Quotes About Education

They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten." Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.

learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again. The only country we don't see this going on is Denmark. They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of

look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually

That the best students from mediocre schools were almost always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.

It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it's the biggest nine-and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulative advantage.

the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over the course of the Computer Center's life, thousands of students passed

Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it.

We have seen, Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.

have programs for the "gifted." Elite universities often require that students take an intelligence test (such as the American Scholastic Aptitude

home. What did two of Louis and Regina Borgenicht's sons do? They went to law school, and no less than nine of their grandchildren ended up as doctors and lawyers as well. Here is the most remarkable of Farkas's family trees. It belongs to a Jewish family from

public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School. The fourth partner was George Katz. He was born in 1931. He grew up in a one-bedroom first-floor apartment in the Bronx. His parents were

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grades, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn't seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

According to the law professor Richard Sander, more than half of all African-American law students in the United States—51.6 percent—are in the bottom 10 percent of their law school class and almost three-quarters fall in the bottom 20 percent.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. "Put people into two categories," Schwartz says. "Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected.

Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation." It's an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to

Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school.

it is when thus relieved from the state of tension belonging to actual study that boys and girls, as well as men and women, acquire the habit of thought and reflection, and of forming their own conclusions, independently of what they are taught and the authority of others.

The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long.

If you think about the class-size puzzle this way, then what seems baffling starts to make a little more sense.

It's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And

surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder

One of the main reasons college professors accept a lower paycheck than they could get in private industry is that university life gives them the freedom to do what they want to do and what they feel is right. Langan has Harvard backwards.

We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean

of its colonies entitled Warning from the West Indies, "is narrow and insecure." The school system did nothing for the "humblest" classes. He went on: "If anything these schools are a factor deepening and sharpening social distinctions." If the government did not give its people