SELECTED QUOTES FROM THE PRODUCTION - PBS

Episode Three: “Equality” (1950-1980)• “I had playmates of all nationalities…Native Americans, Caucasians, Hispanic children. Whenschool started, we would go in opposite directions. Of course, your playmates you played with everyday wanted to know, well, why don’t you go to school with us?” -- Linda Brown Thompson, plaintiff,Brown v. Board of Education• “Their sense was that we are going into an environment where we are not wanted. The teachers aregoing to be hostile…We cannot make friends. We will be isolated…The question for AfricanAmericans is, do you want your children to pioneer this process? Do you want your children to paythis price?” – James Anderson, historian, about first black students to integrate Little Rock’s CentralHigh School in 1957• “In the middle ‘60s and ‘70s, we took a society that was like South Africa, an apartheid society whereeverything was defined by race in 17 of our states, and we made it the most integrated part of theUnited States. That was a huge accomplishment.” – Gary Orfield, author, Public SchoolDesegregation in the United States• “In the American school, they want to make Anglos out of all of us. They want to take our Spanishaway and teach us English. Well, you don’t make anybody greater by making them less.” – JoséAngel Gutierrez, Chicano civil rights leader• “In junior high school, there wasn’t any girls’ after-school program…I decided that I would try outfor the boy’s basketball team. That wasn’t viewed very receptively by the coach, or anyone else.” –Dorothy Raffel, student basketball star and plaintiff in a lawsuit charging the federal governmentwith failure to enforce Title 9• “We have had many debates about affirmative action…desegregation…feminism…special needschildren…We sometimes forget where we were in 1954. I see a net gain for our society.” – DavidTyack, historianEpisode Four: “The Bottom Line” (1980-present)• “Our educational system is in the grips of a crisis caused by low standards, lack of purpose, and afailure to strive for excellence. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasingcompetition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.” – President Ronald Reagan,1983• “Reformers (of the ‘80s and ‘90s) saw the solution in applying business techniques to publicschools…Their main critique was that public schools were a monopoly, a government monopoly[they said] there was no competition, so there was no [incentive] need to improve.” – Larry Cuban,Historian• “I am not in this battle on education to save any institution. I am in here to save the lives of children.By any means necessary. – Wisconsin state Rep. Annette Polly Williams, Advocate for the nation’sfirst and longest running voucher program• “The day the conservative voucher advocates tell me that they would like to give every inner cityblack, Hispanic or poor white kid a $25,000 voucher to go to Exeter, I will become a Republican!” –Jonathan Kozol, activist, author “Savage Inequalities”• “One of our biggest concerns about the [voucher] program is that we are not making the effort toimprove the public schools. Rather than supporting the public schools, we are supplanting them withsomething else...”– Greg Doyle, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction• “I am not excusing problems. I am not saying ‘please don’t evaluate public education.’ But I thinkthat the honest starting premise has to be that, on the whole, public education has been a big successin America. We have more people under the roofs of public schools learning than any of theadvanced industrial democracies.” – Nicholas Lemann, author and journalist