Condoleezza Rice Quotes

From kindergarten to graduation, I went to public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world.

If we don't empower families to be able to have a quality education, then their children - for the first time in American history, truly the first time - will not have the same economic opportunities.

In Latin America, no country is prouder of its legally obligatory admission-free school system than Argentina. Yet only one Argentinian of five thousand born into the lower half of the population gets as far as the university.

It will not do to say we are too poor to educate the people--we are too poor not to educate them

… public education was first provided for boys only; but light soon broke in, and girls were allowed to attend the public schools two hours a day.

Ensuring preschool education for all and investing more in public schools is essential if the U.S. is to avoid becoming a neo-feudal country where advantages and disadvantages are passed on from one generation to the next.

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

The public schools in our neighborhood were so bad that the teachers in the school said you shouldn't send your kids here. My mother called around and found a school that was willing to give both me and my brother scholarship money. It's a classic story about black parents wanting more for their kids than they had for themselves.

The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care... They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country.

We know that the enemy of upward mobility is not poverty or even other people's success. The enemy of upward mobility is apathy and an educational system that offers choice to the privileged and traps the most vulnerable in unsafe and poor performing schools.

We are viewed by the world as a quasi-racist state in which we allow natural disasters to obliterate our minority community, in which our penal system is designed to treat blacks unfairly, and in which we let the medical and educational systems in our ghettos fester to the level of some third-world countries.

A core part of Teach For America's mission has always been affecting positive change in the traditional public school system.

And I think that we in America need to understand that many schools need improvement, and particularly with respect to how they're serving minority children.

Teach For America provides one of the most critical pipelines for bringing new talent into public education.

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

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

One of the over-riding things for many who grow up in poverty is the simple desire to escape. I think it was sort of obvious to me that escape had to be through education.

To pine for the days before public education became a practical reality is to pine for an America held back by mass ignorance and mass illiteracy.

Obviously, this whole 'no child left behind' idea is more rhetoric than actual practice.

Progress for black Americans depends on good schools because education is the last great equalizer.

I'm not the only Labour MP who sent their child to public school but I'm the only one who's questioned about it.

Most blacks want school vouchers, but most liberals vehemently oppose them. Why? Because what is good for teachers' unions is of more importance to the Left than what is good for blacks. Who, then, is racist? By their own admission, and by the policies they pursue, the answer is the people who call themselves progressive.

Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent.

There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.

Unless young blacks are brought into the mainstream of economic life, they will continue to be on the curbstone.