose graduates the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities will compete to admit) that suburban students will be attracted, but whose admittance to, and retention by, the “magnet school” will be conditioned on the suburban student and her/his family acting as a surrogate sibling and family for an inner-city student at the school.

It should be noted that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6/28/2007 reversal of “Brown v. Board of Education” in “Parents v. Seattle School District No. 1” which held that race cannot be used as a criterion for achieving diversity, will probably block state/local funding for such “magnet schools” even if they otherwise qualify as “charter schools.”

Nevertheless, creating as many such “magnet schools” as possible to demonstrate that Gene Lang’s “surrogate parent” idea can be taken to the scale required, is essential to the future of our country and its finally achieving the ideal of opportunity for all. Hopefully, the success of such “magnet schools” will inspire the federal government (which is not subject to “Parents v. Seattle”) to undertake such “magnet schools” for all inner-city children.

If anyone has any comments or questions, a wealth of information is available on http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org or by e-mailing at ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com John Karls who founded and principally funded an IHAD Program serving 200 inner-city children and who served as Gene Lang’s volunteer national treasurer during the 1990’s.