Inner-city Schools Quotes

The soft bigotry of low expectations

I don't know if you've been in any inner-city schools, but it's pretty demoralizing. The kids come to class bright-eyed, enthusiastic - entering first grade really looking forward to school. By the fourth grade they're just completely turned off, and by the time they enter high school, they see little relationship between school and employment. It's bad enough you have incompetent teachers and schools that are poorly run, understaffed, and lack material resources. It's even worse when the kids themselves don't feel they have any stake in school.

More than 50 percent of kids who play an instrument go on to college, yet music education programs at the inner city public schools who need them most continue to be hit hard with budget cuts.

Americans should understand that 50%, or something like, of the kids in inner-city schools, often poor and often minority, don't graduate. And the ones that do don't necessarily have the skills to get a job. That is the biggest disgrace in this country.

I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools (in America) that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there. If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school.

There has to be a consequence to failure. Schools in the inner cities cannot be told, 'Oh, we want you to teach every child to learn how to read and, incidentally, if you fail to do that there's no consequence,' .. There has to be a consequence to failure, and the Title I money needs to follow the child.

Writing 'If Chloe Can' has taken me on an amazing journey: from launching the event at Downing Street, to a performance to 1,000 inner-city school girls at a West End theatre, then to an audience of hundreds more at the Royal Society of Chemistry.

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 spent grades one through nine in Baltimore City, leaving for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of education I was receiving.

Imagine if baseball were taught the way science is taught in most inner-city schools. Schoolchildren would get lectures about the history of the World Series. High school students would occasionally reproduce famous plays of the past. Nobody would get in the game themselves until graduate school.

At present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968. In the inner-city schools I visit, minority children typically represent 95 percent to 99 percent of class enrollment.

The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.

Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

I taught for 17 years in an inner city comprehensive schools.

I started out as a high school teacher in inner-city Chicago and realized quite quickly that my students weren't that motivated.

The inner cities, education is almost worthless, it's horrible. We're going to have Common Core ended.

We've made a huge effort globally and in the US, in getting kids jobs. This is one piece. The South Bronx and inner-city schools need it more than most. It's our hometown; JPMorgan Chase banks a lot of people here. If you see the school, it works. Kids all getting jobs, they're smiling, they're proud of themselves. That's what we need to do in inner-city schools.

I'd like to do something for inner-city schools and education for young people because it's constantly being cut.

I used to go to school in Manhattan with a bunch of the City Kids.

Teaching high school in an inner-city school is not an easy task. Every teacher is responsible for 150 teenagers. The amount of work is just mind-boggling. Remember, you're not just doing a job. You have these kids' futures in your hand; you have to inspire them.

Many problems are so complex that even if we had the money to fix them, we wouldn't know how to do it. Fixing inner-city schools, reducing obesity, creating peace in the Middle East are just a few examples.

As much as politicians, any politicians, Democrat or Republican, are saying they're trying to help the schools, it's hard because our country is in debt. I would like to do something for the inner-city schools because that's our future, and education is very important in helping our country continue to progress and not regress.

I went to an inner-city school in Buffalo. We had no money. But our teachers believed in hands-on active learning - there was a mandatory science fair, which was critical.

I guess, technically, I went to a New York City high school, but I wouldn't call myself a New York City kid. But I've played against city kids all my life. So that kind of instills something in you.

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.