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.

Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job.

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.

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

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

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

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.