Well, one of them is annual assessment in grades 3-8. It's integral to the implementation of everything.

In Connecticut, my understanding, although I haven't seen the actual litigation, is that they want to measure every other year and not provide annual assessment as is required in the statute.

It's a hard process to navigate... to figure out where your kid ought to go to college.

And I think that we in America need to understand that many schools need improvement, and particularly with respect to how they're serving minority children.

We at the Department of Education are going to provide technical assistance; I've committed $14 million to show states how they might meet this more sophisticated approach.

Well, one of them is annual assessment in grades 3-8. It's integral to the implementation of everything.

We want to obviously foster a relationship that we're a partner with states; that we all share the same goals of closing the achievement gap, just as the Congress does; and that we're practical and sophisticated enough to understand what they're talking about.

But the other notion is, we also believe that those folks closest on the ground that we're holding accountable for the results can decide, and ought to evaluate which programs get results.

There's lots of institutions and lots of different cultures, and so that's the kind of thing that parents need to be able to evaluate, and students themselves, when they make a selection.

And I believe that public broadcasting has an important trust with the American people, it's an intimate medium of television, and that we can do reading and language development for young children without getting into human sexuality.

And I think that's righteous, I think that's what parents want to know. They want to know what's going right in the school, and what needs improvement, and that's what this law does.

I think it'd be useful for parents to know kind of what is the culture of an institution.

I mean, one thing I know about change is we are not going to close the achievement gap without educators.

I do think we know that a teacher who knows what he or she is doing, knows their subject matter, and knows how to impart knowledge to kids is a critical piece of closing the achievement gap.

Again, the truth of the matter is we haven't paid that much attention to high school accountability.

What we know is the workplace is more demanding than ever before.

My understanding is that Kansas, Massachusetts, they've been more pioneers on the special education side.

Higher education is confronting challenges, like the economy is, about the need for a higher number of more adequately trained, more highly educated citizenry.

The long and short of it is, we need more rigor in all kinds of programs.

We know that if we're going to remain economically competitive in the world, and viable as a civic democracy, that we're going to have to get more people educated to higher levels.

I think all kinds of parents are different in what they're seeking.

For too long, actually, we have either said you're this or that.

I'm healthy as can be - not an ache or a pain. A lot of my prayer is thanking the Lord that I am healthy. I pray for long life and good health.

The new midlife is where you realize that even your failures make you more beautiful and are turned spiritually into success if you became a better person because of them. You became a more humble person. You became a more merciful and compassionate person.

I wonder sometimes why the U.S. reviewers are more negative towards turn-based battle systems.

Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which

I'm a children's book writer, and my wife is a musician. We've raised a family on income from songs, performances and books.

And we created you in pairs.

I basically sat around unemployed in Sydney for three years straight, and the two things that saved me were the rugby league and my dog.

But I have never wanted to be a singer, because the exterior part of a career, I don't like very much.

That's what they do in Europe. You go down to the city hall and you become legally connected. You have a civil union there. Then, if you're religious, you go down to the church, and the church blesses the union. That gets the problem solved.

Like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed we wear belief and custom.

Tennis is definitely a star for women in sports.

The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.

The people who think I'm famous are knitters. Most of my life, I'm wildly unrecognized.

The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.

A bowler is his own captain. I know what needs to be done, what the ball is doing. If you don't know where you are going to bowl and where you think the batsman will hit, then how can you tell the captain what you want? You are the judge.

There are going to be questions about what major oil companies are doing with all of the resources they're accumulating. They can't escape that.

It's a very romantic sentiment, but to think that you would die if you didn't write, well, I would definitely choose to not write and live.

I am not too proud of having my name associated with some of my restaurants.

I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.

I think filmmaking is a strange animal because it's anti-Democratic and collective at the same time, but I think it's all about not trying to know everything better than everybody else but making the right choices.

I was always fiercely determined and driven to succeed.

To create something exceptional your mindset must be relentlessly focused on the smallest detail.

Wait for the wisest of all counselors, time.

So it's the greatest compliment in the world when people want to hear you sing. That means it feels good to them, so I keep doing it.