Quotes by Geoffrey Canada

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.

— Geoffrey Canada

Hope

Convincing people to give your way a try will work if you neutralize - and sometimes you have to cauterize - the ones who really are against change. They're the kind of person who, if you tell them it's raining outside, they'll fight you tooth and nail.

— Geoffrey Canada

Success

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

Truth

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

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

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.

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

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

— Geoffrey Canada

Education

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?

— Geoffrey Canada

Success

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

— Geoffrey Canada

Education

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

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

Video games offer violent messages, and even the sports video games include taunting and teasing.

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

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

— Geoffrey Canada

Education

One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility.'

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

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

— Geoffrey Canada

Education

People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don't understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

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.

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching... It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters.

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

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.

— Geoffrey Canada

Life

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.

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

It is important to have permanent safe spaces in Harlem.

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

When I began working in not-for-profits, it was taking a vow of poverty, which eliminated huge numbers of folks.

— Geoffrey Canada

Success

Banks used to open and operate between 10 and 3. They operated 10 to 3. They were closed for lunch hour. Now, who can bank between 10 and 3? The unemployed. They don't need banks. They got no money in the banks. Who created that business model? Right? And it went on for decades. You know why? Because they didn't care. It wasn't about the customers.

— Geoffrey Canada

Wisdom

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.

— Geoffrey Canada

Success

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.

— Geoffrey Canada

Education

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.

— Geoffrey Canada

Success