Gwen Ifill Quotes

There's an evidence from a number of studies which show that where you grow up and the age at which you move to the suburbs or to a neighborhood that in general seems to have better conditions can really affect a child's outcomes. The kids who moved at young ages are dramatically better as adults. They're earning 30 percent more, they're 27 percent more likely to go to college, relative to the kids who stayed in the high poverty public housing projects. And so there's clear scientific evidence that you can change kids' outcomes just based on where they grow up.

The data show we can do something about upward mobility. Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.

If you look at our theories of social pathology and then at the dismal conditions in which children grow up in our ghettos, you would predict that all of them would be on drugs or psychological basket cases. Yet if you use criteria like gainful employment, forming partnerships and life without crime, you will find that most of those kids make it.

We're leaving the House to people who either were born with a silver spoon in their mouth... or couldn't get better jobs in the first place.

France has the least social mobility of any developed country. The social elevator no longer works. It's broken.

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.

Just because a child's parents are poor or uneducated is no reason to deprive the child of basic human rights to health care, education, proper nutrition.

Poor children fare worse than rich children on just about everything that social scientists measure.

The first 3 years of a person’s life determines the next 80 years.

The kids who were brought up on minefields should be able to catch up with the kids who were brought up on soccer fields.

The capacity of children to become self-sufficient and successful adults is compromised not only by monetary poverty, but by poverty of experience, influence, and expectation

We know what works. What works are the very opportunities that advantaged families provide for their children.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

A map of Trump country would look a lot like a map of the various regions and counties from which young people with the best opportunities have consistently chosen to flee.

Millennials easily connect the dots between good education and good opportunities, and they also understand that it isn't just hard work that determines how well a child will be educated - it also depends on where they live and the resources their parents commit to their education.

The idea that there is a meritocracy where anyone from any background really might have the social and economic mobility to rise to the top in Silicon Valley, those are antithetical to a lot of the principles that the Trump administration apparently stands for.

One of the most significant factors contributing to the chasm of educational opportunity is the way that schools are funded.

Inequality is partly a marker of success.

...we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.

I think anybody, not just children, is a product of a great environment. If you put them in a better environment from a sad situation, nine times out of 10, they'll go in the right direction.

A child's character develops in accordance with the obstacles he has encountered... or the freedom favoring his development that he has enjoyed.

The child has a different relation to his environment from ours... the child absorbs it. The things he sees are not just remembered; they form part of his soul. He incarnates in himself all in the world about him that his eyes see and his ears hear.

There was a child went forth everyday, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day... or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

The child’s progress does not depend only on his age, but also on being free to look around him.

The economic benefits of investing in children have been extensively documented. Investing fully in children today will ensure the well-being and productivity of future generations for decades to come. By contrast, the physical, emotional and intellectual impairment that poverty inflicts on children canmean a lifetime of suffering and want - and a legacy of poverty for the next generation.