Donald Avenson Quotes

We are spending a lot of money on our schools. We’ve got to make ourselves accountable for the results.

The amount of money we spend on education is important, but not nearly as important as how the money is spent.

You can spend a lot of money on education, but if you don't spend it wisely, on improving the quality of instruction, you won't get higher student outcomes.

Scholarships that allow students to get a good education are important, but first we want to measure the progress that the schools are teaching our students, we want to hold them accountable for the progress, we want to hold the schools accountable for teaching the young people in America.

Schools should be held accountable for results.

There are no tests similar to SATs to tell us how much undergraduates know. State legislators, who appropriate billions of dollars each year to higher education, are naturally interested in finding out what they are getting for their money.

Like health care, education is something worth spending on and worth investing in, but we're spending more and getting less.

You cannot simply put more money into the same system and get better results, so we will need to reform and innovate in the delivery of education.

If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn't create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

The money in the schools overpowers the principles of the purpose.

One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.

Federal oversight has focused primarily on fiscal accountability and not on educational accountability.

You can’t reform education without spending some money.

Every time we have made an investment in education, it has paid off.

Taxpayers, lawmakers and donors need to wake from the spell cast by American universities’ past glory. Only then can they summon the courage to withdraw funding and force the necessary change: replacing faux-academic political activists with real academic thinkers—people who care about original thought, not peddling an ideology.

I believe that tax dollars used to create a new school of engineering for Florida State University, when there is already a successful partnership in place with Florida A&M University, is counterproductive to increasing engineering graduates.

And just because you have colleges and universities doesn't mean you have education.

Standardized tests are an indicator of the kind of service taxpayers are receiving - and whether schools, educators and policymakers are doing their jobs. In the United States, taxpayers spend almost $600 billion annually on public education, so it's not unreasonable to ask what all that money is producing. In fact, it's irresponsible not to know.

Despite the hours spent debating different models of general education, the choices faculties make rarely lead to any significant difference in the cognitive development of undergraduates.

But with lots of good ideas, implementation is the key, and so we need to keep our eye on the ball as we go forward and make sure that people honor their pledges in terms of financial commitments, and that we actually use this money so that it makes a real difference.

Unfortunately, the real achievements of children on the ground became debased and devalued because Labor education secretaries sounded like Soviet commissars praising the tractor production figures when we know that those exams were not the rock-solid measures of achievement that children deserve.

As countries embrace mass higher education, the cost of maintaining universities increases dramatically relative to an elite system.

I know each fund has its supporters, and that some will not want to see the surplus go to schools. But, in tough times, you have to set priorities. And our priority is education.

Higher education has never been economically self-supporting; it has hardly ever been fully organized from public funds; everywhere it has remained parasitic on the private munificence of wealthy persons. The peril is too obvious to need further enforcement: it is the hand of the prospective, the potential donor that fetters intellectual freedom in our colleges, and will do so more and more so long as the duty of organizing public higher education for a nation out of public funds fails of recognition..