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.

My parents came from an environment where everyone knew that the way to be successful was to get a great education, and that was going to be your ticket in life. If you could succeed in education then you would succeed in life, so that was sort of the driving force behind my parents' upbringing, and therefore kind of how they brought me up.

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

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

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

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.

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.