Academic Disadvantage Quotes

As someone who attended six different public schools across America, went to Harvard, and subsequently became a tutor in Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side, I've witnessed firsthand the differences in learning styles between public school educations and private.

I wasn't academically successful. And maybe I've spent a lot of my career trying to make up for that.

I didn't do very well academically; I was always in the bottom class.

You don't see black people winning Nobel prizes for physics or economics or any of the industries or institutions that shape the way the world operates.

In the end, I did end up repeating seventh grade.

To be perfectly truthful, I was not a very brilliant student, even at chemistry school.

Schools are not equal. There are still the haves and the have-nots.

I had been very focused on the issue of education disparities in our country, and literally, by the time kids are just nine years old, in low-income communities, they're already three or four grade levels behind nine-year-olds in high-income communities.

If you don't get trained for your SATs in America today, you are at a disadvantage. Training is expensive and a lot of kids don't get trained, perhaps. So I also identify with the kid or the person who has grown up in environments like I've grown up in.

I used to have to borrow textbooks from my mate in another class. When he was away I'd have no textbooks and the teacher would say, 'Anh, you have to go to detention.' I didn't want to tell her my mum didn't have the money.

That's correct, I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn't write.

I always felt that I was, you know, smart. I just didn't have a lot of the resources that everybody else had... It was tough for me to catch up.

I dropped out of school after my tenth standard. But both my elder brother and younger brother are highly educated.

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.

Kids are falling through the cracks and nobody notices it. That to me is what's wrong with the school system.

The most important factor in college admissions is a test that benefits those who are least prepared for college.

Each day that passes without kids being able to go to school is an enormous burden on the future.

I was put in remedial everything.

I had no talent for science. What was infinitely worse: all my fraternity brothers were engineers.

We cannot afford to lose talented young black people, who make it to university, overseas, or worse, to let other talented black people be put off by the notion that university is somehow not for them.

That is still the case in this country for too many students, the soft bigotry of low expectations. If you don't expect them to learn, if you don't expect them to succeed - then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

At school, I had to work really hard to get a D in maths. And I wasn't slacking off; I actually did work quite hard.

A mugwump is a person educated beyond his intellect.

Single-sex private schools, especially in the middle of nowhere on a bleak hill in County Durham - I don't think they make sense.