Painting a picture of the hostile environment in which racial and linguistic minority children live, this paper proposes how educators can become combatants against educational failure that is corrupting the futures and talents of millions of children of color. The paper focuses on the four federally recognized minorities--Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans--who make up approximately 95% of the minority population of the United States and who are underrepresented in educational and economic achievement and overrepresented in poverty, joblessness, educational failure and attrition. Sections of the paper discuss: how educators contribute to student failure; attacks on minority culture from the society at large; the "English only" movement; differential treatment established by traditional school funding; identification of the root cause; how educators can become advocates for minority students; and retrieving the dream of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. (Contains 71 references.) (RS)