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

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.

Children sometimes understand things that most grown-ups do not see.

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.

President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.

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.

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.