This is going to be a blog full of another person's quotes. Why? Because this blog is about education. And instead of me mouthing off, I want to present you with words from someone far more cognizant than I.

"The problem of persistent poverty is at its root a problem of skills." So says Sen. Barack Obama.

Poor children grow into poor adults, because they are never able, either at home or at school to acquire the abilities and resources they need to compete in a high-tech, service-driven economy, and (pay attention here) these necessary skills are both cognitive (the ability to read/compute) and non-cognitive (the ability to stick to schedules, to delay gratification and shake off disappointments).

The good news is this can be fixed with intervention in the lives of poor children. Special help in these areas if they start early enough (ideally in infancy) and continue throughout childhood can diminish or alleviate the skill gap.

There is a program with nine non-school interventions that can help. This includes the Medical Family Partnership, which sends trained medical personnel to counsel poor mothers both during and after their pregnancies; Early Head Start, a federal program much more ambitious than Head Start itself, offers low-income families parental support, medical care and day-care centers during the first three years of children's lives; Avance, a nine-month language enrichment program for Spanish speaking parents; and Bright Beginnings, a pre-K program that enrolls 4-year-olds who score the lowest on a screening test of cognitive ability and which manages to bring most of them up to grade level by the first day of kindergarten.

Many of these intervention programs work with parents to make home enviorments more stimulating (no TV), others work directly with children to improve their language development, a major factor in later school success. The big problem is these programs are scattered and isolated and too brief, and the positive effects fade once the intervention ends.

There is a program in Harlem called the Harlem Children's Zone. It has a $58 million budget and serves 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood of Harlem. The program includes two intensive K-12 charter schools, with extended hours and no union contract and (this is a big and) a conveyor belt of social programs beginning with Baby College, a nine-week parenting program that encourages parents to chose alternatives to corporal punishment and to read to and talk more with their children (again, no TV).

Starting in pre-K and continuing through grade 12, everyone has continuous community support (is this getting to sound familiar?), like family counseling, afterschool tutoring and a free health clinic. This is designed to mimic the often invisible cocoon of support and nurturing that follows middle- and upper middle-class kids through their childhood. The goal in the end is to produce children with the ability and character to survive adolescence in a high-poverty neighborhood, to make it to college and to graduate.

68 percent of the children in the Harlem program passed the state reading test - which comes to within 2 percent of the state average - and 97 percent passed the math test - well above the state average.

Sen. Obama says, "If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community, in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can't just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal the entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works."

What we all have to realize is that the underperformance of poor children is an issue that affects all of us. This should and must matter to all of us, all ages and all incomes. We should address these problems not just out of a mushy sense of moral obligation but from hardheaded reasons of global competitiveness. At this moment, when nations compete through the skill level of their workforce, we as a country cannot let our skill level decline or be wasted.

Sen. Obama also said, "In many low-income communities there's this sense that education is somehow a passive activity, and you tip your head over and pour education in somebody's ear. And that's not how it works."

We as responsible people have a crucial role in the lives of desperate and impoverished children, not just in the classroom but in their lives, as well.

Sitting in my office talking to No-No, she tells me the news of the streets. How Sha is hooking (at the age of 14) and how she is selling crack to her own mother. I pipe in and say, "But that's her mother's fault," and No No says, "She's taking advantage of her mother's addiction to make herself some money."

She then goes on to tell me that Sha's youngest sister is hungry and there's no food in the house. And then she enlightens me further that the house (the drug house of which I often speak) is often used as a babysitting facility for parents who are using and have young children .

All this wisdom imparted to me in a quiet voice by a 17-year-old child whose older brother went to prison at the age of 16 and won't be coming back home until he's 27. Who tells me that 14-year-old children need to help their mothers with their addictions and find food for their 8-year-old sister.

Who can listen and not be moved to either tears or anger? This tale of life on the Hill, in the city of Schenectady, told in a darkened room by a beautiful, quiet girl who feels only concern for an abandoned child. Who goes on to tell how she and two other children beat up a 16-year-old boy because he kept beating up their lifelong friend who has a child by him.

"What else can you do?" she says. And indeed what else can you do.

I am quiet and subdued, and for once in my life no words come. I can only offer a hug. Call me, I say. "Come see me, send over Sha's sister," I say. But I know to my very marrow I know, that this is not enough. This will never be enough. And help me, I say, help me please to help them.

QUEST is a community-based organization that provides a safe environment, free meals, counseling, art and recreation programs that keep Hamilton Hill children in school, out of trouble and on track for better lives. For more information on QUEST, visit www.questkids.net.