I have students who are PhDs in music who come back and scored the music and teach the kids the instruments that I don't know how to play. Those are the points of light, the former students.

I am asking teachers to understand that we must make the education relevant for the children. If they're only working for the tests or they're only working to please us, they're not going to be interested in school.

I always tell the kids that excellence is like pregnancy. You can't be a little bit pregnant. You either are or you're not.

Kids still like to laugh, kids still like the joy of learning. When you have a cool science experiment, I don't care where you're from. When you have that aha moment, whether you're in China or Kenya, that kid's eyes are gonna open up. So I really try to focus more on what we have in common than what differs us.

You hear terrible stories because there'll be a story about some terrible kid, but most of the kids I work with are terrific kids. They're poor, maybe their families are broken, so they're not coming home to a mom and dad and a nice dinner every night. But these kids are capable.

When I have children that go home and mom and dad are not home because they're working, they're trying to get food on the table, and they come home to an empty house and they go to sleep in an empty house, there is no way that child can compete against a child from the west side of Los Angeles who both parents went to Stanford. Well, good for them, God love them. That's not an equal playing field.

Baseball is a religion in my classroom. It's a very important part of life, baseball.