Because 12 years ago Eric Eisner sat down with a handful of seventh-graders in a forgotten corner of Los Angeles and realized that they deserved the same opportunities as their counterparts in Beverly Hills. It was in Lennox, by the airport, which is about as rough as L.A. gets. Eisner still remembers the first kids he met—all boys in those days: Francisco Lopez, Chris Bonilla, Efrén Hernández, Alfredo Ramirez, Luis Medina. because Eric Eisner had a simple conviction: that there is talent everywhere, even in the most benighted communities of the inner city. He talked to teachers and principals. He set up shop in Lennox Middle School, a windowless building ringed by freeways. Every year he found 20 or so of the school’s best and brightest and counseled them, persuaded a private school somewhere to take them on scholarship, then saw them safely off to college. He began with those five. Now, 12 years later, the yes (Young Eisner Scholars) program—Eisner’s underground railroad—has served more than 200 children and their families. because Eric Eisner (whose wife, Lisa, is a contributing editor at this magazine) never pretended that he was starting a revolution. Wendy Kopp at Teach for America and Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg at kipp are the radicals, out to reshape the entire American public-school system. Eisner has been all by himself. If he has any guiding principle, it is a homespun version of William E. B. DuBois’s 100-year-old notion of the “Talented Tenth,” which held that the disadvantaged classes could not take their rightful place in the American community until they had their own educated generation of leaders. Eisner is the DuBois of the barrio. May many more follow his lead. because Francisco Lopez was a Gates Millennium scholar at the University of Southern California. because Chris Bonilla graduated from Columbia University and is planning on law school. because Efrén Hernández is finishing his senior year of film school at N.Y.U. because Alfredo Ramirez is an engineering student at Columbia University. And because Luis Medina is a senior at the University of Michigan.