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 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 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.

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

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.

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 all have to have more rigorous expectations of our kids in America.