Quotes from Alissa Quart

If we don't at least try to make the future more equitable, most of us will left with simply scraps.

I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.

Uber is hardly the first company to exploit the financial vulnerability of teachers - and the desperation of public schools more broadly - to score PR points. Amazon, Boeing, Bank of America, and other corporations have played the part of school benefactor, offering everything from reward programs to school supplies.

Even as a child, I had walked down streets reading novels, waiting for my feet to get stuck in tar as I crossed the road, like the absent-minded animal in a Richard Scarry kid's book.

Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don't challenge today's stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation's experience of an even more important class - the kind in which they learn. And that's one thing we simply can't afford.

In my 20s, I was a freelance writer with little money and living in a rabbit warren one-and-a-half-bedroom with a roommate.

Kids don't come cheap.

Self-reinvention is an encouraging conceit. It is simply not always a possible one.

Essentially, if you are surrounded by those who 'outrank' you, it is likely to affect your identity in insidious ways.

When I was a young child, professional aspiration was synonymous to me with the clatter of my mother's high-heeled boots as she went off to teach each 1970s weekday morning, carrying her graded blue books under her arm.

It was also the suspicion that I was paying "rent" every time I went out for coffee or a walk, that there was no longer any public space to sit in, that a high charge was always associated with "hanging around"; once again I'd have to buy that unwanted second overpriced spice tea, or hand over another chunk of change for an hour at the indoor play space for my daughter.

Caregiving also is the object of a more realistic critique, as some have noted the psychological toll of the profession. Scholar Arlie Hochschid...worries about the potential harm to workers who must sell the most intimate parts of themselves, manufacturing smiles and cuddles for low pay.

Day care was intended from the start to be a weak system, as scholars of the history of childcare tell me, like a punishment for needing care because a woman didn't have a husband or some other means of support.

The more I researched Alger, the more I believed "bootstrapping" was a story line emerging out of the ashes of Alger's own personal shame for his pedophilia and the trauma he inflicted on others. His life story morphed from his longing for young boys into the ultimate story of young boys' exerting mastery over the adults and the world around them, perhaps his own identification with his powerless victims.

Americans think their odds of success, and of rising from the bottom to the top, are much higher than they are

There are in the world no such men as self-made men. The term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, "SELF-MADE MEN

In the United States, the middle class is the group of working people who, according to a May 2016 Pew survey, with a yearly household income for a family of three ranging from $42,000 to $125,000 in 2014, make up 51 percent of U.S. households.

No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.

On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites' emphasis on words such as 'connection,' 'community,' and 'choice.' Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference.

Approximating authenticity online is not such a tall order. In fact, it may be the very least we can do.

'Mr. Robot,' in particular, signals the rise of a fresh post-Occupy portrayal of the wealth gap. No longer is the story of income inequity delivered via a well-meaning, crushingly earnest indie film by John Sayles or in a single laugh line on 'Roseanne.'

When I got pregnant with my daughter, both my husband and I were freelancers, and we didn't have that much security. We had savings. We were better off than many people, but we didn't have, you know, pensions and all the things that people used to have.

Parents who press their children to succeed do so in hopes of preparing them for an adulthood of high achievement.

Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities.