How The Other Half Learns Quotes

“Genuine education equity will be achieved only when schools serving low-income children mirror in number, variety, and access the options that affluent parents have come to expect for their children.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, who described a “success sequence” in their 2009 book, Creating an Opportunity Society.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“Moskowitz is an unabashed defender of standardized tests and dismisses the notion that they measure only superficial test-taking skills and rote learning. “I believe well-designed standardized tests measure real learning and understanding,” she wrote in her 2017 memoir.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“The first is your ability to translate written language into sounds, words, and sentences, or “decoding.” The second part is your ability to make meaning, or “comprehension.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“For fiction, for example, the thinking jobs are “character,” “problem,” “solution,” and “lesson learned.” For nonfiction, the thinking jobs are “teach?” (meaning what is the author trying to teach the reader) and “point of view?” By second grade, students are accustomed to looking at reading through these lenses;”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“If Eva Moskowitz is to be charged with creating an opportunity for parents like Ayan Wilson, Evelyn Ortega, Vanessa and Andre Farrer, and other families with more ambition for their children than means, it is a curious charge. If you demand that engaged and committed parents send their children to school with the children of disengaged and uncommitted parents, then you are obligated to explain why this standard applies to low-income black and brown parents—and only to them.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“If we define a good school as one that serves all children equally well and effectively, we might as well concede there is no such thing as a good school and never will be.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“That lesson is unambiguous: culture matters. But it cannot be imposed. If a government takes its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, so does a school. The full benefit and effect is obtained only when all parties involved share a common vision, entered voluntarily and by choice.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“a comprehensive and equitable system of public education does not require that every school be exactly the same; it requires an ecosystem of schools that collectively can serve the need of every child.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“What Eva Moskowitz appears to have created is something unprecedented in contemporary education: a mechanism for a critical mass of engaged and invested low-income families of color to self-select into schools where their attitudes, values, and ambitions for their children make them culture keepers and drivers, not outliers.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“There is no moral reason for government at any level to prevent the children of engaged and invested Americans of any race, ethnic group, or income level from reaping the full rewards of their talents and ambitions, nor interfering with parents’ best efforts to do what they deem best for their children.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“we must also recognize that aspiration is a poor substitute for rational policymaking and ask whether we have accidentally conspired to undermine the very outcomes to which we aspire.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“The more challenging question is the moral one: If a child is seriously disruptive, whose interests should we prioritize? The one who needs extra attention and resources to succeed? Or his classmates, whose class time is reduced by his issues and outbursts? It is difficult to overstate how common this dilemma is in schools serving almost entirely low-income children—and how rarely it goes unresolved in schools where affluent Americans send their children.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“The more challenging question is the moral one: If a child is seriously disruptive, whose interests should we prioritize? The one who needs extra attention and resources to succeed?”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“But to worship at the altar of “just read” fails to see reading for what it actually is: a complex and nuanced interplay of decoding, vocabulary, subject matter, and contextual knowledge. Well-intended but misguided teachers and administrators have imposed a kind of illiteracy on low-income children of color by focusing their attention relentlessly in the mirror, instead of out the window. Reading comprehension is not a skill you teach but a condition you create.”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

“A landmark study by Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie looked at a group of junior high students who were considered either “good” or “poor” readers based on standardized test scores.12 In both groups, some students knew a lot about baseball and others knew little. All the kids were tested on their understanding of a passage that described a half inning of a baseball game. Ostensibly poor readers who had more prior knowledge of baseball easily outperformed good readers who knew little about the game. In other words, knowing a lot about the subject appeared to transform poor readers into good ones. If reading comprehension were a skill that could be taught, practiced, and mastered in the abstract—which is how most schools teach and test it today—then the good readers should have had no trouble outperforming the poor readers. “The wellspring of [reading] comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read,” notes Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, who pointed out in his 2017 book, The Reading Mind, the “very”
― Robert Pondiscio, How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice