Ben Howland Quotes

Children themselves know they are being cheated. Ultimately we owe it to our children. They are in school for 190 days a year. Every moment they spend learning is precious. If a year goes by and they are not being stretched and excited, that blights their life.

The college that takes students with modest entering abilities and improves their abilities substantially contributes more than the school that takes very bright students and helps them develop only modestly.

In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.

With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that.

A balanced diet and physical activity are vital to academic performance. A healthy diet has a direct link to increased cognitive function and memory skills, decreased absenteeism from school, and improved mood. These advantages can help students stay focused and complete their coursework.

It is commonly said that a teacher fails if he has not been surpassed by his students. There has been no failure on our part in this regard considering how far they have gone.

I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.

I probably didn't put forth the effort I should have put forth, didn't realize the value of education until I went to college.

We do recognise the need to move towards the publication of information showing the progress made by pupils from one stage of their education to another.

Education is not about thinning the herd. Education is about helping every student succeed.

I coasted through high school. I was 203rd in a class of 987.

I would like my kids to study well.

I kind of always did get good grades.

I used to be a reasonably good student.

We're so used to the tests telling me if I'm smart or not. It's telling me if I know the material or not.

I was a good student. I started college at 16 years old and did okay.

I have seen schools across the country working long and hard to embed a commitment to the unlimited development of every student into their cultures. The result, in terms of motivated learners and test scores, often is spectacular.

My students may have dexterity with the equations they're required to know, but they lack the capacity to apply their knowledge to real-life problems. This critical shortcoming appears in high school and possibly in elementary grades - long before college.

And certainly having gone to Oxford, and seen some of the other students there, I wouldn't say the ones at my school were less capable. They could've been there.

We must provide an improved early education system so that all students have the opportunity to learn and reach their full potential.

I know that instructional time is a zero-sum game, but if we want kids to do well academically, it's hard to imagine that happening if they don't have some control over their attention.

As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured. —New York, Sept. 26, 2007

A fourth-grade reader may be a sixth-grade mathematician. The grade is an administrative device which does violence to the nature of the developmental process.

Test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don't tell you where a student could end up.

I have an absolutely unshakable faith in kids, grounded in the fact that I worked for three years in one of the worst public schools in Baltimore, with kids most people would write off because of their backgrounds. But, when I set high expectations, at the end of the day, these kids went from scoring at the bottom on standardized tests, to scoring at the top, despite their unfortunate circumstances.