LeVar Burton Quotes

Although children are only 24 percent of the population, they're 100 percent of our future and we cannot afford to provide any child with a substandard education.

If we get public education right, everything else will follow. But if we get it wrong, not much else will matter.

There is nothing more important to our Nation's future, to our homeland security, and to our economy than ensuring we have a top-notch educational system that is the envy of the world.

For six and a half years, I had responsibility for leading the Labour party policy on education and delivering on our promise of improved opportunities for all our children.

I am going to use every rostrum and every forum and every searchlight that I can to tell the people of the country and their elected representatives that we can no longer afford overcrowded classrooms and half-day sessions. We just must not, we just cannot afford the great waste that comes from the neglect of a single child.

What we need is an education system that works for every child, not a select few. This starts with providing a quality education for our youngest Americans so they can learn, grow, and become prosperous citizens.

Our nation's commitment is to provide a quality education to every child to serve the public common good. Accordingly, we must shift the paradigm to think of education funding as investments made in individual children, not in institutions or buildings.

We need to focus on helping EVERY child to get a world-class education in EVERY school in this country.

The greatest obstacle to those who hope to reform American education is complacency.

I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.

Through the Committee on Education and the Workforce, we need to ensure we are educating a future generation to achieve a workforce for the 21st century. I believe the best education solutions come from those closest to the students: state and local entities.

The promise of education reform can never be fulfilled without adequate funding, and by shortchanging our schools, President Bush is breaking his promise to our children.

This is not a skill problem, this is a will problem. Does America have the will to make education a priority? We know the things that work. Why don't we scale up those things that do work.

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

The Time to Succeed Coalition brings together an unprecedented group of leaders from education and business, communities and academia to say that it is time to strike the shackles of an outdated school calendar from our disadvantaged schools.

All you've got to do is go back and look in the early 1900s and see what we had in Texas without public education and realize what it has done for the state.

Americans thinking that America will continue to lead the world in innovation and quality of life without some quick and serious educational improvements are dangerously delusional.

We can't afford not to fully fund education.

May this plain statement of facts prevail on the friends of the rising generation to interpose for their welfare; that the education of children may no longer be to parent and master a lottery, in which the prizes bear no proportion to the enormous number of blanks.

President-elect Bush spoke in a forceful and candid manner that it is his passion that all children should have access to a first class education.

I have said it on several occasions, several times from this podium, that providing a quality education for our children is high on my priority list. I will not stop now.

If we don't empower families to be able to have a quality education, then their children - for the first time in American history, truly the first time - will not have the same economic opportunities.

Unless we make education a priority, an entire generation of Americans could miss out on the American dream.

Over-reliance on strictly economic justifications has already begun to hurt the quality and range of education at every level of American life.

The single greatest investment we can make in the economy is to make sure that each person has a good education.