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I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.

I was brought up in a tenement house in a working district. We didn't even have a bathroom! We had a gaslight in the hallway and a black-and-white TV.

Growing up, I had a front row seat to seeing two people work really hard. My dad scrubbed toilets at a private Catholic school for a while, and that was to help me get through school.

So I was shampooing at 14. But I've always thought that had I the opportunity for an education, I would have been an architect. There's no question about it.

As somebody who visits countless schools, I see firsthand the dire situation our educational system faces.

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

I could never plan to have a career that went this well... you know, there were times when it didn't: when it went into the toilet, or ducked, or was difficult to get moving.

I started school in public housing. My dad had a sixth-grade education.

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.

I learned how to cover race riots by telephone. They didn't pay me enough at my first newspaper job to venture onto the grounds of South Boston High School when bricks were being thrown. Instead, I would telephone the headmaster and ask him to relay to me the number of broken chairs in the cafeteria each day.