Gary Orfield Quotations

Only the kids who get a postsecondary education are even keeping even in terms of income in their lives, and so forth. The rest are falling behind, year by year. Only about a twelfth of the Latino kids and maybe a sixth of the black kids are getting college degrees. The rest of them aren't getting ready for anything that's going to have much of a future in the American economy.

Statistics greatly underestimate dropout rates because they rely on school principals who weren't checking on them. When students disappeared, the principals just wrote them as transfers.

We have had a quarter century of tuition going up faster than family income. And we've had completely inadequate increases in the Pell grant. Many states and institutions are shifting from need-based aid to aid based on test scores. At the same time, college has become much more essential for achieving middle-class status in the U.S.

The policy is essentially a product of negotiation, of power and discretion, not law.

The Pell grant is already too low for most needy students who go to four-year colleges.

We're pumping out boys with no honest alternative, and of course their neighborhoods offer many other alternatives.

(What's happening in Bibb County) is kind of characteristic of what's going on across the country.

There's instability of enrollment, health issues, teachers teaching out of field, high teacher turnover, low parent education.

There's one thing you can't learn in a segregated school as a minority. You can't learn to operate in an integrated society. The same is true for whites who grow up attending all white schools. When they get around people of other races, they are not comfortable, and they are not really effective.

There's nothing I know of in the research world that (says) size itself matters. There's lots of small, awful districts in this country.

The Supreme Court that used to be pushing us forward is undermining efforts to desegregate.

Segregation is growing in degree and complexity as the nation becomes increasingly multiracial.

Suburban America has no idea about this crisis. But we are all going to pay for it in the end.

The law sets out what seem to be very clear goals and consequences. However, as researchers predicted before the law was enacted, huge numbers of schools would be branded as failures, including many that are seen as successes and often have rising achievement levels. In response, the administration is permitting a wide variety of changes that lower the failure rate.