Randi Weingarten Quotes

Education is among the most important problems we face because it's the ultimate 'gateway' problem. That is, it drives virtually every global problem that we face as a species. But there's a flip-side: if we can fix education, then we'll dramatically improve the other problems, too.

We have run out of creativity for children and teachers alike in the name of pushing up standards.

Of all our institutions public education is the most important. Everything depends on it, the present and the future.

Education to me is the most important thing that we've got going in this country. I mean, a lot of my family are teachers. I was the recipient of a great public education, and I see that's one of the first things that we're going to go, 'What are we going to raise?' The ignorant masses.

No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.

Games shouldn't only be fun. They should teach or spark an interest in other things.

Education was the most important value in our home when I was growing up. People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

Since we can't know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.

Learning is the new skill. Imagination, creation and asking new questions are at its core.

One of my great laments is that education today seems to have... be less about passion and more about process, more about tactic or technique.

Children have such vibrant minds. They need to play. They need to be creative. They need to imagine. It's so important for their sense of self discovery. And it helps them learn problem-solving.

Kids don't need to be taught the value of making; they are natural makers, at least until traditional education makes them afraid of making mistakes. The long-term value of making for kids is in learning to become an active participant in the world around them rather than a consumer of prepackaged products and solutions.

We have found that the most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic.

I had a great education. From kindergarten to John Dewey High School in Coney Island, I am public-school educated.

Education is the key. But it's the kind of education that we teach that is the key. We don't have it.

I want to go into science class and awaken that spark that makes learning possible.

In schools giving students a full education, not to create great artists but about the right to have full expression and imagination and creativity, along with an acknowledgement that everybody learns differently. You try and you fail and you try again. All those skills are useful in the workplace, too.

Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that, by the time they leave school, every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate and plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people, can be most engaged in.

Educate, educate, educate!

We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.

Equal access to public education has been achieved. But what is the good of access to a failing school?

It is my ambition that parents can send their children to school with the prospects that they are as interested and excited to learn on their last day of school as they were on the very first.

People often say, 'I like your comics, even though I don't know enough math to get all of them,' as if it's some kind of club where they don't belong. But there's no club. There's just lots of people who are excited about thinking, learning, joking, and sometimes overanalyzing things.