Quotes About Inequality

They grew up in an era when public education and community support for kids from all backgrounds managed to boost a significant number of people up the ladder—in Bend, Beverly Hills, New York, Port Clinton, and even South Central LA. Those supportive institutions, public and private, no longer serve poorer kids so well.

The answer is that the destiny of poor kids in America has broad implications for our economy, our democracy, and our values.

Our contemporary public debate recognizes this problem but assumes it is largely a "schools problem." On the contrary, we have seen that most of the challenges facing poor kids are not caused by schools.

inequality of opportunity slows growth by keeping disadvantaged potential workers from developing their full capacity.

Schooling—unequal as it is in America—plays only a minor role in alleviating or creating test score gaps.

there's no denying that rich and poor kids in this country attend vastly different schools nowadays, which seems hard to square with the notion that schools are innocent bystanders in the growing youth class gap.

The achievement gap between children from high income and low income families is roughly 30-40% larger among children born in 2001 than among those born 25 years ago. The class gap among students entering kindergarten was two to three times higher than the racial gap.

Rich kids are more confident that they can influence government, and they are largely right about that.14 Not surprisingly, poor kids are less likely to try.

Neighborhoods are important sites of growing class segregation.

often within a single school, AP and other advanced courses tend to separate privileged from less privileged kids.

often within a single school, AP and other advanced courses tend to separate privileged from less privileged kids. Later on, kids from different class backgrounds are increasingly sorted into different colleges: for example, by 2004, kids from the top quarter of families in education and income were 17 times more likely to attend a highly selective college than kids in the bottom quarter.

today is a place of stark class divisions, where (according to school officials) wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the high school lot next to decrepit junkers that homeless classmates drive away each night to live in.

Discrimination is difficult, because in its worst form, it is not overt. It is subtle.

I learned, then, beyond question, that if all the property in the world were distributed, and an equal share given to everyone, the bulk of mankind would soon be destitute, and a few would have everything.

Look at me, Mariam.' Reluctantly, Mariam did. Nana said, 'Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

If you were the poor, suffering was your currency.

Nana said, "Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

I'll put it on my table where I keep my drawings, Hassan said. His saying that made me kind of sad. Sad for who Hassan was, where he lived. For how he'd accepted the fact that he'd grow old in that mud shack in the yard, the way his father had.

She waited until he had left the kolba, before snickering and saying, 'The children of strangers get ice cream. What do you get, Mariam? Stories of ice cream' (Hosseini 6).

He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path, a large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. "That's the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That's the Afghanistan I know. You? You've always been a tourist here, you just didn't know it.

But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers' past. They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death.

Most of our neighbors in Fremont were bus drivers, policemen, gas station attendants, and unwed mothers collecting welfare, exactly the sort of blue-collar people who would soon suffocate under the pillow Reganomics pressed to their faces.

Like a compass facing north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

Morality is a matter of money. Poor people cannot afford to have morals. So they have religion