The ladder was there, from the gutter to the university, and for those stalwart enough to ascend it, the schools were a boon and a path out of poverty.

Sometimes the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.

Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.

Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?

Privatizing our public schools makes as much sense as privatizing the fire department or or the police department

Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.

Teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions

Without knowledge and understanding, one tends to become a passive spectator rather than an active participant in the great decisions of our time.

Those who can’t teach, pass laws about how to evaluate teachers.

Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.

American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century.

I tried to picture a bunch of guys in blue suits running around a beachside neighborhood, knocking on doors and flashing Fed creds. That should cause a stampede of illegal aliens heading south.

One has to attain an ego-less state (nir-ahankari)

Someday find my son...tell him about how things can be between men on this Earth."--A Letter to Jesse Owens

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

You can never say you're big - I don't think you can ever take anything like that for granted.

Most people think happiness comes from experiences in the world. The fulfillment of desire causes a type of happiness. But as soon as they experience passes, the happiness passes.

A lamp is lit in woman's eye; that souls, else lost on earth, remember angels by.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

If you never look just wrong to your contemporaries you will never look just right to posterity - every writer has to try to be, to some extent, sometimes, a law unto himself.

My wife is way funnier than I am. As much as I don't really feel I share a sense of humour with my family, I definitely share one with her - we find the same things funny.