Minority Education Quotes

Affirmative action is not going to be the long-term solution to the problems of race in America, because, frankly, if you've got 50 percent of African-American or Latino kids dropping out of high school, it doesn't really matter what you do in terms of affirmative action. Those kids aren't going to college.

A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads.

And I think that we in America need to understand that many schools need improvement, and particularly with respect to how they're serving minority children.

Our economic future rests on the extent to which all students, especially those who represent America's growing majority, have access to rigorous, college-preparatory classes and excellent teachers.

As more and more minority groups fill our nation's classrooms, what can we do to even the separate-but-forever-unequal playing field? Now that's a question many very smart people have spent decades trying to answer.

In fact, the Harvard study data indicates that 70 percent of African American children attend schools that are predominately African American, about the same level as in 1968 when Dr. King died.

Minnesota's diversity should be its greatest strength, but our neglect of nonwhite students has stifled our progress toward growth and equity.

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.

In some states, not even 50 percent of black boys finish high school.

Everybody wants to have sex - you don't have to have a baby when you're 16. You don't have to do drugs. I think our Sunday schools should be turned into Black history schools and computer schools on the weekend, just like Hebrew schools for Jewish people, or my Asian friends who send their kids to schools on the weekend to learn Chinese or Korean.

Every kid, every minority kid can be so successful if they focus on their education.