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" The 'niche' effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation. "

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" Public school was never in business to produce Thoreau. It is in business to produce a man like Richard Nixon and, even more, a population like the one which could elect him. "

" Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs. "

" If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream. "

" In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school. "

" We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King. "

" I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy. "

" Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States. "

" I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children. "

" You need massive recruitment to tell the poorest of the poor what is possible. "

" Now, I don't expect what I write to change things. I think I write now simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted. "

" I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure. "

" The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking. "

" No matter what happens in a child's home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there's no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything. "

" In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable. "

" I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height. "

" Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. "

" President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams. "

" President Obama's first term in office has been better for intentions than for actual changes in planning and policy. I do believe, and he has several things to this effect, that he would like to provide universal preschool or at least far more preschool for our children. "

" Schooling should not be left to the whim or wealth of village elders. I believe that we should fund all schools in the U.S. with our national resources. All these kids are being educated to be Americans, not citizens of Minneapolis or San Francisco. "

" Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools. "

" The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk. "

" Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state. "

" The inequalities are greater now than in '92. Some states have equalized per-pupil spending but they set the 'equal level' very low, so that wealthy districts simply raise extra money privately. "

" 'Savage Inequalities' was about school finance, and 'Amazing Grace' primarily dealt with medical and social injustices in New York. But with 'Ordinary Resurrections,' I had no predetermined agenda. When I met with the children, I was not in pursuit of any line of thinking. In our conversations, I let them lead me where they wanted to go. "

" Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available. "

" Congress has an opportunity to take advantage of the opening created by Justice Kennedy later this year when it reauthorizes the federal No Child Left Behind Act. "

" It's sad that some people who have one exciting moment spend the rest of their lives rehashing it. "

" All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare. "

" But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral. "

" I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be 'fixed' - I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines - ever asks the opinions of teachers. "