Dani Mitchell

“To buy into school, kids need to be reminded of the purpose all day, everyday.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Whether you are sixteen or sixty, the rest of your life is ahead of you. You cannot change one moment of your past, but you can change your whole future. Now is your time.”
― Matthew Kelly, The Rhythm of Life: Living Every Day with Passion and Purpose

“Finland had required a matriculation test for 160 years; it was a way to motivate kids and teachers toward a clear, common goal, and it made a high school diploma mean something. Korea rerouted air traffic for their graduation test. Polish kids studied for their tests on nights and weekends, and they arrived for the exam wearing suits, ties, and dresses. In America, however, many people still believed in a different standard, one that explained a great deal about the country’s enduring mediocrity in education: According to this logic, students who passed the required classes and came to school the required number of days should receive their diplomas, regardless of what they had learned or what would happen to them when they tried to get a job at the Bama Companies. Those kids deserved a chance to fail later, not now. It was a perverse sort of compassion designed for a different century.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“One thing was clear: To give our kids the kind of education they deserved, we had to first agree that rigor mattered most of all; that school existed to help kids learn to think, to work hard, and yes, to fail. That was the core consensus that made everything else possible.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way