Movies portray men as tough guys.

Osama Bin Laden is not going to come here and destroy America. Our education system is doing that just fine.

I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.

If you raise a child, there's no time, you can't be a great parent.

I want to be a children’s hero… Children need heroes because heroes give hope; without hope they have no future.

When kids know that you refuse to let them fail ... they don't give up as easy. So sometimes they don't have it inside, [but] they're like,'You know, I don't want to do this, but I know my mother's going to be mad.'That matters to kids, and it helps get them through.

When I was growing up, kids used to talk about snitching... It never extended as a cultural norm outside of the gangsters.