If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

False hope is worse than despair.

There is something deeply hypocritical in a society that holds an inner-city child only eight years old "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years before.

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.

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

The answers I remember longest are the ones that answer questions that I didn't think of asking.

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.