We should totally ban for-profit charters. For-profit's first obligation is to its stockholders, not to its children.

In DC, policymakers think that if we can only have high enough standards, tough enough tests, and hold people accountable, we can close the achievement gap. And it hasn't happened. Yet the new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, is based on the same test-based and market-driven framework and ideology, except it lets the states do it.

Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.

You can't lead your troops if your troops do not trust you.

Most people believe that schools were good enough when they were children and that they are good enough now. But the dynamic growth of our system of education has spawned serious problems of educational quality.

When you succeed at keeping almost everyone in school, you must figure out ways to educate everyone you keep in school.

There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions.