School Agenda Quotes & Sayings

'Savage Inequalities' was about school finance, and 'Amazing Grace' primarily dealt with medical and social injustices in New York. But with 'Ordinary Resurrections,' I had no predetermined agenda. When I met with the children, I was not in pursuit of any line of thinking. In our conversations, I let them lead me where they wanted to go. — Jonathan Kozol

As an advocate for kids for over twenty years, I have watched things change since I was in school. Thankfully, this book made me face what I intuitively knew was real but pretended wasn't: The youth of our culture have been deeply wounded by our collective neglect and adult-driven self-focus. Young people need adults to understand what they are going through and people to care about them without a personal agenda. This book was very helpful to me, and my attitude toward teens will never be the same. — Doug Fields

I don't think most people realize - and there's no reason they should - the amount of demeaning garbage you have to take if you want a career in the arts. I mean, going off to med school is something you can say with your head high. Or being a banker or going into insurance or the family business - no problem. But the conversations I had with grown-ups after college ... "So you're done with school now, Bill." "That's right." "So what's next on the agenda?" Pause. Finally I would say it: "I want to be a writer." And then they would pause. "A writer." "I'd like to try." Third and final pause. And then one of two inevitable replies: either "What are you going to do next?" or "What are you really going to do?" That dread double litany ... What are you going to do next? ... What are you really going to do? ... What are you going to do next? ... What are you really going to do ... ? — William Goldman

If you look at the early nineteenth century you see the idea that we educate children to be voters and to be participants in our popular democracy. And then at the turn of the century when more and more immigrants are coming into the schools, Americanization becomes a more explicit part of the agenda. — Dana Goldstein

Clearly, gay marriage is on the top of the agenda right now. It's pretty amazing, considering where stuff was at when I was in high-school, when there were no LGBT Gay-Straight Alliances or any of that stuff. Am I a huge Lady Gaga fan? No, but I think some of the stuff she does that helps LGBT kids is amazing. And it's great that that's mainstream. It's fantastic that there's a pop star who's willing to put herself out in that way. — Kathleen Hanna

They have to convert our agenda into something aggressive. Two guys wanting to be happy together are invading their marriages. Helping a kid who's getting beaten up in school is promoting homosexuality. If you gave me a million dollars, I wouldn't know how to promote homosexuality. — Barney Frank

This framing accents the importance of building a tidier system, one that incorporates the array of existing child care centers, then pushes to make their classrooms more uniform, with a socialization agenda "aligned" with the curricular content that first or second graders are expected to know. Like the common school movement, uniform indicators of quality, centralized regulation, more highly credientialed teachers are to ensure that instruction
rather than creating engaging activities for children to explore
will be delivered in more uniform ways. And the state signals to parents that this is now the appropriate way to raise one's three- or four-year-old. Modern child rearing is equated with systems building in the eyes of universal pre-kindergarten advocates
and parents hear this discourse through upbeat articles in daily newspapers, public service annoucement, and from school authorities. — Bruce Fuller

Only in the light of this agenda does it make sense that so-called "sex education" should be advocated to take place throughout the school years - from kindergarten to college - when it could not possibly take that much time to teach basic biological or medical information about sex. What takes that long is a constant indoctrination in new attitudes.63 — Thomas Sowell

These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs and materials. — Mike Schmoker

Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says. — Sheldon Richman

The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn? — Jonathan Kozol

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, as it's officially known, is the product of three private organizations, two of which have official-sounding names: the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). The third private group is Achieve Inc., which boasts on its Web page that it helped take the idea of nationalized learning standards from a radical proposal into a national agenda. — Glenn Beck