James S. Coleman Quotes

The higher the social class of other students the higher any given student's achievement.

The results indicate that heterogeneity of race and heterogeneity of family educational background can increase the achievement of children from weak educational backgrounds with no adverse effect on children from strong educational backgrounds.

The Scholastic Aptitude Tests do not predict success any better than the socio economic status of the parents.

I was an anomaly because my father was a Harvard man, and he came from a family of poor people.

People's fates in life are decided largely by their schools.

Competition among schools is always a great motivator.

I'm working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.

An education system suits some more than others. It can lead you out into life or lead you on a wild goose chase. It can help to make you miserable, or dull and nasty and insipid, or profoundly stupid in the special way that 'brainy' people can be.

I was the daughter of teachers, so school was always very important. I liked it.

Schools are successful only insofar as they reduce the dependence of a child's opportunities upon his social origins.

Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain.

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

I grew up in a middle-class family. I went to law school.

Education seems to be placing increased emphasis on assessment and tracking, which means parents are terrified that if their kid doesn't exceed their expected learning level at six years old, they are immediately put in the class that ends up working at McDonald's.

I know, it sounds generic and is a cliche, but coming from a middle class family in Kanpur, it was always the neighbourhood opinions which mattered.

The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read 'Reader's Digest', listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

I come from a middle-class family in Gwalior.

I know that instructional time is a zero-sum game, but if we want kids to do well academically, it's hard to imagine that happening if they don't have some control over their attention.

People often think of America as a classless society, but, of course, that isn't true. Within immigrant communities, there's an enormous distinction of class, depending on who your parents are, and that kind of thing comes out really quick in things like marriage and interpersonal relationships.

My dad was working class.

One of the most consistent findings about low performing schools and students is that "home variables" (parental income and education, etc.) are more predictive than "school variables." But, having said that, we as a society can have much more effect on the school variables than on the home variables, so it's important and valuable to focus on the question of which interventions in schools are most effective and which are least effective.