"I'm not against the use of tests. I'm against attaching rewards and punishments to it. When you do that, you destroy the measure."
- Diane Ravitch, education historian

"I have been seeing profound demoralization among teachers in America today. It is almost hard to convey. Teachers feel they are being held accountable for social conditions beyond their control. We have to have an ethos in education of encouragement, support, at the same time encourage and respect teachers and stop beating up on them."
- Diane Ravitch, education historian

"Nobody elected Bill Gates to run our schools, and yet his money is driving so many policies and so many of these reforms. Parents are drowned out because we don't have the dollars behind us."
- Sue Peters, parent and co-founder of the local Parents Across America chapter.

"I find it astounding that taxpayers are continuing to spend millions of tax dollars on test development, implementation, test scoring, and evaluation systems associated with testing at a time when our schools are going broke. We have experimented with test-based accountability for a decade and we have seen no growth in student achievement that justifies its continuation."
- Carol Corbett Burris, principal, South Side High School, NY

"What has happened . . . is that [charter schools have] become an enormous entrepreneurial activity, and the private sector has moved in. So there are now charter chains where the heads are paying themselves $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year. They compete with regular public schools. They do not see themselves as collaborators with public schools but business competitors and, in some cases, they actually want to take away the public school space and take away the public school business."
- Diane Ravitch, education historian