Wendy Kopp Quotes

Children without access to quality early education programs start kindergarten with an 18-month disadvantage, and that gap continues to widen. By the time they are in fourth grade, many cannot do math or read at grade level.

One of society's thorniest problems is that children from poor families start school lagging badly behind their more affluent classmates in readiness.

Even the best parents have to spend so much time making ends meet that they cannot help their kids with homework or afford the extra tutoring that wealthier students enjoy. To address these unjust disparities, we need an early education revolution.

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.

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

The gap in education in this country, the unfairness of the schools, is one of the great unfairness in this society.

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.

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.

As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families.

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

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

When millions of kids are missing out on school, delivering educational services becomes an issue that concerns the humanitarian system.

Indeed the Obamas, the Clintons, and many other elites who oppose school choice and make it harder for charter schools to operate, send their own children to private institutions that cost more than many Hispanic families make in a year.

Head Start is designed to ensure that all children - regardless of their family's income, race, or ethnic background - are able to enter kindergarten ready to learn.

We have a government that boasts about free education. Those of us who have scratched below the surface know it is costing us by denying opportunities for others to attend college or university.

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.

As a teacher you can see the difference in kids who have parents who were involved. That difference, by the time these kids get to the third grade, is drastic.

The so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us.

Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education.

Only one in five children in the U.S. lives within walking distance of a park. Many more lack access to a quality early childhood education that provides ample time and space to play.

Experts tell us that 90% of all brain development occurs by the age of five. If we don't begin thinking about education in the early years, our children are at risk of falling behind by the time they start Kindergarten.

I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I'd feared.

If you have a kid who goes to kindergarten and doesn't know what a circle is, doesn't know what red and green are, and doesn't know what right and left are, by the time he learns those things, the rest of the class is far ahead of him.

A child miseducated is a child lost.