Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state.

The rich...should beg the poor to forgive us for the bread we bring them. Healthy people sometimes feel they need to beg forgiveness too, although there is no reason why. Maybe we simply ask forgiveness for not being born where these poor women have been born, knowing that if we lived here too, our fate might well have been the same.

We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals.

Apartheid does not happen spontaneously, like bad weather conditions.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has.

By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.