There is a full-blown, life-and-death crisis in public education today for poor, minority students in America. There are larger, systematic problems with the country’s public education system overall, but poor children continue to get the short end of the stick, even though they often face some of the toughest challenges to academic success.

For students from devastated poor communities such as Harlem, the problems often start at birth. Researchers have found that low-income children have only a fraction of the vocabulary of their higher-income peers by the age of three. As these children progress through elementary school, there is a well-documented “achievement gap,” where black children lag behind white children in state tests of English and math proficiency.

As these children hit middle and high school, many of the black students fall further behind, leading many to give up hope and leave school. These hundreds of thousands of black young men and women soon learn that there are not many jobs for high school drop-outs, and the jobs that do exist often barely pay enough to live above the poverty line.

Many of these undereducated young people become trapped in poverty and all that is often associated with it – unemployment, substance abuse, poor health, violence, even early death. One study found that 60 percent of young black men who drop out of school land in prison by their thirties. And incarceration, which is many times more expensive than a good education program, produces virtually no positive outcomes for those who go through it or for society.

This problem, while not new, is a growing more acute as the job market changes. When I was growing up in the South Bronx in the 1960s, my mother would warn my brothers and me that if we didn’t do well in school, we would end up pushing a rack of clothes in the Garment District in Manhattan. Today, even those kinds of low-skill, low-wage jobs have disappeared.

What has not changed is the fact that education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. For decades, though, the public school system, particularly in poor, minority neighborhoods, has been lousy at ensuring children graduate from high school, succeed in college and have a shot at the globally competitive market for high-skill jobs.

The first step our country needs to take is to make sure that public schools put the needs of children first, not the needs of adults. We also have to improve our cohort of teachers. Simply put, bad teachers need to go or be retrained; and we need to attract and retain more great teachers. Toward that end, teachers should be paid like full-time professionals, called upon to work more hours where necessary, and be accountable for the student achievement in their classrooms. Like most professional workers, their successes should be acknowledged financially and otherwise.

We also have to reshape the school year. If students are behind – as many are in low-income, minority schools – they need extra time to catch up. That means a longer school day and a longer school year. In exchange for more pay, teachers may need to work more hours.

Lastly, we need to adopt a new perspective on education. We need to acknowledge that education begins well before kindergarten and goes beyond the walls of the classroom. Yes, we need stronger schools, but we also need to systematically address the larger context of academic success and failure.

For example, research shows that the brain’s architecture and potential for learning is, to a great extent, formed in the first years of a child’s life. That means we need to educate parents so they can begin to boost the odds of their child’s educational success as early as possible. Parents need to be taught some simple steps such as reading, singing and playing with their children each day or how to teach discipline, rather than simply punish them.

Poor children often face an array of barriers to their educational achievement, from inadequate health-care to the threat of physical violence to stressful home environments. Any one of these can derail a child’s success in school, so we need to support children holistically. That means working with children consistently from birth through college and to strengthen the families and community around these children.

We cannot expect the status quo – which got us to this horrible place – to close the achievement gap and get this country’s education system where it needs to be. We need to see the situation for what it is – a tragedy for individual children and a threat to our country’s long-term well-being. Then we need to express our outrage to our political and education leaders. We need to hold their feet to the fire for the long haul until our country is prepared to do whatever it takes to turn our children into happy and productive adults.

To learn more about the Harlem Children’s Zone, visit www.hcz.org>