John Engler Quotes

That's why I created the New America School - to fill the cracks in our public education system.

I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools.

I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'

The promise of equal educational opportunity envisioned by the Brown decision remains unfulfilled.

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

We know that the enemy of upward mobility is not poverty or even other people's success. The enemy of upward mobility is apathy and an educational system that offers choice to the privileged and traps the most vulnerable in unsafe and poor performing schools.

So one of the things that happened with integration in the South is they found that the black teachers were much more educated than the white teachers.

In the 1820s, the U.S., Japan, and the U.K. were some of the only countries where the average population received at least two years of formal schooling.

And I think that we in America need to understand that many schools need improvement, and particularly with respect to how they're serving minority children.

Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

The gap in education in this country, the unfairness of the schools, is one of the great unfairness in this society.

We have done a poor job educating people about education. Only when we have clarified that can we talk about how best to achieve it.

I believe that education is the greatest equalizer; thus, I will continue to fight to equalize the playing field in an educational atmosphere that is not always level!

I started the Pies Descalzos foundation in Colombia when I was 18, and since then I have been very involved in the crusade for education.

Obviously, this whole 'no child left behind' idea is more rhetoric than actual practice.

Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education.

Teach For America was built on the idea that our best hope of reaching 'One Day' is to have thousands of alumni use their diverse experiences and ideas to effect change from inside and outside the education system.

I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.

We're failing our children with education, we're failing our environment.

To make me believe that those men who have regulated education in our country have humanity in their hearts is to make me believe a lie.

The immediate future is going to be tragic for all of us unless we find a way of making the vast educational resources of this country serve the true purpose of education, truth and justice.

About half my work in education is U.S. political reform around school districts and charter schools, and creating more room for entrepreneurial organizations to develop. And about half on technology, which I look at as a global platform.

There will always be places in the world where good schools don't exist and good teachers don't want to go, not just in the developing world but in places of socioeconomic hardship.

We spend a lot of time training and retraining. It's heartbreaking because our education system has failed all of us. And again you go to China, even Mexico, Brazil the education systems are valued - ours are not in this country at K-12 level. It's amazing how that change has transpired in my lifetime.

In fact, the Harvard study data indicates that 70 percent of African American children attend schools that are predominately African American, about the same level as in 1968 when Dr. King died.