It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.

I'd love to go back and teach primary school. I used to teach fourth grade and fifth grade. I'd love to spend several years teaching kindergarten or maybe third grade.

As damaging as the obsessive emphasis on testing often proves to be for kids in general, I believe that the effects are still more harmful in those schools in which the resources available to help the children learn the skills that will be measured by these tests are fewest, the scores they get are predictably the lowest, and the strategies resorted to by principals in order to escape the odium attaching to a disappointing set of numbers tend to be the most severe.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.

The contrasts between what is spent today to educate a child in the poorest New York City neighborhoods, where teacher salaries are often even lower than the city averages, and spending levels in the wealthiest suburban areas are daunting challenges to any hope New Yorkers might retain that even semblances of fairness still prevail.

A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives.