The reality in Washington D.C. is if you live in Tenleytown versus if you live in Anacostia, you get two wildly different educational experiences. It’s the biggest social injustice imaginable. What we are allowing to happen in this day and age, we are still allowing the color of a child’s skin and the Zip code they live in to dictate their educational outcome, and therefore their life outcome. We are robbing them every single day of their futures. And everybody in this country should be infuriated by that.

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

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.

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'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.

There’s a belief now that the problem with our schools is parents, that if we just had better parents we would have better performing kids and, therefore, we wouldn’t have a problem at all. But what’s missing in that equation is that you do have a lot of parents in this country who are very involved in their children’s education and who do want something better. They want to see better for their kids. They know that they’re in schools that aren’t performing particularly well and if you look at how we treat those parents, it is quite poorly.

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