Liz

“A lot of students just don’t understand what’s out there,” she told me, shaking her head. “You have the kids who plan on being baseball players but don’t even play on the high school team because the coach is mean to them.”
― J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

“In most countries, attending some kind of early childhood program (i.e., preschool or prekindergarten) led to real and lasting benefits. On average, kids who did so for more than a year scored much higher in math by age fifteen (more than a year ahead of other students).”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“Why were American kids consistently underestimated in math? In middle school, Kim and Tom had both decided that math was something you were either good at, or you weren’t, and they weren’t. Interestingly, that was not the kind of thing that most Americans said about reading. If you weren’t good at reading, you could, most people assumed, get better through hard work and good teaching. But in the United States, math was, for some reason, considered more of an innate ability, like being double-jointed.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way

“It was interesting to note that higher standards were seen not as an investment in students; they were seen, first and foremost, as a threat to teachers.”
― Amanda Ripley, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way