I beg people not to accept the seasonal ritual of well-timed charity on Christmas Eve. It's blasphemy.

• At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book.
• We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.
• Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States.
• During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.
• I am opposed to the use of public funds for private education.
• Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.
• Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.
• I believe we need a national amendment which will guarantee every child in America the promise of not just an equal education but a high-quality equal education.
• A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.
• I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.