Richard Dawson Quotes

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

Excitement in education and student productivity, the ability to get a result that you want from students, go together and cannot be separated.

If there's one thing that 'No Child Left Behind' has proven, it's that more academics don't make for smarter children - or even higher test scores. And yet we somehow refuse to accept this reality.

What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you're always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, 'I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.'

Scholarships that allow students to get a good education are important, but first we want to measure the progress that the schools are teaching our students, we want to hold them accountable for the progress, we want to hold the schools accountable for teaching the young people in America.

I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.

I don't know anybody who said, 'I love that teacher, he or she gave a really good homework set,' or 'Boy, that was the best class I ever took because those exams were awesome.' That's not what people want to talk about. It's not what influences people in one profession or another.

Good teachers know how to bring out the best in students.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

Unfortunately, the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve.

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

Schools should be held accountable for results.

Appropriate assessments are a crucial part of effectively educating students. But they only measure a narrow segment of what kids need to learn.

A final is a final, and is motivation in itself.

I'm not a policy oriented person. I'm constrained to what I study. But educational policy has not yet taken adequate note of the whole child. Kids are not just their IQ or standardized test scores. It matters whether or not they show up, how hard they work.

I was in school studying International Studies and Sociology. I was really into what was going on in school. I was affected by the ideas and engaged as a student, but not disciplined or motivated enough to do the work. That was a fear of mine for a while, that nothing was motivating.

Real improvement in our schools is not simply a matter of spending more, it is a matter of expecting more.

A top-quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year. ... That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top-quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away.

How many more years will our educators continue to lecture us on the evils of whipping children until they bring home high grades? Year after year we listen to these fellows tell us that it is not the grade that counts but the development of the child's personality. After the lecture they go back to all the best schools and reject our children because they have C averages.

Schoolwork came kind of natural to me, but when I brought home a grade that wasn't up to par, my parents let me know it.

On K-12 education America has gone down, down, down compared to the other nations. It doesn't mean that we have gotten dumber. It just means that we have not advanced as fast in those areas as other nations have done, and we're way down right now.

Most people believe that schools were good enough when they were children and that they are good enough now. But the dynamic growth of our system of education has spawned serious problems of educational quality.

So I was doing well academically, and I was a well-ranked tennis player and was the apple of my handsome father's eye-and then I would bring home a report card with a B-plus on it, and my parents would look at the report card as if I'd flunked. "Uh, honey?" one of them would ask, looking perplexed. "Now, this isn't a criticism but, if you could get a B-plus in philosophy, how much harder would it have been to get an A-minus?"

You want to know what I make? I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could. I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional Medal of Honor, and I can make a...

What do they teach them at these schools?