I think people don't talk enough about education and what we need to do in our public education system.

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.

I think that one thing that people are missing is that we are never going to be able to fix this country's [American] economy in the long run until we fix our public education system.

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.

You may not do well, necessarily, up front, and in order to be the best, you've got to work hard.

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.

If a country puts its entire focus on making sure that the education system improves, then that's the kind of progress that you can see.