Teach For America provides one of the most critical pipelines for bringing new talent into public education.

It's critical that states improve how teachers are trained, recruited, evaluated, compensated, advanced, and retained.

Managers are responsible for setting workplace policies under which teachers can succeed. Managers are responsible for negotiating contracts that create the conditions under which teachers can succeed.

I believe in two things: One, Andrew Carnegie said, 'He who dies with wealth dies in shame.' And someone once said, 'He who gives while he lives also knows where it goes.'

I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.

Isn't that the great thing about Christmas? You get a lot of respite, time to recharge your batteries, time with family without too much else happening anywhere else in the world, time to focus on the people you love and the activities that you enjoy, time to exercise, to read.

I love my house. I love my family. I love my animals.

I must have been six or seven years old at the time. My family lived on the bottom floor of a two-story house on Cruger Avenue in the Bronx, and every night at 9:30, I sat by my little radio in our kitchen and listened to a half hour of Bing's records regularly spilling out over WNEW.