Academic Underachievement Quotes

Minority students became the victims of low expectations.

I had a lot of trouble in school to begin with. I got left back in kindergarten, and I was in special education. My teachers didn't have very much faith in me.

I was quite disruptive and out there. Then I found myself in a load of remedial classes being told how to use a ruler. But when they tested my IQ, they found out I was quite intelligent.

Too many children today are trapped in schools that don't work for them.

I spent a lot of time in the school psychologist's office. I didn't apply myself. My mother thought I had learning disabilities.

I was attending the University of Alberta. I was going to be a high school teacher, like my parents. I failed - no, I didn't fail a class, I just barely passed. I really didn't try. It was Canadian history, through the plays of the time. My God, those were boring plays.

Scholastically, I did enough to get by, but I was smarter than I let on.

I had absolutely no focus as a kid. I never paid attention at school, I never went to college. Not because we were too poor; we were. But if I wanted to go to college, I would have found a way.

We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.

Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States.

I was never, in my whole school career, given a job as a monitor, a form captain, or a prefect. I never won any kind of prize.

America has a terrible educational problem in the sense that we have too many youngsters not finishing school. A third of our kids don't finish high school, 50 percent of minorities don't finish high school.

I was talking and playing pranks and skipping school, failing pretty much every class I took.

Education in our family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre ... In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at high school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre.