You have to be prepared to think outside the box...Stand back and think about what we could do creativity. We've got to do that to push the field forward.

Education is the only billion dollar industry that tolerates abject failure.

Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now?

One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility'.

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

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.

Middle-class families know education begins at birth.