Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.
Can you believe approximately 17 percent of American children ages 2 to 19 years are obese? How about this fact: approximately 60 percent of overweight children ages 5 to 10 already have at least one risk factor for heart disease? We are all to blame for this - parents, schools, kids - all of us.
If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.
OFSTED has made large cuts in the paperwork which schools are asked to provide and further steps to reduce the bureaucratic burden will be introduced in September.
If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.
We know the parental support, community support, makes a difference. It's not just the metrics of testing and putting pressure on the schools and on the teachers.
If, in the schools, the classical language would no longer be taught, whom could we entrust with the writing of memorials, documents, letters and notes in the public service? How could we possibly assign important offices and heavy responsibilities to someone who cannot even write fluently?
I see the difficulty of kids in going to university, the difficulty of kids in schools getting arts education, so that the arts and drama and the creative arts are extracurricular. They aren't: they are at the centre, and they are the equipment we so desperately need in the world.
Public schools are not simply being corporatized, they are also subjected increasingly to a militarizing logic that disciplines the bodies of young people, especially low income and poor minorities, and shapes their desires and identities in the service of military values and social relations.
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.
Right now many schools have no recess. Most schools have no PE.
While I was growing up all over, in all my different schools, I was always doing theater, auditioning for plays.
The applicability of the Establishment Clause to public funding of benefits to religious schools was settled in Everson v. Board of Ed. of Ewing, which inaugurated the modern era of establishment doctrine.
You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.
An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.
Why can't teachers end up owning schools, the way waiters can open their own restaurants?
Instead of just giving lip service to improving our schools, I will actually put the kids first and the teachers union behind in giving our kids better teachers, better options and better choices for a better future.
I went to the public schools myself. And they were great for me.
I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life.
Going to salsa clubs may be popular, but I feel we're really missing something as a society by overlooking ballroom dancing. If only we could persuade schools to teach it or there was somewhere young people could go on a Saturday night to learn it.
During the days of segregation, there was not a place of higher learning for African Americans. They were simply not welcome in many of the traditional schools. And from this backward policy grew the network of historical black colleges and universities.
Charter schools are public schools that operate, to a certain extent, outside the system. They have more control over their teachers, curriculum and resources. They also have less money than public schools.
Devices that allow people to shoot up to 100 rounds of ammunition at one time have no place in our schools, no place in our parks, no place on our streets, no place in our communities, and no place in this country.
I grew up moving around. I went to seven different schools, so I know what it's like to be that new girl and have to not only know who you are but also take that into foreign circumstances and know how to respond.
The government is a very large constructor. They have schools, colleges, hospitals and courts, offices. We are trying to influence the public works department to adopt green buildings.
A drop in younger children visiting libraries is of great concern. As children's laureate, I am passionate about the role of libraries, both in schools and in the wider community. They are unique places where children can begin their journey as readers, as well as being creative hubs.
And, in the case of schools, or anything else, if you have something that is forcing you to do better than you did the day before, it makes you look forward and it makes you think in a way that's going to make the product better, which is the students and the education.
You wouldn't go to a hospital, you wouldn't go to a law firm where the doctors and lawyers were not retained on merit: where they all had tenure regardless of competence. Parents feel the same way about schools that they send their children to.
A certain administration which I won't call by name took the arts out of the schools, and that left the brothers out on the street with nothing, so they went to the turntables and started rhyming. Then they had a way to express themselves, and that's the birth of hip-hop.
In America the schools have become too permissive, the kids now are controlling the schools, the tail is wagging the dog. We've got to make a change there and get it back to where the teachers have control of the classrooms.
We have been so pleased with the response to our unique schools in the Nashville area, and we are confident that other areas will embrace our concept, as well.
I organize a chess festival in Hungary. I support chess in schools, and I have my own chess foundation. And I started writing books.
Parents and schools should place great emphasis on the idea that it is all right to be different. Racism and all the other 'isms' grow from primitive tribalism, the instinctive hostility against those of another tribe, race, religion, nationality, class or whatever. You are a lucky child if your parents taught you to accept diversity.
Our political establishment refuses to use the word 'segregated.' They call the schools diverse, which means half black, half Hispanic, and maybe two white kids and three Asians. 'Diverse' has become a synonym for 'segregated.'
I know what it's like to have a dream. I know what it's like to roll the dice and say, 'I'm going to go after this thing,' and nothing turns my stomach quicker than acting teachers or acting schools that look at a bunch of dreamers and say, 'We can help,' when they know full well that they can't.
