Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in individual ambition and autonomy. But to ask an individual to break down doors that we have chained and bolted in advance of his arrival is unfair.

I think a moment of critical energy has suddenly emerged. But moments like this come and go unless we seize them at their height.

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.

The first ten, twelve or fifteen years of life are excavated of inherent moral worth in order to accommodate a regimen of basic training for the adult years that many of the poorest children may not even live to know.

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.

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

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