There's not a day that goes by that I don't draw on my undergraduate background in psychology.
My contract with my teachers is fair, and is two pages. The union contract is 200 pages. You cannot manage your business when you cannot make any decision without going back to 200 pages worth of stuff.
If you are a lousy teacher, you should be fired.
Teachers need to be paid like professionals.
We've gotta guarantee all of our kids an education.
I want my kids to graduate from high school. But that's not enough. I also want them to go to college. Why? Because rich people's kids go to college. And if that's good enough for them, it's good enough for my kids. Because you know what? College graduates don't tend to go to jail as frequently as nongraduates.
Young people will tell you, if you're not prepared to write the most violent, the most misogynistic, the most horrible kinds of rhymes and scenarios, you are not going to get air play.
Good dental care doesn't make you a good student, but if your tooth hurts, it's hard to be a good student.
People talk about Wall Street greed, but one of the things many people don't understand is that there are a lot of organizations that have been the recipient of largess from the same Wall Street.
One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility.'
Lots of boys pick strong messages about who they are and who they want to be from the media.
Video games offer violent messages, and even the sports video games include taunting and teasing.
Movies portray men as tough guys.
Boys want to grow up to be like their male role models. And boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male.
It's just becoming more acceptable for girls to react violently.
Middle-class families know education begins at birth.
The system decides you can't run schools in the summer.
I graduated from Bowdoin College and went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Then I left and took a job teaching really poor inner-city white kids in Boston. It was interesting to me because I'd never been around poor whites before.
In two-parent households, women have increasingly entered the workplace, and in single-parent households, there is even more of a need for the adults to work. That means parents do not fully control their own schedule and have to scramble to find high-quality after-school options.
