Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Wendy Kopp - Page 2

The idea that computers can ever replace teachers and schools reveals a deep lack of understanding about the role leadership plays in student success.

Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.

I'm happy to admit that I'm a hopeless optimist.

While I started out with a vague understanding that diversity would be important, my own observations have led me to realize that achieving greater levels of diversity is in fact vital to our long-term success.

Competition and competitive rhetoric can be healthy. It's what drove the United States to pursue the Soviet Union into space, creating countless innovations along the way.

The U.S. has a long history of walking up to the precipice of rigor and then walking away. As voters, let's support leaders who were courageous enough to make the hard decisions necessary to move our system forward. And as parents, let's put our faith in our educators, our children and tests that hold them to their highest potential.

It's time to declare a cease-fire in the education arms race. We have far more to gain from collaborating to solve our common problems than competing for higher rankings.

We collaborate with other countries on issues like public health and climate change because we understand these issues affect our collective welfare.

When you think of the typical Teach For America corps member, soldiers and ex-bankers are probably not the people who come to mind. In fact, there is no such thing as a typical corps member. They can't be neatly pigeonholed or painted with a broad brush.

Teach For China recruits top American and Chinese college graduates, like 26-year-old Yang Xiao, to teach in the country's most disadvantaged schools.

I myself was completely torn by the decision to start Teach For America. There was a voice in my head telling me not to do it - to take a more normal path. I did have one thing going for me, which was that I had been rejected from all the other jobs I'd applied to.

Common Core results finally give families an accurate barometer of whether our kids are mastering the skills they need to succeed in a knowledge-based global economy, early enough that we can intervene.

Fostering the leadership necessary for transformational outcomes in education is hard work, and in countries around the world, there is a constant search for easier solutions.

Research shows that whether you are low-income or not, mindset is a bigger predictor of success than academic skills, and how students gain great academic skills and persevere in the face of challenges.

There is a perception in our communities that we have low educational outcomes in low-income communities because kids aren't motivated or families don't care. We've discovered that is not the case.

Teach For America would not be able to continue recruiting and developing an ever-more diverse and impactful group of corps members and alumni if the nation's leading colleges become even less diverse.

As a white woman with a privileged education, I'm keenly aware that I founded an organization that can only realize its goal if it enlists many more leaders who share the backgrounds of the students and families we work with.

Research confirms that great teachers change lives. Students with one highly effective elementary school teacher are more likely to go to college, less likely to become pregnant as teens, and earn tens of thousands more over their lifetimes.

Countries have largely been left alone to handle or ignore their educational problems as they see fit. In part, this was because we assumed that the contexts and challenges were so different from nation to nation that education could not be tackled at the international level.

Our laws guarantee all students the right to a K-12 education, regardless of their immigration status.

Dartmouth is such a special college with its rich history, dedicated student body, and, as I've been learning more recently, colorful customs.

When I started Teach For America, I wasn't trying to come up with an idea that would change the world. I was trying to solve a problem much closer to home: I was a senior in college, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life!

Few things are more important to our country's future than recruiting and keeping great teachers in our schools.

Common Core reminds us what testing can do right. Modeled on standards of the world's education superpowers, questions demand critical thinking and creativity. Students are asked to write at length, show their work, and explain their reasoning.

More often than not, the most effective leaders have been shaped by teaching successfully in high needs classrooms. Because of their experience, they know that it is possible for low-income children to achieve on an absolute scale and understand what we need to do to allow them to fulfill their potential.

Persistent inequality costs the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars a year, undermining our global competitiveness, our democracy, and our ideals as a nation.

As a founder of two organizations that recruit top college graduates to expand educational opportunity, I've spent a lot of time examining what's at work in successful classrooms and schools over the past two decades.

Across the globe, disadvantaged children are not living up to their potential because if they attend school at all, the schools are usually not designed to meet their extra needs.

Teach For America is working hard to be one significant source of the leadership we need.

We aspire to be equal opportunity, but all across the country where a student is born, their race, their class affect where they end up.

In the long run, we will need many more African-American, Latino, and Native American leaders, and leaders from low-income communities, who can bring additional insight and a deeply grounded sense of urgency, and who are the most likely to inspire the necessary trust and engagement among students' parents and community leaders.

We're trying to be the top employer of recent grads in the country. Size gives us leverage to have a tangible impact on school systems.

Cultivating more leaders who reflect our heterogeneous society depends on universities' transparent use of race as one of many factors in an admissions process that is accessible to all.

In a society that glorifies the pioneers, it's easy to think that an endeavor is only worth pursuing if you can be the first to pursue it.

Let the tech firms and consulting firms build your skills, but be sure to ask yourself, 'Am I maximizing my impact?' 'Am I living up to my values?'

We must broaden the definition of who our neighbors are, and extend the boundaries of our interest and empathy.

There's no how-to guide for how to change the world. But it's easy to get hung up by misconceptions about what it takes to make an impact.

Where educational deprivation exists, it breeds conflict and enables repression.

The most reliable way to be certain of their classroom impact is through independent studies conducted by third-party organisations which compare the student growth in our corps members' classrooms to that of other teachers in similar situations.

When school district officials literally laughed at the notion that the Me Generation — this was the label for my generation — would jump at the chance to teach in urban and rural communities, their concerns, too, went unheard. My very greatest asset was that I simply did not understand what was impossible.

Creating a high-functioning education system requires all the strategies involved in building high-functioning organisations anywhere. It requires a deliberate and aggressive strategy to ensure extraordinary talent at every level of the system, from the superintendentcy to district offices to principalships to classrooms. It requires building systems for accountability; offering parents the ability to choose their public schools is the ultimate form of this. It requires building a strong culture at the system and school levels based on high expectations for student achievement.

The most successful teachers in low-income communities operate like successful leaders. They establish a vision of where their students will be performing at the end of the year that many believe to be unrealistic. They invest their students in working harder than they ever have to reach that vision, maximise their classroom time in a goal-oriented manner through purposeful planning and effective execution, reflect constantly on their progress to improve their performance over time, and do whatever it takes to overcome the many challenges they face.

I have not seen that standardised tests make the profession less attractive, though some principals respond to them in a way that drives the best teachers out of their schools (by over-emphasising test prep in the school curriculum for example). On the other hand, great teachers want benchmarks to measure progress and tests can help with that.

The evidence would suggest that there are some great alternative certification programmes and some lousy ones. There are some wonderful traditional education schools, and some that aren't so effective. What's important is less the pathway than the impact on students.

People are attracted to teaching because they want to make a real impact. The teachers who are making the greatest difference go far beyond meeting standardised test measures. They aspire to truly level the playing field for their students, which means inspiring a love of learning, fostering the highest levels of critical thinking, building perseverance in working towards academic excellence, and so on.

As a country [USA], we can attract more talented people to teaching by raising awareness of educational inequity and getting the public to understand from individual classrooms, schools, and cities that this is an issue that can be solved.

Standardised tests cannot capture all, but on the other hand, students who are not capable of doing well on standardised tests are not well-equipped to thrive in today's world and so it's important for teachers to ensure that students gain the foundation necessary to meet the baseline educational standards these tests represent.

Education is the most powerful tool countries have for boosting economic growth, increasing prosperity and forging more just, peaceful and equitable societies. Where educational deprivation exists, it breeds conflict and enables repression.

I often hear from new graduates that it's better to wait until you have more experience.... But I'm a big believer in the power of inexperience.... The world needs you before you stop asking naive questions and while you have the time to understand the true nature of the complex problems we face and take them on.

Inexperience is an asset. Embrace it.

When people think the issue can be solved, it becomes a moral imperative to be part of the solution. We can do a lot more within our school districts to recruit aggressively, select people according to high standards, invest in their training and development, and foster and reward their leadership. Once we invest more in attracting, developing and retaining teachers, potential recruits will begin to see it as a profession worth considering.

The limitations of federal laws are able to create real progress at the local level. Ultimately, to effect not just incremental progress but progress that is transformational for students, we need committed leadership - people who believe deeply that their students can achieve at the highest levels and who know how to create the conditions at the classroom, school and system level to give them the opportunities they deserve.