For the last four years we have had a student whose mother is Filipino and father is American. The family has decided to move permanently to the Philippines and had to go to the Philippine consulate in New York City to process their immigration papers. I drove them to the city because they had never been there before. The headwaiter in our hotel restaurant happened to be Filipino and struck up a conversation. As a result, I found out about a Filipino couple who have worked in the United States for the past 24 years. Their children are being raised in the Philippines by their grandparents. The parents are here for the express purpose of sending money home to pay the tuition for their children's schools. In fact, in two years the parents will return to the Philippines because their youngest is about to graduate from nursing school.

In addition, because we used two taxicabs in New York City, I met a man from Calcutta, and another from Senegal. They both came to this country to be able to work and to support their families here and in India and Africa. The taxicab driver from Calcutta owns his taxicab and his home in Queens after 36 years in America. His neighborhood, which became largely Indian 30 years ago, is now rapidly becoming Chinese. He said his new Chinese neighbors are very helpful, community-minded people who have chosen their neighborhood because of its colleges. Both the Indian and Chinese families are very focused on education.

We all have admiration for people who are strong enough to set goals, and thrust themselves into an alien culture to help their family members achieve a better life. My grandparents, and yours, can be counted among them. Wisdom, drive, strength and courage are character traits of the fortunate.

It could be said that the “child left behind,” no matter where in the world, is denied enough good health and family focus to be able to keep an eye to their future. Even if the Filipino children remain in the Philippines, they are not “left behind” because they happen to be the fortunate recipients of family focus and devotion to education creating the eye to their future.

We have recently begun an experimental program to test the amount of one-on-one focus that may be needed to help students overcome reading challenges. “How much focus is needed to save a child from being left behind?” In this program, one student spends three hours per day with an instructor for six weeks (92 hours) to provide enough time for the student to crystallize strategies to overcome personal challenges. So far the results are amazing, but the data is still growing as we track the long-term results of such an intensive.

This summer three students will have an intensive, and during the school year, we plan to provide six more intensives.

We discovered a 16-year-old student who volunteers in our classroom happens to be very delayed in his reading skills and that his grades are very poor. Would a six-week, one-on-one, 92 hour intensive help that student become personally motivated to overcome his challenges? Right now he is “left behind” with very few prospects for success. Our hypothesis is that intensive focus can change a life, in fact even save a life from failure. No different from the Filipino children whose future prospects would be limited without an intense effort. In the year ahead we shall seek funding to provide an intensive for that teenager, and continue to collect data to explore the long-term effects.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to discover that an intensive can truly embrace the notion of “no child left behind?”

Gilda Brower is the director and founder of the Montessori School