In schools where parent involvement is greater, you do have higher achievement levels and better functioning, better performing schools.

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.

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.

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.

We've lost our competitive spirit. We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.

An education reformer is as important in America as the first lady.

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.