The public schools in our neighborhood were so bad that the teachers in the school said you shouldn't send your kids here. My mother called around and found a school that was willing to give both me and my brother scholarship money. It's a classic story about black parents wanting more for their kids than they had for themselves.
There’s a belief now that the problem with our schools is parents, that if we just had better parents we would have better performing kids and, therefore, we wouldn’t have a problem at all. But what’s missing in that equation is that you do have a lot of parents in this country who are very involved in their children’s education and who do want something better. They want to see better for their kids. They know that they’re in schools that aren’t performing particularly well and if you look at how we treat those parents, it is quite poorly.
My education in the public schools of New York City between 1932 and 1944 was an excellent preparation for a life in science. Because of the Depression, these schools were able to attract a remarkably talented and dedicated collection of teachers who encouraged their students to strive for the highest levels of accomplishment.
If the church adopts a school, and the school has kids, and the kids have parents, well, then you've reconnected the hub of a community, because you've brought together its three most fundamental institutions - church, schools, and family.
Parents should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual kids can be taken into account.
I grew up on the Eastern Shore during desegregation. A lot of white parents chose to send their kids to private schools rather than integrate - but not mine. My brother and I both attended and graduated from public schools. It's one of the best things that happened to me.
When I was a kid, I loved to draw, and I was lucky because I had parents and teachers and grown-ups around who recognised and encouraged that.
Punitive measures whether administered by police, teachers, spouses or parents have well known standard effects: (1) escape-education has its own name for that: truancy, (2) counterattack-vandalism on schools and attacks on teachers, (3) apathy-a sullen do-nothing withdrawal. The more violent the punishment, the more serious the by-products.
If we use these common standards as the foundation for better schools, we can give all kids a robust curriculum taught by well prepared, well supported teachers who can help prepare them for success in college, life and careers.
Kids should be encouraged to compete.
I've been in this business for a long time at my age, I've just turned 30, and I feel like my wife's career is going incredibly well, my kids are happy and healthy in schools, we've both been able to buy a house for our parents, respectively, in the places they live.
It's a metaphor for what we're being told: "Just stay in the box, kid, don't muddy the water." Parents say it to their kids. Teachers say it. Schools do. And so people become immune to the sameness.
The benefits because his collective parents are permitted to grow secure in their particular roles in his life. His adoptive parents are not unwittingly encouraged to compete to possess him. Nor are his birthparents punished and banished from a place in his life.
My parents were typical Asian parents, and they do, like all parents, want their children to be successful. They really encouraged my brother and I to study math and science, and that's what we did as kids.
It's up to the parents to watch their kids and make sure their kids aren't doing any crazy drugs. I always blame the parents. When their kids are doing something crazy, I blame the parents.
We need to create schools that are organized to meet the needs of the kids they serve instead of what we've been doing. We expect kids to adjust to the schools and if they can't, we say something is wrong with the child - instead of focusing on engagement and nurturing the love of learning in kids.