Nicholas Lemann School Quotations

We are very pleased to be the new stewards of the John Chancellor Award for Outstanding Achievements in Journalism, which provides richly-deserved recognition and reward to a journalist who has consistently produced the highest quality reporting, day in and day out, without compromise. We are also grateful to Mr. Lipman for his generosity in funding the Chancellor Scholarships so the Journalism School can nurture and educate talented newcomers with fire in their bellies to enter this field.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation grant recognizes our commitment, while at the same time it illustrates the commitment of the Kellogg Foundation, to challenging prejudice -- whether conscious or unconscious. Our goal at the Journalism School is to set a new, higher standard for education regarding the coverage of race and ethnicity. We endeavor to be leaders in the field.

One of the most consistent findings about low performing schools and students is that "home variables" (parental income and education, etc.) are more predictive than "school variables." But, having said that, we as a society can have much more effect on the school variables than on the home variables, so it's important and valuable to focus on the question of which interventions in schools are most effective and which are least effective.

Profound question is how do you measure the non-skills component of what goes on in schools: values, curiosity, critical thinking, and so on. That's very tough. Maybe everything worthwhile can't be measured.

I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing.