NYC Students Face Alarming Decline in Literacy Rates

0:00 Speaker 1 Sunday morning. What is Sunday without speaking to the Governor with us today is the great Governor David Patterson and common sense? Why not? And well, Governor, what’s on your mind this Sunday morning?

0:17 Speaker 2 Well, John, you know, with Kats and Cosby from five to six Monday through Friday, every day, you have a lot of guests, and I’ve multiplied it out. You all average about thirty five guests on the show each week.

0:32 I don’t know how you do it in just five hours, but I want to suggest a guest that you might think about as we go into this coming week, and that would be Michael Mogrew, the head of the United Federation of Teachers. He has hit the ceiling and went off on Mayor Zorn Mundani because the students from third

0:55 grade to fifth grade in English Language and Arts have now fallen under fifty percent. In other words, half of the students that are in those classes cannot read. And he is also angry that what was supposed to have helped the situation was a new group of para professionals, people who are going to wind up teaching, but they

1:20 put them in the classroom to help the teachers while they’re still learning the craft well. Grades three to grades eight are down six percent since Mayor Mamdani, who promised he was going to sign the bill to add that the para professionals to the teachers in the classroom is apparently not going to do it or not doesn’t even

1:43 know what he’s doing. So it’s a pretty wild day in education. And I wanted all of the listeners to know that these are our children. They may not be our biological children, but that the children of the next generation, and we’re giving them a bad break.

2:01 Speaker 1 I agree with you. I hear stories and a lot of it happened during COVID. Our kids got screwed. We interrupted their education and interrupted their progress, and they lost years of education because of the fingers on pointing Fauci, doctor Fauci, who really didn’t know what he was doing.

2:36 Speaker 2 Well. One of the my opinions John that kind of surprised me is when we first started experiencing COVID, which was at the end of twenty twenty and then it went for you know, three or four years, is that there is a piece of electronical equipment which we could have activated. It’s called a zoom we zoom every day

3:00 and they had the equipment at that particular time, so there could have been a certain amount of homeschooling. Now, they couldn’t do it for every student every day, close to an outrageous amount of money, but if you’re at least reaching half of the children, that is a way to motivate getting the other half involved in the process.

3:23 I don’t I don’t quite know if what the things that doctor Fauci is accused of would actually affect New York students, but it’s it’s being looked into right now, and some of the accurate accusations are quite dangerous.

3:43 Speaker 1 I agree with you, and you know, but certain people suffered the most, and I understand what the where all the science we have now, it didn’t really have to happen like that.

4:01 Speaker 2 Yeah, we had no familiarization with this kind of virus, and we had really no plan because we didn’t even know it existed. So I think most of the people in the New York City and all around the state.

4:21 I think most of the people handled it as well as they could. But there certainly were some gaps, and that might have occurred right where I was talking about in the New York City public school system. They kind of got used to not going to school and being educated.

4:40 They went to school sometimes sometimes they didn’t even go to school, and they weren’t getting any type of reading lessons. They weren’t learning anything about math. They weren’t they weren’t even learning anything about the current events that were keeping them out of school.

4:58 Speaker 1 And nobody know, nobody made a demand on them that they’re not just to be given a free diploma without working hard.

5:09 Speaker 2 I mean, if when you get a diploma, it means you worked hard, and.

5:14 Speaker 1 You know during the time you went to school, Governor, I know we’re old, but timer you went to school and I went to school, we had to fight hard for those diplomas. We had to fight hard for those uh, for those grades.

5:30 Speaker 2 Oh, John, I remember my last year of high school was the most difficult year in my education because I took calculus and I still don’t understand how calculus works.

5:42 Speaker 1 I said, I say, the same story. I looked at I look at the calculus equation on the on the on the blackboard or the whiteboard. See you know, I’m multi racial, uh, And I look at it. I said, how am I going to make a living solving that equation?

6:00 Speaker 2 Exactly? I mean, I felt the same way, and I was worried that I wasn’t going to get a diploma. Now I was. I was a very good student in high school, and you know, there was no need for me to hit the panic button the way I did.

6:15 But it’s just that all the other classes I had ever taken since kindergarten had teachers that could really explain it. My calculus teacher, I didn’t know whether you know, he consulted with Albert Einstein or something, because I could never understand a thing he was saying.

6:31 Speaker 1 I agree, well, Governor Pattison. I think we put in our two cents for this Sunday morning, and thank you for coming on and thank you for your common sense, and we’ll get together real soon.

6:43 Speaker 2 Let’s add it up to four cents next Sunday,