Ruben Hinojosa Quotes

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

Schools are not equal. There are still the haves and the have-nots.

The system that had grown up in most states is that wealthy districts with an affluent population can afford to spend a lot more on their public school systems than the poorer districts.

The public education system works for children of families like mine but it does not work for the children of families who I represent …

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

The schools that suffer are the schools in, in poor neighborhoods. They are the neighborhoods with the greatest need, with the parents struggling to work and to make ends meet. They don't have enough resources to give, they don't have enough resources to pay more, and these are the neighborhoods that go first.

In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 1 in 5 girls make it to secondary school.

Far too many bright, motivated kids are being badly served by their educational experiences - ones at elite, wealthy schools as well as underfunded ones.

There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go.

We aspire to be equal opportunity, but all across the country where a student is born, their race, their class affect where they end up.

I cannot understand how the education of this United States of America has been fooled time and time again. Either make it separate but equal or integrate, therefore it will be equal. And it has been separate and unequal.

If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.

As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.

The promise of equal educational opportunity envisioned by the Brown decision remains unfulfilled.

I am very fortunate I can send my kids to private school, but everybody does not have the money. If you cannot get your kid in a good school today, your kids are going to be behind the eight ball.

All around the world, we send our top talent into finance, technology, medicine and law - everywhere but towards expanding opportunity for our most marginalized children.

If you're poor, you don't often live near a good school. If it's a competitive public school program, our kids are not prepared to enter those programs.

The sheltering of upper income children in private schools not only accelerates the deterioration of public education, it hides its consequences from precisely those people who could do something about it.

Those inner-cities, they're not giving kids a chance. They're not giving the teachers a chance to really help those kids. They're making it real tough. You're either gonna help or you're hurting your own country.

We want to help schools that don't have money.

Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the children of the highest bidder-the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.

Savage Inequalities

The elites benefit from affirmative action programs even when those programs are designed to help the masses.

Equal access to public education has been achieved. But what is the good of access to a failing school?

The inequality that exists today, … derives less from the unequal availability of opportunity than from the unequal ability to exploit opportunity …