Gary Orfield Quotes

"There's nothing I know of in the research world that (says) size itself matters. There's lots of small, awful districts in this country."

"Statistics greatly underestimate dropout rates because they rely on school principals who weren't checking on them. When students disappeared, the principals just wrote them as transfers."

"The law sets out what seem to be very clear goals and consequences. However, as researchers predicted before the law was enacted, huge numbers of schools would be branded as failures, including many that are seen as successes and often have rising achievement levels. In response, the administration is permitting a wide variety of changes that lower the failure rate."