Like many inner-city schools, Gordon Elementary School in Memphis, Tennessee, is an oasis of adult concern and security in a bleak and often dangerous neighborhood. Most children live in single-parent homes, and many are being raised by their grandparents.
Drugs are a problem.
Shootings are common. Almost all of the children are enrolled in the federal lunch program. One day last fall while his class was studying the Mississippi River, third-grade teacher David Moore asked his students if they had ever seen the river. After all, the famously muddy waters slide by less than three miles from the school. Only 6 of the 23 students in the room, all of them African-American, raised their hands.