Charles Best Quotes

I am very fortunate I can send my kids to private school, but everybody does not have the money. If you cannot get your kid in a good school today, your kids are going to be behind the eight ball.

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

When millions of kids are missing out on school, delivering educational services becomes an issue that concerns the humanitarian system.

The gap in education in this country, the unfairness of the schools, is one of the great unfairness in this society.

Online education that leaves almost everybody behind except for highly motivated students, to me, can't be a viable path to education.

As long as acquiring knowledge is the educational goal of schools, educational opportunities will be limited, as they are now, to affluent families.

I grew up in a very progressive family and with a great educational system, and I asked myself, 'Why doesn't everybody have these opportunities for a good education? So why not give back to these kids who didn't grow up with the same privileges I had?'

If you're poor, you don't often live near a good school. If it's a competitive public school program, our kids are not prepared to enter those programs.

In Colombia, education is sometimes considered a luxury, not a human right. And it's not a priority in the agendas of many leaders.

I believe education should be a right for every child, but tragically in many parts of world it is a privilege for certain children whose parents have money. There are 72 million children in the world who don't go to school and many of them are in Africa.

Too many people believe that the education deficit is someone else's problem.

We have a locale-based education system; we have increasing economic segregation. We clearly need a larger federal program to try to help disadvantaged districts.

When I began teaching, my colleagues and I quickly realized that our students didn't have access to the same resources we had growing up. We knew there were supplies and resources that could help our students, but our school district simply couldn't afford them.

One of the most significant factors contributing to the chasm of educational opportunity is the way that schools are funded.

I saw first-hand that all schools are not created equal, and the students shouldn't have to go without all of the materials that they need for a great education.

I want kids to be able to escape failing schools that trap them. And it's an unequal trapping of children. The most affluent find a way to escape. They move to a great suburban district or send their kid to a private school. The people who are trapped in the worst schools that have been terrible often for half a century? Those are the poorest kids.

There are places on Earth, in every country, where, for various reasons, good schools cannot be built and good teachers cannot or do not want to go.

Let me ask you: Should only children of the wealthy have access to quality early education? Should only children of the wealthy have access to a college degree? The answer - the only answer - is: no.

The District of Columbia is an extreme example of disconnect between financial input and educational outcome. Unfortunately, extreme is not the same as abnormal.

In some parts of the world, students are going to school every day. It's their normal life. But in other part of the world, we are starving for education... it's like a precious gift. It's like a diamond.

I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'

Very few charter schools are being created in some of the best school districts in the state. If you're an educational innovator, that isn't where the greatest need is.

I had been very focused on the issue of education disparities in our country, and literally, by the time kids are just nine years old, in low-income communities, they're already three or four grade levels behind nine-year-olds in high-income communities.

Schools are not equal. There are still the haves and the have-nots.

Across the globe, disadvantaged children are not living up to their potential because if they attend school at all, the schools are usually not designed to meet their extra needs.