MF GALAXY

Dr. Lorraine Monroe has been a teacher and professor of education for decades, and has made a significant impact on the way that children are educated and teachers are taught to teach in New York City. Dr. Monroe is the founder and Executive Director of School Leadership Academy, an educational consultant, and was the Chief Executive for Instruction at the NYC Board of Education. She founded the Center for Minority Achievement at Bank Street College and is a member of the Board of Trustees at Columbia University Teachers College.  I spoke with Dr. Monroe after she’d just given a talk about the schools that she oversaw, and how their transformative mission requires them to fight the many ways that Euro-American schools poison African-American children. She spoke of the necessity of getting city kids out of the city and into nature, and in particular to a healing camp that provided meditation that they loved, a camp whose quiet restored their serenity and gave th...

This is a longer version of an article published in Vue Weekly in the week of 2008 February 28 for a series of articles commissioned for African History Month.                       One of the most obvious indicators of injustice is the use of double-standards. We learn early in life that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If geese are eating gravel and ganders and getting grain—and worse, the gander lobby is raising hell about geese wanting to get some—you know that someone is having the down pulled over his eyes. And that’s usually a prelude to getting roasted. The last several months in Toronto have been a furious battle over the just-approved proposal to create an Africentric public school as one means to address the disproportionate failure and drop-out rate of African-Canadian students in that district. But to hear Paula Todd on CTV Newsnet’s The Verdict — just one of a wailing chorus of opposition—such a sc...