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President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.

Jonathan Kozol

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Jonathan Kozol
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: September 5
Author
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
President
Exams
Stills
Standardized
Still
Exam
Much
Relentless
Testing
Emphasis
Obama
Places

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Children, of course, don't understand at first that they are being cheated. They come to school with a degree of faith and optimism, and they often seem to thrive during the first few years. It is sometimes not until the third grade that their teachers start to see the warning signs of failure. By the fourth grade many children see it too.
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I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.
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I write books to change the world. Perhaps I can only change one little piece of that world. But if I can empower teachers and good citizens to give these children, who are the poorest of the poor, the same opportunity we give our own kids, then I'll feel my life has been worth it.
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False hope is worse than despair.
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We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.
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I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
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The first goal and primary function of the U.S. public school is not to educate good people, but good citizens. It is the function which we call - in enemy nations - 'state indoctrination.'
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I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.
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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.
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We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.
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There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old accountable for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.
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I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more reliable in telling us what actually goes on in public school than many of the adult experts who develop policies that shape their destinies.
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Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.
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The cause of homelessness is lack of housing.
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As a matter of record, New York City spends a higher portion of its budget on instruction and associated costs within the schools themselves than any of the other 100 largest districts in the nation.
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Charity isn't a good substitute for justice.
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The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory.
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A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives.
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I once made a check of all books in my fourth-grade classroom. Of the slightly more than six hundred books, almost one quarter had been published prior to the bombing of Hiroshima 60 percent were either ten years old or older.
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A culture in which guilt is automatically assumed to be neurotic and unhealthy has devised a remarkably clever way of protecting its self-interest.
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