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Cultural dominance of middle-class norms prevail in middle-class schools with a teacher teaching toward those standards and with students striving to maintain those standards.

Education standards need to be set at the state level. High standards are an important way to ensure that the education system we are funding is actually working and producing, at a minimum, what we would expect it to.

As we embark on something as ambitious as the Common Core, educators must be able to teach to the standards with the necessary support and collaboration and without the sense that there will be dire consequences if students, schools and their tests don't make the grade.

Low standards are a tactic that takes pressure off teachers' unions by accepting mediocrity and failure for kids.

The present structure of rewards in high schools produces a response on the part of an adolescent social system which effectively impedes the process of education.

I was in a special class, where you skip a grade - you go from seventh to ninth. But I got kicked out. You had to maintain an 85 average, and I didn't. I was too focused on trying to be popular.

By far the most important factor in the success or failure of any school, far more important than tests or standards or business-model methods of accountability, is simply attracting the best-educated, most exciting young people into urban schools and keeping them there.

What concerns me, is the general social tendency to enforce a level, above which nothing rises and stands out.

Instilling a sense of self-discipline and focus when the kids are younger makes it so much easier by the time they get into high school.