Eva Moskowitz Quotes

I wish we could have acted quicker on Detroit or other failing schools.

I don't totally believe that all of the politicians see a problem with the gap between the scores of black children and other groups. I believe that many politicians think this has been the way it has always been, so what's the problem?

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.

I wish we could do a better job of understanding what we're doing to kids, because it can be better. It's unfair to give up on these young black kids. We don't do that to white kids.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent.

No Child Left Behind widens the gap between the races more than any piece of educational legislation I've seen in 40 years. It denies inner-city kids the critical-thinking skills to interrogate reality.

As African-Americans, we often spend our time and energy blaming other people for the problems we see around us.

It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.

When you allow racial disparity and institutional inequity to affect one part of the country, eventually it's coming back to get everyone.

Savage Inequalities

Federal, state and municipal policies have isolated many children, especially in urban districts, into schools that are segregated by race, class and income.

You can't just put a bubble over the Westside of L.A. and pretend like there aren't other problems. The way that we are failing the kids in this city through our education system has a profound effect on everybody in the city, and I'm not prepared just to turn a blind eye to that.

While no community is immune to the impacts of COVID-19, I'm troubled by the disparate impact to communities of color.

In New York City, the idea that district schools advance equality is a myth.

We're all burdened by our history of racial inequality. It's created a kind of smog that we all breathe in, and it has prevented us from being healthy.

Isn't it blatantly racist to assume blacks can't pass a simple civics exam in the same rates as others?

To see, once again, that African American students are more likely to have a limited math curriculum and an underpaid novice teacher is disheartening and should be a call to action for policymakers and educators.

My father was born in the year 1900 in South Carolina, and he grew up at a time where being an African-American child in the American South was to be deprived of access to anything close to a reasonable education. He only had three years of formal education, but he was self-taught. He read two newspapers a day.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit.

Do you know who the real hypocrite is? It's the federal government and the Justice Department. It's a fraud; it's a lie. They have no interest in the education of black children. They are only interested in the politics of it.

Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be, how he could be led into self-destruction, and how he would not realize that it was the society that had forced him into a great sickness.

It is devastating that jail is seen as a rite of passage for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, part of the natural order of things. It is an outrage that there is an attitude that this is normal. This is not normal. We can't shrug our shoulders and say this is just a 'fact of life' in remote Australia.