The cost of college should never discourage anyone from going after a valuable degree.

I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.

There was nothing more important I could do than be supportive as a dad.

Teachers say their schools of education did not adequately prepare them for the classroom. They would have welcomed more mentoring and feedback in their early years.

It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from sort of white suburban moms who, all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, their schools aren't quite as good as they thought they were. And that's pretty scary.

The jobs of the future, as you know so well, are knowledge-based. You need college-educated folks to do this work. And so the consequences for our country are absolutely devastating if we don't start to behave in very different ways.

We need to lengthen the school day. We need to lengthen the school year. Our calendar is based upon the agrarian economy. Children in India and China are going to school 25, 30, 35 more days a year. They're just working harder than us. So, we need more time, particularly for disadvantaged children, who aren't getting those supports at home.