Academic Readiness Quotes

College wasn't for us. We just didn't have the attention span.

Currently, only 70 percent of our high school students earn diplomas with their peers, and less than one-third of our high school students graduate prepared for success in a four-year college.

My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs.

It will help at every state along the road to learning. For the pre-school years we will help needy children become aware of the excitement of learning.

If a child cannot speak English the first day at school, that child is not ready to learn.

I am a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University, where I teach an introductory class in cosmology. I see the deficiencies that first-year students show up with.

School success is not predicted by a child's fund of facts or a precocious ability to read as much as by emotional and social measures; being self-assured and interested: knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.

When I went to school, I was already reading and writing. In fact, I was offended that the other kids couldn't.

When a child shows up for school, and is not physically and mentally ready to learn, he or she never catches up.

It is not fair to think that when students transit through a K-12 system that is not preparing them for beyond, that somehow we are going to wave a magic wand and things are going to be perfect for them at the higher-ed level.

The Purdue education was fine, but I wasn't ready to learn when I was at Purdue.

You have, unfortunately, a K-12 educational system where the requirements to graduate are not the requirements to be college and career-ready. So if you want young adults who are college and career-ready, our K-12 system right now does not have that as its standard.

If you don't take enough math classes or science classes or writing intensive classes, you're not going to be prepared to compete in college or the workplace -- no matter what your diploma says.

Students sometimes turn up at my course and they look a bit like they're going to Bali with only Wellingtons and a map, and they never leave their hotel room because they didn't think to bring a bikini. I'm full of bizarre analogies like that.

So far I've seen the life studies packet used as (1) an umbrella, (2) a makeshift towel, (3) a pillow, and now this. I have never actually seen anyone study with it, which either means that everyone who graduates from Thomas Jefferson will be totally unprepared for life or that certain things can't be learned in bullet-point format.

What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.

Common Core results finally give families an accurate barometer of whether our kids are mastering the skills they need to succeed in a knowledge-based global economy, early enough that we can intervene.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

A third of our kids, after we spend more per student than any country in the world other than a couple rounding errors, 30 percent are college- and/or career-ready.

The conviction that the best way to prepare children for a harsh, rapidly changing world is to introduce formal instruction at anearly age is wrong. There is simply no evidence to support it, and considerable evidence against it. Starting children early academically has not worked in the past and is not working now.

I want to make sure kids read by the third grade and are prepared for the fourth grade. As school gets harder and kids get older, the words get bigger... If they don't understand what they are reading, they start to fall back, and their interest in school falls off.

I started getting letters from college in the tenth grade.

One of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education.

Tutoring a four year old to get into an exclusive preschool made as much sense as hiring a swim coach for a guppy.

Students should feel excited and prepared for the new school year.