Jonathan Kozol Quotes

I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.

The problems of public schools will not be solved by cutting off the source of their funding, which is what vouchers are.

And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you're as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here's a voucher, go sign up.

I'm a product of public schools. They are resource-challenged, and when you take those dollars away from public schools and send them to private schools, you're further starving the system.

We're not proposing any shifting of funding from public schools to private schools.

I went to public schools, which is to say publicly financed.

Our schools should get five years to get back to where they were in 1963. If they're still bad maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools.

I'm totally opposed to vouchers. I will fight them tooth and nail.

I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs.

I hope to see the day when as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over …

I'm not knocking private schools, but I owe it to my kids to let them grow up in a place where private school isn't required. They're only in school 6-8 hours a day; they have to live in their neighborhood 24 hours a day. I didn't want them growing up in a place where anybody with the means had abandoned their public schools.

Direct Grants, private schools which took huge numbers of state pupils, involved effective co-operation between state and private sectors - a thing all modern governments claim they want. So why were they abolished? And why aren't they now restored?

The push to defund public schools and reroute taxpayer money to charters and private institutions is actually a very clever strategy by the Right Wing, which has always had a great deal of disdain for a system that forces them to pay taxes toward some other kid's non-religious, science-based education.

Millennials are not deeply familiar with school choice, and have some reservations, especially about the types of institutions that a student might choose to attend with taxpayer dollars.

President Bush and I had asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to school vouchers. We didn't get it, and we were disappointed. But we did not go out and form a corporation to pay for it. That would have been a problem.

Second, when comparing private school and public school test scores, it's like apples and oranges. Public schools have to take everyone, but private schools can be selective. It's not accurate or fair to compare the job they do.

There is a growing acceptance and interest in publicly funded school choice as a catalyst for education reform in general and a way to empower parents to be education reformers.

Arizona is a national leader in school choice with both charter schools and tuition tax credits giving parents and their children more school choices than ever before.

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them.

I am and have always been a strong proponent of public education. But by the virtue of its very nature - publicly funded schools cannot offer the type of spiritual education that Catholic schools have long provided.

Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools.

Female schools might be comprised in the list of those worthy the public patronage, with great propriety.

If you're going to have a public subsidy to education, vouchers are clearly a better way of delivering it. They should result in some loosening up and privatization of the government school system.

The people of Missouri said they expect their elected leaders to support public schools because they know that education is the best economic development tool there is.

Republicans get a lot of money from big business, but they are not tied to the union dollar. As a result they have been aggressive advocates of school reform, charter schools and vouchers for private schools.