After a 15-year career in television news, sometimes spent biting my tongue in the name of objectivity and balance, I retired to raise our two small children.

If you live in the overlapping world of politics and media, as I am learning, anything less than full transparency can potentially do you in.

You're never going to hear me say, 'Well, I've been critical of Obama five times, so now I need to be critical of McCain five times.' That is a false equivalence, and that's what I think is wrong with journalism.

Let's be clear about what Common Core is. It spells out what students should know at the end of each grade. The goal is to ensure that our students are sound in math and literacy and that our schools have some basic consistency nationwide. But the standards do not dictate a national curriculum, and teachers are not told how or what to teach.

Our goal here in New York is to ensure that every child who graduates high school is ready to start a career or start college and to dramatically increase the number of students that graduate from college.

My father is very dry and very quick-witted, and my mother is very silly. It was the perfect combination because I got an education in physical and verbal comedy.

At school, I was the classroom clown - I was always being thrown out for being naughty. Before I left, a teacher called me in and suggested I became an actor.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.