“Violence is Black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years worth of education.”

“If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. ”

“The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.”

“The amount of educational programming on television today is simply desensitizing. The only reason left to go to school is to see gun violence.”

“As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education.”

“In middle school, Renaldo was voted most likely to vote in a Presidential election. But he was the most obvious choice to receive that accolade, since he was the only 17-year-old at school.”