My parents came from an environment where everyone knew that the way to be successful was to get a great education, and that was going to be your ticket in life. If you could succeed in education then you would succeed in life, so that was sort of the driving force behind my parents' upbringing, and therefore kind of how they brought me up.

If you grew up in a lower-income community, or less well-off, the belief is that the way to change that circumstance is through education.

We need to do everything we can to ensure every single child has an effective teacher every day, which means we need to identify who are the most highly effective teachers, and we should recognize and reward them for the incredible professionals that they are.

We are in tough economic times right now, and the first thing we have to do is look at how we're spending the dollars that we have, and at what kind of return on investment we're getting. Because I think it will show that spending more money without fixing the fundamental flaws in the system won't produce anything different in terms of results. In DC, we were spending a whole lot of money on things that had no positive impact on students' achievement levels.

I believe that the teachers unions are doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. They were designed to be professional organizations that protect the rights and privileges and pay of their members. The problem is that we don't have an organized national interest group with the same heft as the teachers union that's advocating on behalf of children.

We need to identify the least effective or ineffective teachers and for those people we need to either quickly accelerate their practice or move them out of the profession. That's what I believe and quite frankly I have never met anybody at least to my face who said they disagree with that notion.

I think for what success looks like for me, it is a world in which you can look at the achievement scores, the academic scores, of any school anywhere in this country [the USA], and you wouldn't be able to look at the score and determine what the racial makeup or the socioeconomic makeup of that school is simply because of the academic achievement levels.