Host: Basir Mchawi

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For copies of the show: (212) 209-2945

Program description

Education at the Crossroads attempts to look at education in a broad and comprehensive fashion. Critical education related issues manifest on an almost daily basis. Crossroads looks at many of the issues that the mainstream media fails to cover including: alternative forms of education, high stakes testing, African centered education, home schooling and community responses to continued miseducation. While local issues are often discussed, issues of national and global importance are covered regularly. Education at the Crossroads presents a cutting edge vision of what education needs to be.

Host/producer profile

Basir Mchawi has woven a distinguished career as an educator, activist and communicator. Having been a teacher and administrator in both public schools and independent Black schools, Mchawi has had an opportunity to stretch the limits of what can be done for our children. Whether making the concerns of communities of color audible in the halls of the central bureaucracy or changing the character of public education by creating smaller community centered schools, Mchawi has always been in the forefront of the struggle for quality education.

In the mid and late 1970's, Basir Mchawi served as editor and publisher of Black News, the innovative monthly news magazine of Brooklyn's EAST organization. As producer and host of View from the EAST, a WLIB public affairs radio program, Mchawi helped transform talk radio in New York. In the early 1980's Mchawi came to WBAI to produce a series of political and cultural programs including the ground-breaking 16-hour, The World According to John Coltrane. In 1996, Education at the Crossroads was first heard on Thursday evenings as part of the regular WBAI weekly lineup. In the strange times we currently find ourselves in, Basir Mchawi continues to "agitate, educate and organize."

I am currently working on developing a cadre of other producers and hosts for Education at the Crossroad. I am especially interested in bringing young people into community radio on both sides of the microphone.