School Improvement Quotes & Sayings

We are working so hard in this country on the details of school improvement that we don't always stop to consider the big picture - if we are actually working on the right things. — David Perkins

First, a school with a strong, shared sense of mission is more likely to initiate improvement efforts. Second, norms of collegiality are related to collaborative planning and effective decision making. Third, cultures with a strong dedication to improvement are more likely to implement complex new instructional strategies. Finally, schools improve best when small successes are recognized and celebrated through shared ceremonies commemorating both individual and group contributions (Louis, 1994; Fullan, 1998; Abplanalp, 2008). — Terrence E. Deal

When people recover from depression via psychotherapy, their attributions about recovery are likely to be different than those of people who have been treated with medication. Psychotherapy is a learning experience. Improvement is not produced by an external substance, but by changes within the person. It is like learning to read, write or ride a bicycle. Once you have learned, the skills stays with you. People no not become illiterate after they graduate from school, and if they get rusty at riding a bicycle, the skill can be acquired with relatively little practice. Furthermore, part of what a person might learn in therapy is to expect downturns in mood and to interpret them as a normal part of their life, rather than as an indication of an underlying disorder. This understanding, along with the skills that the person has learned for coping with negative moods and situations, can help to prevent a depressive relapse. — Irving Kirsch

The great object to be attained through the observance of Arbor Day is the cultivation of a love for nature among children, with the confident expectation that thereby the needless de-struction of the forests will be stayed, and the improvement of grounds about school buildings and residences will be promoted. — Andrew S. Draper

Logically, you should go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a good degree, go into the workplace, then work hard and be happy.
The only problem is that happiness isn't logical. — A.C. Ping

I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something - a sculptor he would have been, no doubt - who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course, but the point I'm working round to is that there were a couple of lines that went, if I remember correctly: She starts. She moves. She seems to feel The stir of life along her keel. And what I'm driving at is that you couldn't get a better description of what happened to Gussie as I spoke these heartening words. His brow cleared, his eyes brightened, he lost that fishy look, and he gazed at the slug, which was still on the long, long trail with something approaching bonhomie. A marked improvement. — P.G. Wodehouse

Except for a handful, chess players don't have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn't make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn't have it. While — Fred Waitzkin

Education leads to intellectual life. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. Children may be innately motivated to make friends, acquire status, hone motor skills, and explore the physical world, but they are not necessarily motivated to adapt their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. A family, peer group, and culture that ascribe high status to school achievement may be needed to give a child the motive to persevere toward effortful feats of learning whose rewards are apparent only over the long term. — Steven Pinker

Maycomb did not have a paved street until 1935, courtesy of F. D. Roosevelt, and even then it was not exactly a street that was paved. For some reason the President decided that a clearing from the front door of the Maycomb Grammar School to the connecting two ruts adjoining the school property was in need of improvement, it was improved accordingly, resulting in skinned knees and cracked crania for the children and a proclamation from the principal that nobody was to play Pop-the-Whip on the pavement. Thus the seeds of states' rights were sown in the hearts of Jean Louise's generation. — Harper Lee

And I think that's righteous, I think that's what parents want to know. They want to know what's going right in the school, and what needs improvement, and that's what this law does. — Margaret Spellings

We're told the old-school imperialists were racists, that they thought of the wogs as inferior. But, if so, they at least considered them capable of improvement. The multiculturalists are just as racist. The only difference is that they think the wogs can never reform: Good heavens, you can't expect a Muslim in Norway not to go about raping the womenfolk! Much better just to get used to it. — Mark Steyn

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought. — Ludwig Von Mises

[The] overuse and misuse of standardized tests is only the start of the problems with NCLB. NCLB uses these test scores to impose sanctions that have no record of success as school improvement strategies, and in fact are not really educational strategies at all. They're political strategies designed to promote privatization and market reform in public education. — Stan Karp

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. — Steven Pinker

When affluent, educated parents decide to homeschool, public schools lose out on involved PTA parents and capable school-improvement advocates. Or when parents spend all their money and energy searching for the best organic baby products, there's little energy left to lobby for consumer product regulations that might benefit everyone. — Emily Matchar

Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity. — Thomas Sowell

Real improvement in our schools is not simply a matter of spending more, it is a matter of expecting more. — George H. W. Bush

It is not enough to simply listen to student voice. Educators have an ethical imperative to do something with students, and that is why meaningful student involvement is vital to school improvement. — Adam Fletcher

Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg researched the diaries of young women around the turn of the century and found that the girls' primary concerns for self-improvement in the 1890s focused on character.51 They wrote about striving to be kinder and more concerned for others, working harder in school, and rejecting frivolity. One hundred years later, Brumberg found, the same age group focused its self-improvement on physical appearance, and that the means by which to achieve it almost always involved buying things. — Traci Mann

School improvement is not a mystery. Incremental, even dramatic improvement is not only possible but probable under the right conditions. — Michael J. Schmoker