I like McGillis reports for a pro-publica.

He covers politics and government.

But over the last few months, he's been thinking a lot about education, who's getting an

education right now, and who isn't.

In his off hours, I like tutors' kids in his hometown of Baltimore.

He started thinking about all this when one of his students, a kid, will call Shamar,

and into lockdown, the way most of us did last spring.

Shamar's 12 years old, and his lockdown was especially chaotic.

Shamar's mom struggles with addiction, and he was moving from one house to another, staying

with whatever relative could take him in.

The one stable thing in Shamar's life, Alex says, had been school.

The story that I tell in the piece, which just really kind of stuck with me, was this

time where I went to pick him up from school.

Instead of running around the playground, jumping on the jungle gym, like he usually did,

he was walking up the sidewalk toward me and looked really, really sad.

And he thrust this paper at me, and I assumed it was some kind of letter from school saying

that he had misbehaved, or that his grades had plummeted.

And instead it was this form letter that went out to the whole class, just saying that

their very young social studies teacher had quit for unspecified reasons, just about

halfway into the school year.

And I read this, and I look up at him, and he actually had, this is not Hollywood, he

actually had a single tear streaking down his cheek.

...