I could enjoy the life that I had by virtue of the educational attainment that my grandparents and parents had pursued. Education was always incredibly valued in our family.
It always surprises me when donors who operate successful businesses assume that just building a school structure means that a community now has access to education. When creating a business, does renting an office space now mean that you're producing goods, training staff and generating revenues?
There are many challenges in the global education ecosystem: from top-down systemic issues in how educational services are organized and delivered, to bottom-up issues of curriculum effectiveness, accountability, and human resource allocation.
We have every resource necessary to provide access to education for every child on the planet; we just need to commit to enabling it.
It is the local community that needs to own the commitment to education.
I'm not a non-profit person. I think of myself as an entrepreneur who wants to work on global education.
My mom was on welfare and the occasional food stamp, but I have never participated in any of those governmental programs, even the ones that kind of work like education, scholarships and whatever, and I managed to do just fine.
There was a rule, back when I was an education lawyer in Alabama, about visiting public schools: always go on a rainy day so you can see how badly the roofs leak.
The so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us.
The American dream always meant that anybody willing to put in a hard day's work could make a decent living. That's just not true anymore for people without at least some post-high school education.
