James S. Coleman Quotes

I am particularly surprised that certain outlets look at pass rates irrespective of student population. As if inner city high school kids are to fare as well as college students.

You know, I'm fairly intelligent, but I don't think my grades reflected that.

The SAT plays an important role in helping admissions officers around the country sort out students, well-deserving students from 20,000 high schools that have different curriculums, different grading standards, and different ability to help students get ready for college.

We have placed more emphasis on grades and school ranking than on genuine education.

I coasted through high school. I was 203rd in a class of 987.

I was in honors classes in high school. I'd get an A on every test, but I had a 1.9 grade point average. The teacher would say, 'You didn't do your homework.' I'd say, 'But isn't the homework supposed to be the lead-up to the test?'

My priorities are making sure we reduce class size and close the achievement gap.

You can't just abandon accountability measures in schools... Educators want that because otherwise they can't identify achievement-gap issues for students.

I think for what success looks like for me, it is a world in which you can look at the achievement scores, the academic scores, of any school anywhere in this country [the USA], and you wouldn't be able to look at the score and determine what the racial makeup or the socioeconomic makeup of that school is simply because of the academic achievement levels.

The higher education system in these countries (US, Korea etc) has become like a theatre in which some people decided to stand to get a better view, promoting the others behind them to stand. Once enough people stand, everyone has to stand, which means no one is getting a better view, while everyone has become more uncomfortable.

Duke is in extremely competitive environment. In my high school, I think I got one B my whole four years. I was used to being the smartest kid in every class I was in, and then I went to Duke and suddenly I was the dumbest kid in every class. Everybody there is up to something.

Because grades in climbing are subjective, I am fan of making big gaps between climbing grades.

I didn't know about competition until I got to school. I didn't know how degrading it was to be graded until I got to school.

I would certainly look at a proposal for tuition-free community college for two years if the students kept a certain high grade-point average.

Charter opponents often try to delegitimize strong testing results like those in Boston by attributing them to excessive test prep - as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio did recently.

Sir, I didn't deserve the grade you gave me on this test. Do you know a lower one?

The word gap leads to an achievement gap and has life-long consequences

A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.

I was a B student in math, simply because my teachers liked me, as an actor.

In presidential campaign I released a 65-page file from the Syracuse University College of Law that showed poor grades, back in college, also. If I were plagiarizing consistently, my grades would have been better.

Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A's. Originality on the other hand could get you anything -- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.

I was at the foot of my class.

If the goal of the No Child Left Behind Act is to ensure that all children meet state standards, then allowing large numbers of the most disadvantaged children to fall between the cracks is unacceptable.

One thing about school - I always had this attitude that I was in school to learn, and attempted to do whatever was involved in that process, while school had this attitude that I was there to earn grades, which I couldn't care less about. Unsurprisingly, my grades weren't very good.

People can fly. Some people fly higher than others, that's all.