COLETTE GILROY lived her childhood in the tumultuous years of prewar and wartime France, surviving several harrowing bombing attacks. She was taken out of school shortly after the war at age 15 to work in a factory, eventually making her way to England to become proficient in English, which led to work at UNESCO in Paris and a 12-year career at United Nations headquarters in New York that included months of service in Africa as Documents Officer for the Commission of Investigation into the Dag Hammerskjöld crash.

While working full-time at the UN, she recommenced her education, completing three years of high school in just 18 months. She then went on to her B.A. at Fairleigh Dickinson, M.A. at City College of New York and Ph.D at Penn State University, with several years of additional study at New York University and the Sorbonne in Paris - all interwoven with a long, successful and very satisfying teaching career.

During her many years as a high school teacher, she was the supervising master-teacher for numerous student-teachers. She taught in-service courses and developed a series of computer programs to assist students who needed independent help. She presented papers at Lille, France and Atlantic City (Teachers Convention) on her computer work.

NICHOLAS GILROY graduated from Stuyvesant High School in his birthplace, New York City, received his B.A. from Stanford University and his M.A. and Ph.D from New York University. After military service as a high speed Morse Code interceptor operator for the Army Security Agency in Okinawa during the Korean War, he worked several years in advertising research in New York, Canada and London, England, followed by more years in film production in New York.

He taught two years of junior high school English followed by close to three decades as a professor of communication at Bronx Community College in the City University of New York, teaching a range of courses in oral communication, as well as literature and written composition.

He was continuously active in a variety of cross-curricular programs, training other faculty members in integrating oral and written communication skills into their content courses, designing and team-teaching combined English-speech courses, assisting faculty members in creating study guides for their courses and working on a learning-to-learn task force to help weak students turn their failures into successes.

He was an actor for two summer seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, narrated a series of essays broadcast nationally on Monitoradio, directed and performed in theater workshop productions, and for many years supervised the classroom observations of junior and adjunct faculty. Outside the college he has taught teenage acting classes at the Stella Adler Studio, lectured on theater and aesthetics, performed in readers' theater, taught creative drama courses for K-12 teachers and conducted creative drama workshops for elementary and middle school students.

COLETTE AND NICHOLAS were married in June of 1955, and have enjoyed home building, remodeling, decorating, landscaping, gardening, cooking, reading, writing, savoring art and music, traveling - and have taken special pleasure in team teaching together. They have raised two bicultural, multilingual daughters and have two grandchildren, one of whom is already a fully bilingual/bicultural child.

The Gilroy's passion for education reform was born from their decades of experience in teaching and supervision -- as professionals, as parents, as grandparents, and as surrogate parents -- involved in the education of many children.

The genesis of Fixing America's Broken Public Education sprang from their managing a hotly contested school board election campaign -- illustrating both the inescapable need for education reform and the enormous obstacles to achieving it.

• Public Speaking
• Consulting
• Seminars
• Education Writing