Arne Duncan Quotes

American high school students trail teenagers from 14 European and Asian countries in reading, math and science. We're even trailing France.

Promoting education is an effort that is close to my heart. Illiteracy contributes to poverty; encouraging children to pick up a book is fundamental.

Massachusetts children cannot only lead the nation in test scores, they can be competitive with the best in the world. And the gap in achievement among races can virtually disappear.

Early care and education helps children build the skills they need for success in kindergarten and can help close the achievement gap.

Generational disinterest in education means that too many young children lack the push from their parents in early years which can make the difference between success and failure in schools.

Education is literally the difference between success and failure, or even life and death for many children.

A third of our kids, after we spend more per student than any country in the world other than a couple rounding errors, 30 percent are college- and/or career-ready.

In Uruguay, the President of the country announced that this would be his legacy, "One laptop per child."

Even if one child falls in a borewell, the entire country gets worried; we must generate more awareness about hundreds of children who are unable to survive due to lack of primary healthcare facilities.

On K-12 education America has gone down, down, down compared to the other nations. It doesn't mean that we have gotten dumber. It just means that we have not advanced as fast in those areas as other nations have done, and we're way down right now.

The thing we need to work on as a country is our educational system. To me, that is something that our generation needs to be focused on. To make sure that for our next generation, every child - no matter what background, no matter what ethnicity, no matter whether they're whatever gender - that they are all educated to have real equal opportunity. That's number one for me. But I have no question that if it's not our generation that will make sure that that happens that it will be our children's generation.

If the goal of the No Child Left Behind Act is to ensure that all children meet state standards, then allowing large numbers of the most disadvantaged children to fall between the cracks is unacceptable.

The big problem in the long process of dumbing down the schools is that you can reach a point of no return. How are parents who never received a decent education themselves to recognize that their children are not getting a decent education?

I'm literate, and the idea of leaving children illiterate is criminal.

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

You live in a country that makes it harder to raise children than any other country in the world. You vote for me and I'll give you family values.

If the goal is to dramatically improve college completion rates, not college-going rates by itself but college completion, it's not just a college problem. We need a big focus on early childhood education. Our early childhood education system is pretty good in this country. Not enough students have opportunity. And, very discouragingly, they lose their advantage because they go to poor schools after that. So, let's focus on our babies.

Next, to make them expert in the usefullest points of grammar; and withal to season them and win them early to the love of virtue and true labour, ere any flattering seducement or vain principle seize them wandering, some easy and delightful book of education would be read to them; whereof the Greeks have store, as Cebes, Plutarch, and other Socratic discourses.

We need to have an education system in New Jersey and all over the country that makes all of our kids, either college or career ready. It should be their choice. I mean, every kid doesn't want to go to college. But I think we should aspire to let every child reach his maximum or her maximum potential.

With younger children the greatest reward is to be able to pass on to a new stage in each subject. It is a punishment to a young child not to be allowed to use the apparatus but to sit still and do nothing.

Imagine if you had genuine, high-quality early-childhood education for every child, and suddenly every black child in America - but also every poor white child or Latino [child], but just stick with every black child in America - is getting a really good education. And they're graduating from high school at the same rates that whites are, and they are going to college at the same rates that whites are, and they are able to afford college at the same rates because the government has universal programs. So now they're all graduating.

The observation of the way in which the children pass from the first disordered movements to those which are spontaneous and ordered -- this is the book of the teacher; this is the book which must inspire her actions . . .

We can change the world one thought at a time, one child at a time, one family at a time, one community at a time, one city, one state and one country at a time.

A top-quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class - based on test scores - by over 10 percent in a single year. ... That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top-quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away.

I keep as far from children as possible. I don't like the size of them; the scale is all wrong. The head tends to be too big for the bodies and the hands and feet are a disaster and they keep falling into things, and the nakedness of their bad character.