Wendy Kopp

School boards can be a steppingstone to higher forms of political leadership.

Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.

I had been very focused on the issue of education disparities in our country, and literally, by the time kids are just nine years old, in low-income communities, they're already three or four grade levels behind nine-year-olds in high-income communities.

We go around and talk about what are each of the kids most proud of from the previous week.

Kids who live in low income areas face extra challenges and show up at schools that were not designed to meet their extra needs.

When kids are met with the highest expectations and given the extra supports they need, they can be as motivated as kids anywhere.

Kids in urban and rural areas face so many challenges, and they show up at schools that don't have the extra capacity or extra resources to meet their needs.

Charter laws do something really important. They give educators the freedom and flexibility that they need to attain results. But we also have to invest a lot in the leadership pipeline to take advantage of that freedom and flexibility.

If we freed up all the money in the certification process, think about how much more money we'd have to put into teacher salaries.

I'm happy to admit that I'm a hopeless optimist.

Mindsets, skills and leadership, experience and access, and critical consciousness - we need all four of these things for our students to be the leaders, people and citizens we want them to be.

In every case where I've seen a transformational school, there's a principal who really has the foundational experience of having taught successfully.