Laura Moser Quotes

I don't think anyone can accept us being 51st in the country dealing with fourth-grade math scores and reading scores in the fourth and sixth grades that are close to the bottom. That's not acceptable. It's not acceptable to the people of Alabama.

I was always a very good student.

The No Child Left Behind Program was an incentive to the schools to get their kids up to snuff on math and science and reading.

Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.

Some people are in positions of power, and when incentives go haywire, we are all human and it's easy to make mistakes. I am not saying everybody is Bernie Madoff.

Competition among schools is always a great motivator.

If we're going to have standards in schools, let's be honest and have standards.

When you introduce competition into the public school system, most studies show that schools start to do better when they are competing for students.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar turned out to be all hat and no cattle with his sorry oversight of the Minerals Management Service.

With the enactment of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act, we have taken an important step toward achieving federal education policies that will allow students to learn and achieve at the highest possible level.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

Education in America stinks!

The savings and loan scandals grew in the dark basements of official government secrecy.

There is little doubt that our guarantee fund system is seriously mismanaged and compromised.

Investing in better-quality education outcomes - especially in maths and science - more than pays for itself.

In the Catholic schools, they spend much less money than the public schools, and they get amazing results. Private schools spend much more money than the public schools, and they get remarkable results.

Whenever someone says to me, 'Are you for or against Common Core,' the first question I ask is, 'What do you think Common Core is?' You will get a different answer from every single person. You will literally get a different answer.

I was a good but not super serious student until about 10th grade, until I was about 14 or 15. Then I started to realise how competitive the world is. I started to meet kids who were more high-performing.

It is necessary and critical for states to have flexibility to determine how to identify and improve schools.

Now, the education of our children is of national concern, and if they are not educated properly, it is a national calamity.

Educational progress is a national concern; education is a private one.

There has to be a consequence to failure. Schools in the inner cities cannot be told, 'Oh, we want you to teach every child to learn how to read and, incidentally, if you fail to do that there's no consequence,' .. There has to be a consequence to failure, and the Title I money needs to follow the child.

You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.

Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.

I worry that the weakness - particularly of our public schools - is going to make that less and less true for everybody. And if we ever lose that as our core, then we're going to lose our confidence. We're not going to lead. We're going to protect. We're going to turn inward. That would be very bad for the world. So as a former Secretary of State, I think I can advocate for education as a national security priority.