C. Everett Koop Quotes

There's only so much academic disruption that a young child can deal with before he just can't catch up.

Too often we act - ask our schools to be truant officers, our teachers to be truant officers, because we're giving them children who have, you know, they're not ready to learn. And if they're not ready to learn by the third grade, they know they're behind.

The goal of the Head Start program is to give at-risk children all across our Nation a fair chance at succeeding in the educational system.

Polls that have been taken by kindergarten, first- and second-grade teachers indicate that 30 percent of the kids have been deprived in some way so that they are physically unable to keep up with the class.

When I began my practice, I said I'm going to be a pediatrician that really thinks about and understands a child's educational trajectory.

We know that school readiness programs work, and the best ones work extraordinarily well. They are effective in reducing the achievement gap, which in Connecticut is among the highest in the country.

Both the quantity and quality of the words children hear during their first three years of life make an enormous difference in how prepared they are to start school, and ultimately, their long-term achievement.

Head Start is designed to ensure that all children - regardless of their family's income, race, or ethnic background - are able to enter kindergarten ready to learn.

Every child should be given a strong start to their education.

Early childhood education is an urgent educational, economic and moral imperative. Without it, we face a long-term national economic security crisis.

I'm a great believer that the most important years are the sort of early years but the preschool years and then into the first and second grades. If you get a good base in the first and second grade and you can read, you can do anything.

I wasn't a very good student in elementary school and had a hard time with reading and writing.

If you have a kid who goes to kindergarten and doesn't know what a circle is, doesn't know what red and green are, and doesn't know what right and left are, by the time he learns those things, the rest of the class is far ahead of him.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

I was a kindergarten dropout.

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school. The acquisitions he has made are such that we can say the child who enters school at three is an old man.

The research clearly demonstrates high-quality early childhood opportunities help children succeed.

When I was supposed to go to a certified kindergarten that's supposed to teach you actual things like how to read, I went to a daycare that my parents thought was a kindergarten. I was Crayola-ing inside the lines with no fundamental education at all. So I walked into the first grade with no formal education at all.

When I was in primary school I was in a special needs group, which is the polite way of saying the dopey kids.

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

Experts tell us that 90% of all brain development occurs by the age of five. If we don't begin thinking about education in the early years, our children are at risk of falling behind by the time they start Kindergarten.

Students never think it can be the teacher's fault and so I thought I was stupid. I was frustrated and would come home and cry because I couldn't do it. Then we got a new teacher who made math accessible. That made all the difference and I learned that it's how you present it that makes it scary or friendly.

What makes this story so remarkable is that throughout my early childhood I had ongoing learning difficulties, particularly in mathematics. I struggled to learn the multiplication table, and no matter how hard I tried, I simply couldn't remember 6 times 7 or 7 times 8.

Experts say that if children can't read by the end of the fifth grade, they lose self-confidence and self-esteem, making them more likely to enter the juvenile justice system.

Children without access to quality early education programs start kindergarten with an 18-month disadvantage, and that gap continues to widen. By the time they are in fourth grade, many cannot do math or read at grade level.