Before I ever stood in a classroom, I worked in a methadone clinic. Then a halfway house for men coming out of prison.

I expected the hard part to be the addiction, or the records, or the reentry. It wasn't . It was reading.

Person after person I worked with had no real education past the sixth grade and was reading years below where they should have been. Bright people. Capable people. People who had simply been let go of somewhere around the fourth grade by a school system that never came back for them.

That is not a coincidence, and it is not a character flaw. That is a pattern. And once you see it, you cannot stop seeing it.

So I went back to school, and in 2009 I became a teacher. I have never taught special education students in an inclusion class, self-contained, summer school and extended school year. I chose it on purpose - because those were the students the system was already losing, and I had just spent years meeting the as adults.