Geoffrey Canada

“The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work.”

“At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.”

“We've gotta guarantee all of our kids an education.”

“My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff.”

“Many schools today are sacrificing social studies, the arts and physical education so children can cover basic subjects like math, English and science.”

“Teachers need to be paid like professionals.”

“You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.”

“I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.”

“Movies portray men as tough guys.”

“Boys want to grow up to be like their male role models. And boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male.”

“Good dental care doesn't make you a good student, but if your tooth hurts, it's hard to be a good student.”

“I believe that for lots of churches and religious institutions, their main focus on the development of faith among parishioners needs to spread to the community.”

“In two-parent households, women have increasingly entered the workplace, and in single-parent households, there is even more of a need for the adults to work. That means parents do not fully control their own schedule and have to scramble to find high-quality after-school options.”

“It's just becoming more acceptable for girls to react violently.”

“Kids who are poor often have families that have not really been kept informed about... how important it is to read to your child, to reduce stresses in their life, to use positive incentives and words.”

“It is important to have permanent safe spaces in Harlem.”

“When I first found out that Superman wasn't real, I was about maybe eight. And I was talking to my mother about it. And she was like, 'No, no, no. There's no Superman.' And I started crying. I really thought he was coming to rescue us. The chaos, the violence, the danger. No hero was coming.”

“The system decides you can't run schools in the summer.”

“If you are a lousy teacher, you should be fired.”

“You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'”