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I would leave school every day and walk to my grandparents' house under the El because everyone worked. I was 6 and walking home alone from school. It was a different city and a different time.

I would get my student loans, get money, register and never really go. It was a system I thought would somehow pan out.

My mom raised us three boys by herself on welfare. It's not worse than anybody else's life.

I would provide more opportunities for the kids of urban communities to go to school and learn trades - to get more jobs to take care of their families.

If I'd stayed at college I would have become a teacher.

My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

I would have been miserable in college. I always hated school.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn't have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

I would not be gotten into a schoolhouse until I was eight years old. Nor did I accomplish much after I started. I doubt if I had gone to school six months in all when my father died. I was fourteen at the time.

I still consider myself a working-class girl and would send my kids to public school.