Jonathan Kozol

“No human being who wants to read and own a book should ever have to go on a bended knee to get it.”

“In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.”

“Our nation's oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children - black children, in particular - in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal.”

“When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.”

“So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be inevitable.”

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

“The last thing the theatre owners wanted was for people who spent $200 to see 'Les Miserables' to come out again and see the real miserable children of America, right there on the sidewalk.”

“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.”

“I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height.”

“I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.”

“Governor Romney has said nothing about preschool. I think that giving the poorest kids in America wonderful preschool, and three years of it, starting when they are two-and-a-half, is absolutely crucial.”

“I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.”

“'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.”

“The 'niche' effect of charter schools guarantees a swift and vicious deepening of class and racial separation.”

“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.”

“Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important, too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions.”