He worked inside a Philadelphia correctional facility as the principal.

And he couldn't stop noticing the same thing about the men around him — they couldn't read.

And once Hilderbrand Pelzer III started connecting the dots, he kept landing in the same place.

Every single kid.

The ones who'd been incarcerated two and three times by age 17. The adults trying to learn phonics in their 30s. The students who threw books across the room in first grade.

Reading. Every time.

"The behavior and the frustration that young people experience in their early literacy days," he told me, "is the beginning of the school to prison pipeline."

Not a behavior problem. A reading problem.

This episode is heavy and hopeful at the same time. And it is for every teacher who has ever thought: this work matters beyond my classroom walls.

Because it does.