Wendy Kopp Quotes

In inner-city, low-income communities of color, there's such a high correlation in terms of educational quality and success.

Kids born into certain ZIP codes will most likely have certain educational outcomes. And we've got to end that. If we end that, we explode economic development.

The traditional story of economists has been to say education explains what the returns are to school. I say, 'Okay, that's fine, but what explains the education? How much is just a matter of my giving you a poor kid versus a rich kid?'

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

I think that when we're talking about youth violence, we're talking about kids who don't have opportunities, so they're engaged in a certain degree of lawlessness, because we as a society have failed them.

I am particularly surprised that certain outlets look at pass rates irrespective of student population. As if inner city high school kids are to fare as well as college students.

I had been very focused on the issue of education disparities in our country, and literally, by the time kids are just nine years old, in low-income communities, they're already three or four grade levels behind nine-year-olds in high-income communities.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

Kids in urban and rural areas face so many challenges, and they show up at schools that don't have the extra capacity or extra resources to meet their needs.

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.

What began to weigh heavily upon me was that at the same time I was struggling to get my scholars and their families to believe in themselves, I was part of an educational system that despite its best intentions, only reinforced their failures.

Kids from poor families might be nicer, the might be happier, they might be more polite---but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.

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

I grew up on Section 8 housing, food stamps, welfare, and dealing with social services. I never had a Christmas. I never had a birthday.

I come from nothing. Growing up I didn't really have too much, and I can tap into that anytime that I want to and just remember how bad things were for me growing up and just knowing that I never want to go back there and I don't want my kids to go through it.

Arizona has three of the top 10 public high schools in the nation. We know how to educate a child. We just need to do it more often in more locations, and where we're having issues are in low-income areas where - where kids don't have a parent that cares or two parents that care, and, of course, also in our tribal nations.

Poverty is so significant that we can't expect to overcome the impacts of poverty in schools.

There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than $2 a day.

In the US, the problem is primary and secondary education. We've had such an increase in inequality because a quarter of American kids don't finish high school!

Kids who are middle class, socioeconomically, are surrounded by mentors. They have coaches, teachers, they have family friends, their parents have friends. They might have opportunities, they might have jobs that allow them to experience things that kids in poverty often don't have. Sometimes they come from dysfunctional families. And when you come from a family where money's a real challenge, then it might not be a priority to get you into a summer internship.

There are people in America who are absolutely desperate right now, who have no means to support their families, who have no opportunities to better themselves or their education - and they're not that different from the farmers and working-class people that I visited when I went to Kenya with Oxfam.

Because present procedures by design favor the affluent, the poor are being increasingly marginalized. And because the poor are so marginalized, they can exert little influence on institutional design decisions. We need to break out of this vicious spiral and create momentum in the opposite direction.

Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.

Sometimes, when you grow up in one of these poverty-stricken neighborhoods where the educational system isn't the best, you don't realize that you have any choices.

Some people steal to stay alive, and some steal to feel alive. Simple as that.