Laura Moser

“What role should religion play in the American public school classroom? My own knee-jerk response would be, 'none whatsoever,' but the Constitution isn't quite so direct on the subject.”

“Grit can't be measured on pop quizzes, but it can often predict long-term success more than mere intelligence.”

“New York City has an integration problem.”

“Diversity isn't just a hallmark of big cities anymore.”

“Ohio has long been an embarrassment to charter-school supporters nationwide, with its trail of scandal and graft and abysmal student performance.”

“My husband and I were married in May 2007 on a sprawling rent-a-ranch in the Texas Hill Country. On the drive from Houston, we'd stopped off for our marriage license in the former produce aisle of a Winn Dixie-turned-courthouse in San Marcos and from there drove off the grid.”

“I've basically worked as a journalist and a writer.”

“Don't most of us agree that providing school meals to kids who need them is an overwhelmingly good thing? After all, nutrition is essential to proper cognitive development.”

“If we all band together against extremism and spend a few minutes a day using tools that have been proven to work, we can make a big difference in defending those values we share as Americans.”

“As President Trump quickly moved to limit immigration, civil rights, and environmental protections, I felt fear for my young children, and guilt, too - as if I'd somehow betrayed the unspoken contract all parents make to give our children a better life than ourselves.”

“As more and more minority groups fill our nation's classrooms, what can we do to even the separate-but-forever-unequal playing field? Now that's a question many very smart people have spent decades trying to answer.”

“A big reason I'd spent my career as a writer and not a public speaker is that I am a person who refines my worldview in a silent room, waiting for my thoughts to arrange themselves on the screen before me.”

“I don't claim any great experience or expertise.”

“We can all get behind feeding the poorest kids in school, right?”

“I had to work up the courage to even imagine myself running for Congress. But I eventually decided that our country had a moral problem in only letting white men - even the right-minded ones - have a seat at the table.”

“I believe that if Democrats - not any one Democrat, and certainly not just me - want to start winning races again, Lujan's statement that the DCCC would fund candidates who oppose abortion rights puts our country in danger and makes it all the more likely that the Republicans will continue to defeat us in election after election.”

“With our growing attachment to the online universe comes a refined ability to keep tabs on several things at once, to watch stories unfold on parallel planes.”

“I never experienced much outright anti-Semitism. While we learned about the Holocaust - endlessly, it felt like - no spray-painted swastika ever appeared on my childhood landscape. Jewish persecution was an ever-looming reality, but always an abstract one.”

“Very few of us can stop our lives and become activists.”

“Houston's one of the most diverse urban areas in the entire country, and most people here are really proud of that.”