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

I'd rather deal with anger than apathy.

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.

Poverty is so significant that we can't expect to overcome the impacts of poverty in schools.

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.

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.

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.