Living here just below North Avenue, we open our windows a crack, sliding them up to the nails we have pounded into the window channels to deter unwanted guests. We keep our windows open so that we can listen and learn what is happening outside.

An open window on a summer night will teach you some of what you need to survive in our city. Here on Madison Avenue, though, we often learn more than we want to know - as I did one night, years ago, when the voice of a young woman caught my attention.

"Get back here, you two," she yelled as she walked past my house. "I’m tired of this sh--. You act like damn dogs...."

She was a young mother from the street next to mine, not much more than 17 herself. The unfortunate recipients of her abuse were her two young sons, running and playing as boys will.

Their mother’s hostile and berating words seemed to hit them like stones, driving the young brothers away from her. "She must have been treated badly herself, " I thought, as they continued their slow-motion parade down my street. "She must have suffered as a child to be so blind to her own children’s needs."

Under the dim street lamps, the woman couldn’t see that her words were cutting deep wounds into her sons’ self-esteem. From my bedroom window two stories above them, though, I could hear the sounds of children learning what it means to be devalued. I could sense their fear, and their growing anger - young people being treated like animals....

In the years which would follow that night by my window, the two brothers would never learn their true value. In school, they would be labeled as "learning disabled." Eventually, they would abandon their school rooms entirely, spending their days and nights standing "look out" on a nearby corner.

On occasion, they would turn to observe me as I walked to my door, adopting the cool, semi-detached expressions of young men with nowhere to go. We would exchange mild pleasantries, but we all knew why they were there. They were waiting for the only destiny they had learned to expect from their lives - the eventual ride in a Baltimore City police cruiser....

The tragedy is that their failure was not inevitable. Because of a young man named Ronald, we know that all children can succeed if their self-esteem is encouraged and they receive the educational opportunities most Americans take for granted.

Like the brothers from my neighborhood, Ronald has a learning disability which affects his ability to put down on paper what he thinks and hears. At 3 months of age, however, Ronald went to live with his great aunt and uncle, and that is when his future and the fate of my two young neighbors began to diverge.

Every day, Aunt Doris and Uncle Donald drilled into Ronald that he had abilities as well as a disability. They convinced him that he had value. "It was rather tough in school for Ron," Doris recently explained, "but he had determination, and we told him that he could do anything that he wanted to do and that nothing would stand in his way."

Ronald responded to the love which his great aunt and uncle had given him. While the young brothers from Madison Avenue were experiencing rejection, at home and at school, Ronald’s teachers recognized his value as a human being and helped him. He received tutoring and other individualized help which affirmed his abilities and allowed him to compensate for his limitations; and last month, his proud family in attendance, Ronald received his college degree.

It isn’t hard to understand why Ronald succeeded where my neighbors failed. In addition to his supportive family, Ronald’s exceptional skill as an athlete has always drawn attention to his potential in life, and with that attention has come educational opportunity. Thanks to the eloquent chronicle by Don Markus of the Baltimore Sun, you see, the world now knows that Ronald is none other than Mr. Ron Green of Pasadena, MD, veteran lineman on the Tennessee Volunteers’ national championship football team.

Doris and the late Donald Green, as well as Ron Green’s coaches, teachers and counselors, deserve our highest commendation for the important parts they have played in his success. It subtracts nothing from their collective achievement, however, to observe that all of our young people should be valued and given the opportunities to succeed which Ron Green received as a star athlete.

Ron Green has declared that he wants to show all children with learning disabilities that "...if they work hard, they can do what I did." I applaud the young man’s generosity of spirit, and I agree with his assessment.

His life proves that when we affirm our children’s value and give them educational opportunity, they will succeed, and the entire community will share in their success. The corollary to that observation is also true, however. When children are denied either love or educational opportunity, they are likely to fail.

An appalling number of children are failing in Baltimore and other major American school systems, and their failures are our collective responsibility as a community. We have failed to give our children the individualized educational opportunity which allowed Ron Green to achieve his goals. When we deny our children the human and technological resources which we know will allow all of them to succeed, we are making a value judgment about their worth to us which has profound social consequences.