Rachel Kushner Quotes

I don't think anyone thinks that the SAT score is a measure of your innate intelligence. It is not. That is a fallacious concept, and we at Kaplan, and others who are in a position, should be out there making sure people know this is nothing, this score does not have anything to do with your innate intelligence.

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.

And so, you can do hundreds and hundreds of studies showing a general factor and just so long as you restrict your populations, your testing materials and the kinds of situations you look at, you can keep finding the same wrong thing again and again.

An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement.

Competition has not worked in education because it has never really been tried.

When student performance shows increases on test scores, that improvement is not associated with an increase in 'fluid intelligence' - that is, using logical thinking and problem solving in novel situations, rather than recalling previously learned facts and skills.

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.

We're so used to the tests telling me if I'm smart or not. It's telling me if I know the material or not.

I was about nine years old when a teacher administered my IQ test. Unfortunately, as I was nine, I didn't know that I needed to keep the paperwork for future reference.

To apply for a gifted program, children as young as 4 are required to sit through hour-long verbal exams.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.

I read so slow. If I have a script, I'm going to read it five times slower than any other actor, but I'll be able to tell you everything in it. It kills me that there are standardized tests geared towards just one kind of child.

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

Labor, under their current leadership, want to be the Downtown Abbey party when it comes to educational opportunity. They think working class children should stick to the station in life they were born into - they should be happy to be recognized for being good with their hands and not presume to get above themselves.

If education does not create a need for the best in life, then we are stuck in an undemocratic, rigid caste society.

I can well imagine that certain writers, even writers that we'd consider today very great writers, may not necessarily have tested highly on IQ just because of their numerical skills, or maybe they may not be very good at memory, and are not particularly good at these kinds of tests.

Rarely do we stop and consider whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest.

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

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.

Children from a given family background, when put in schools of different social compositions, will achieve at quite different levels.

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

IQ is the biggest scam in the history of education. Nobody needs IQ testing. Nobody benefits when you do it. I'm in a very different position than most of you; I don't want an IQ test for Black kids, and one for green kids, and one for yellow kids, and one for red kids. I don't want any for anybody, because it offers no benefits to anyone….The disproportionate placement of African-American males in classes for the mentally retarded should have taught a prudent person that something is wrong with intelligence testing.

The typical white intellectual considers himself superior to ordinary white people for two contradictory reasons: a) he constantly proclaims belief in human equality, but they don't ; b) he has a high IQ, but they don't.

We once had a society stratified by bloodlines, in which the Protestant Establishment was in one class, immigrants were in another and African-Americans were in another. Now we live in a society stratified by education. In many ways this system is more fair, but as the information economy matures, we are learning it comes with its own brutal barriers to opportunity and ascent.

In this respect, higher education is now causing most of the growing inequality and strengthening class structure of the United States.