we’re so interested in the best and the brightest, by our very narrow definition of what we’re looking for in this country, what we mean by merit and what we mean by leadership. So I’m also just stunned by the Department of Education that includes virtually no educators, whose definition of being well-educated is that you graduated from Harvard.

what we’re seeing instead is an enormous number of pilot schools that are really replicas of the worst parts of the public system, where decisions are made farther and farther away from children, and they’re made on the basis of people who don’t know the kids or that school well. So I pictured a lot of mom and pop stores. And there are some wonderful pilot—charter schools that I love around the country. But 90 percent of what the charter schools have become is not small schools, but just alternate private systems within the public sector.

the New York Post, last week, reported that a charter school in Brooklyn, the director, was making $700,000 a year. This is a non-profit.

General Motors and Chrysler are planning to close plants and send workers overseas, who are less well-educated than the workers who are in those plants now.