My name is Hao Lam, and I am the founder of Best in Class Education. I am writing to you because your child’s education matters—and because I have spent thirty years thinking about what it truly takes for a child to reach their potential. I wanted to share some of what that has taught me.

I grew up in Vietnam, where access to education was limited and tightly controlled. What a child could learn, and what future they could imagine for themselves, was decided by a system that did not know their name.

I did not have real access to education until I was well into my twenties.

By the time I graduated high school at 23, I had seen firsthand what it means to be kept from education—and what it means to finally reach it.

It does not just change what you know. It changes what you believe is possible.

That experience is why I find it hard to look at what is happening in schools across the country today without feeling it personally.

Parents share things in our centers that they do not always say out loud anywhere else.

They talk about report cards that do not reflect what they know their child is capable of.

About teachers who are doing everything they can inside classrooms that are simply too large for any one person to truly reach every student.

About homework that turns a kitchen table into a place of frustration—a child who is stuck, a parent who wants to help, and neither of them sure how to move forward.

And underneath all of it, a question that surfaces late at night: Am I doing enough? Is my child getting what they need? And if they are not—what am I supposed to do about it?

That unease is something I want to write about more honestly. I think it is far more common than we admit and far more important than we treat it.

Across years of tutoring elementary to high school children, individually working with each of my students, watching exactly where they got lost and what it took to bring them back—I began to understand something that stayed with me. Over thirty years, that understanding has only deepened.

Working alongside educators, refining a curriculum and methodology built from everything that close work had taught me, I kept arriving at the same conclusion: every child can succeed. Not most children. Every child. They just need someone who knows how to reach them. Best in Class exists because I refused to let go of that goal

This is the first in a series of letters I will write to you, one each quarter. Not newsletters. Not updates. Letters. Some will be about what is happening in education today—the trends, the gaps, the moments that matter more than most people realize. Others will be about what we are doing here, inside our centers, and why we do it the way we do.
  

Thank you for the trust you place in our centers. It means more than a quarterly letter can say.


Hao Lam

Founder & CEO, Best in Class Education

Author, From Bad to Worst to Best in Class

Connect with me on LinkedIn
I also regularly contribute to Forbes Business Council.