I'm not truly convinced solutions are coming out of Washington.

As a son of Jamaican immigrants whose father cut sugarcane as a contract farm worker for over a decade and whose mother was a cook who fed those migrant workers out in the fields, the odds have always been against me growing up in rural South Bay, Fla.

I see that that 'American dream' is slipping away because we're not solving the problems of today, we're not planning for the future.

When you compare mayors to Washington insiders, Americans see that mayors actually get the job done.

Education should not be about building more schools and maintaining a system that dates back to the Industrial Revolution. We can achieve so much more, at unmatched scale with software and interactive learning.

Education is taken for granted. Teaching shops are different from building character.

Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.