Michelle Rhee quotes:

My grandfather was a teacher, my grandmother on my mom's side, four of my aunts, my sister-in-law, my best friend. So I've always, my entire life, been surrounded by teachers, and because of that I've had a tremendous respect for what teachers can do, the power that they can have.

My parents were extraordinarily focused on education. It was the topic of every dinner conversation, is are you number one, are you getting all As, if not, why not. You need to do better. So my entire orientation and focus growing up was around doing your best and making sure that you were going to get the best education possible.

If a country puts its entire focus on making sure that the education system improves, then that's the kind of progress that you can see.

We've lost our competitive spirit. We've become so obsessed with making kids feel good about themselves that we've lost sight of building the skills they need to actually be good at things.

Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job.

I think that one thing that people are missing is that we are never going to be able to fix this country's [American] economy in the long run until we fix our public education system.

I'd rather deal with anger than apathy.

My parents came from an environment where everyone knew that the way to be successful was to get a great education, and that was going to be your ticket in life. If you could succeed in education then you would succeed in life, so that was sort of the driving force behind my parents' upbringing, and therefore kind of how they brought me up.

That should be the goal, is that every kid in every neighborhood, despite whatever challenges they may face, are getting a great education in our public schools.

Standardized tests are an indicator of the kind of service taxpayers are receiving - and whether schools, educators and policymakers are doing their jobs. In the United States, taxpayers spend almost $600 billion annually on public education, so it's not unreasonable to ask what all that money is producing. In fact, it's irresponsible not to know.

I think for what success looks like for me, it is a world in which you can look at the achievement scores, the academic scores, of any school anywhere in this country [the USA], and you wouldn't be able to look at the score and determine what the racial makeup or the socioeconomic makeup of that school is simply because of the academic achievement levels.

The reality in Washington D.C. is if you live in Tenleytown versus if you live in Anacostia, you get two wildly different educational experiences. It's the biggest social injustice imaginable. What we are allowing to happen in this day and age, we are still allowing the color of a child's skin and the Zip code they live in to dictate their educational outcome, and therefore their life outcome. We are robbing them every single day of their futures. And everybody in this country should be infuriated by that.

We are always going to put the best interests of kids above the rights, privileges and priorities of adults.

You may not do well, necessarily, up front, and in order to be the best, you've got to work hard.