I'd rather deal with anger than apathy.

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.

That should be the goal, is that every kid in every neighborhood, despite whatever challenges they may face, are getting a great education in our public schools.

The notion about education has changed and that now it’s sort of much more aligned with, “Well, schools can’t combat poverty. We can’t possibly expect schools to do the work to overcome poverty.” I think that notion which has changed over the last few decades is part, not all, but part of what is maybe leading to people feeling less of a sense of possibility.

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.

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

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.