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" 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. "

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" 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.' "

Geoffrey Canada

Lie

Chance

America

" There's not a day that goes by that I don't draw on my undergraduate background in psychology. "

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

" Young people will tell you, if you're not prepared to write the most violent, the most misogynistic, the most horrible kinds of rhymes and scenarios, you are not going to get air play. "

" An extended school day gives administrators the ability to ensure children get a well-rounded education. "

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

" 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. "

" If you are a lousy teacher, you should be fired. "

" Teachers need to be paid like professionals. "

" Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure. "

" My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Middle-class families know education begins at birth. "

" People don't believe or understand that a community can lose hope. You can have a whole community where hopelessness is the norm, where folks don't have faith that things will get better because history and circumstances have proven over 30, 40, or 50 years that things don't get better. "

" Poverty places not just one or two obstacles but multiple obstacles in a child's pathway to what we would consider to be regular development - cognitively, intellectually and emotionally. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I want my kids to graduate from high school. But that's not enough. I also want them to go to college. Why? Because rich people's kids go to college. And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for my kids. Because you know what? College graduates don't tend to go to jail as frequently as nongraduates. "

" How is it we could have a system where schools could remain lousy for 50 years and yet you do exactly the same thing this year that they did 50 years ago when it didn't work then, and no one feels any pressure to change? "

" You don't need someone destroying you when your own people are the worst messengers possible. And this is what black people in America have not come to grips with. "

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

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

" 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. "