CHAPTER 1

In the nineteenth century, Fall River, Massachusetts, was known as the textile capital of America. By the time Melissa Roderick attended high school there in the late 1970s, the city had fallen on harder times, but living-wage factory jobs were still attainable and, for many Fall River teens, were a lot more appealing than suffering through another year or two of high school. Teens who did manage to secure a factory job were permitted to sign out of class. “Most would just stop going to school because they were so miserable and they were failing everything anyway,” Roderick recalled. “In high school, I don’t think I learned anything. I don’t think I even wrote a paper.”

Roderick graduated from B.M.C. Durfee High School and went on to Bowdoin College, a selective liberal arts college in Maine. Others in her tight-knit group of friends dropped out. “They had terrible ninth-grade years. Tenth grade was a disaster. And by the end of tenth grade, I was the only one still in school,” Roderick recalled.

Fall River had marked Roderick with a pronounced Boston accent, a blue-collar sensibility, and a deep affinity for the underdog. She insisted that her lackluster high school experience was actually “the best thing that ever happened to me, because it left me with this conundrum.” Untangling that conundrum—why some students persevere through high school and college, while others drop out—became her life’s work.

In the mid-1980s, Roderick was a graduate student in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, working part-time at a dropout prevention program for Boston teens. The Summer Training and Education Program (STEP) provided teens with academic help, part-time work, and classes on topics such as pregnancy and drug use over a two-month period during the summer between middle school and high school. The goal was to prevent summer learning loss and teen pregnancy and eventually improve students’ chances of graduating. The program seemed so promising that it was replicated in one hundred sites in fifteen states, reaching more than twenty thousand students between 1987 and 1991. But Roderick and some of her colleagues had noticed a disturbing trend. By all accounts, the summer program had been a success: the teens had been engaged and seemed poised to do well in high school. And yet, as soon as school began in the fall, word began trickling back about students who had already dropped out or were seriously considering doing so, one disheartening report after another. “No matter what we did, we lost kids in high school,” Roderick said. “You could just never predict. The kid would look fine, then he got to ninth grade and bombed out.”

As the program wound down, STEP’s staff and community sponsors convened to discuss its future. Soon, a heated debate developed. On one side was a faction insisting that the program had not reached students early enough in their academic careers and needed to shift focus to the middle grades, a time when students’ attachment to school often begins to fray.

Another faction insisted that it was students’ experiences in high school that played the larger role in determining whether they graduated or dropped out. This group argued that the kids in the summer program were, by and large, just fine until ninth grade. Roderick was partial to this argument, in part because she had seen many of her own friends struggle with the transition to high school.

It isn’t hard to discern why Roderick made it even as her friends stumbled. Her family placed a premium on education and public service. She joked that you could pinpoint the Rodericks on a Fall River census map because her mother and father were the only ones in the neighborhood with advanced degrees. Her mother, Marilyn, was a teacher at the local elementary school and served on both the city council and the school board for the better part of four decades.

It was clear from an early age that Melissa Roderick was destined for a world beyond Fall River. In high school she was assigned to gifted classes. She was a voracious reader and also remarkably determined and socially aware from a young age. As a teen she managed to talk her way onto the board of directors at the city’s halfway house, coordinate the local chapter of Mo Udall’s 1976 Democratic nomination campaign for the U.S. presidential race, and work thirty hours a week delivering newspapers.

Paradoxically, Roderick’s subsequent research on dropouts, inspired by the debate that took place in that Boston meeting room, would help shift the national conversation about dropouts away from the qualities that students had or did not have. She would go on to spend most of her professional career arguing that properly run schools could keep students from dropping out and that students should not have to be preternaturally gifted or gritty to graduate from high school. Indeed, her message could be boiled down to the simple idea that a student should not have to be Melissa Roderick to graduate from a high school in a low-income area.

Born in 1961, Roderick is about as old as America’s dropout problem, or at least as old as the dropout problem as we conceive of it today. Throughout most of American history, high schools were considered to be elite institutions, and they were designed to serve and graduate only a small fraction of the population. It wasn’t until 1940 that even half of the nation’s high-school-age students were earning diplomas. There was little public hand-wringing over this state of affairs. Those who did think that universal education was an economic or moral necessity in a modern democracy tended to concentrate on elementary education.

But as a larger and larger share of teenagers began delaying entrance into the workforce, high schools became the dominant institution serving American adolescents, and the public’s expectations for high schools changed dramatically. By 1960, the percentage of teenagers earning a high school diploma had reached 70 percent. It was also at this time that the public became convinced that the ranks of students who had not earned a high school diploma constituted a grave national problem, and the issue began to receive headline status.

In a 1963 speech taped for television at the White House, President John F. Kennedy emphasized the toll that dropping out takes on the individual and the nation. Kicking off a summer campaign to stem the tide of dropouts, President Kennedy warned, “Today an education is not a luxury. It is a necessity. The uneducated and untrained person is seriously handicapped, economically, socially and culturally…. School dropouts constitute a serious national problem, one deserving of the attention and efforts of all segments of our society—educators, clergymen, businessmen, labor leaders, and above all mothers and fathers.”

Kennedy’s singling out of mothers and fathers reflected the popular understanding that dysfunctional families were at the root of the dropout crisis. In 1960, Life magazine ran a two-part photoessay titled “Dropout Tragedies,” which detailed the “sad individual stories” that seemed to lay behind the dropout statistics. The article lamented, “There is often little help at home. Many parents praise ‘good money,’ scorn ‘book learning.’ Others do not care, or frequently in the case of minority groups, are just not able to help. And many homes are crippled by divorce, sickness and poverty.”

The Life article reflected and reinforced the stereotype of the dropout that was emerging in popular culture at the time. Historian Sherman Dorn, who wrote the definitive history of America’s relationship to its dropout crisis, argues that the way in which Americans have portrayed high school dropouts for the past half century is based more on recurring anxiety that the youth of the nation are going to hell in a handbasket than on any clearheaded analysis of the causes or effects of dropping out of school.

In the popular imagination, Dorn points out, dropouts were seen to be deviant somehow, either too dim to keep up with their peers academically or too dense to recognize the dire consequences of dropping out. If they weren’t delinquents, then they were at the very least knuckleheads. Indeed, the very term dropout, which came into popular use in the 1960s, puts the onus for leaving school squarely on the students.

Conventional wisdom about dropouts didn’t change much in proceeding decades, though the depictions of them changed with the times. In the early 1960s, the dropout of popular culture was a disaffected tough guy. In the late 1960s, the dropout was depicted as a Timothy Leary–style “flower child,” “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.” In the 1980s, the dropout was often portrayed as a drug-dealing black or Latino male or as a pregnant black or Latina female. But even as the particulars of the stereotype evolved, the common denominator remained. Dropouts were a particular type. They came from particular families. They made particularly ill-advised choices.

The resulting assumption was that there was not much that schools could or should do to save these youths from themselves. Indeed, those community groups and activists who suggested otherwise sometimes came under scathing attack. In 1984, a group of Latino parents picketed the Chicago Board of Education, demanding the resignation of then-superintendent Reggie Love. They argued that the soaring Latino dropout rate—pegged somewhere between 50 and 75 percent at that the time—amounted to educational malpractice.

Legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko, a Pulitzer Prize winner who was widely considered to be the “voice of the people” in the City of Big Shoulders, shot back with a column in the Chicago Tribune telling the protesting parents to go stick it. If they wanted to point their fingers at someone, they should “look in the mirror.” “The fact is,” Royko asserted, with characteristic cantankerousness, “there isn’t much that anybody in the school system or in City Hall or in the state legislature or in Washington, DC, can do about the dropout rate. They can study it. They can provide statistics, and charts. They can hold hearings and blab about it and write long reports about it. But there’s not much they can do to reduce it.”

Royko ended his rant with a barrage of rhetorical questions aimed at the protesting parents: “Do you ever talk to them about their schoolwork? Do you encourage, reward, stimulate? Do you set up rules? Do you at least turn off the damn TV or the cassette player?” He concluded, “That’s your job. And if they fail, it’s your fault, not ours.”

In many ways, Royko’s assessment jibed with the academic literature on dropouts. Because dropping out of high school is such a complex, multifaceted process, studies are rarely able to pinpoint the precise reason that a student leaves high school without a diploma. Instead, they tend to unearth common associations between the characteristics or experiences of dropouts and the act of dropping out.

Studies label these factors “predictors” or “risk factors,” and researchers have offered up many dozens of them, from low self-esteem to poverty to race and ethnicity. Dropout rates are higher for Latino and black students than for Asian and white students. They are higher for males than for females. They are higher for students living in poverty than for middle-class students. They are higher for children from single-parent homes than those from two-parent homes.

The problem was this research didn’t provide much useful information for Roderick or the other educators and policymakers engaged in earnest debate over the best way to help young people. If students dropped out because they were poor or black or from a single-parent home, there wasn’t a whole lot that a summer program was going to do about any of that.

Eventually, the debate in Boston about which direction the dropout prevention program should take reached an impasse. It was then that the head of Boston’s anti-poverty agency turned to Roderick and asked her a question that would eventually change the course of her academic career. “You’re the hotshot researcher,” she said. “What does the evidence say about this?”

Not a lot, it turned out. Unable to uncover much evidence to inform her colleagues’ debate, Roderick decided to embark on her own study to try to answer the question. Initially, she tried to conduct research within Boston Public Schools, but when she failed to get data from them, she turned to Fall River, where her deep roots in the community opened doors.

Fall River Public Schools provided an excellent laboratory to study the dropout crisis. Though considerably smaller than major urban school systems like Chicago’s or New York’s, it shared many of their challenges. In 1980, Fall River’s median educational level was less than nine years, the lowest in all of Massachusetts. The school system served roughly twelve thousand students, 60 percent of whom were labeled as low-income. One-third of its students were racial or ethnic minorities, primarily Portuguese immigrants or native Portuguese speakers.

Fall River also provided Roderick with an opportunity to get data that was hard to come by at the time. In the early 1980s, school systems did not have the sophisticated data systems that are now a staple in large districts, tracking everything from attendance to grades to college admissions. A popular dataset was the federal government’s High School and Beyond Survey, which did include transcript data but did not begin until students’ sophomore year. It would be a coup for Roderick to get access to transcript data for students over a larger portion of their academic career.

In the basement of an old administrative building, Roderick unearthed the elementary school transcripts of Fall River’s students who were seventh graders during the 1980–81 school year. Then she went over to the high school and uncovered those same students’ high school transcripts, matching them to the elementary transcripts using birth dates and home addresses.

The results floored her. Most students had been chugging along nicely before high school, and then, seemingly without warning, they dropped off an academic cliff. The drop-off was so precipitous, she assumed she had made an error somewhere in her analysis. “The first time I read the means, I was like, ‘Oh man, I screwed up, this is terrible! I can’t believe I just hand-entered all these transcripts, and I made a mistake,’” she said, slapping her head for effect. But she hadn’t made a mistake. “Ninth grade was a disaster. And it was real.”

Roderick discovered that dropouts in her sample could be sorted into two buckets. The first were those who dropped out during or before ninth grade. She called these “early drops,” and they accounted for about 35 percent of dropouts in the study.

Meanwhile, a much larger percentage of dropouts were what Roderick called “late drops”: students who left school in tenth, eleventh, or twelfth grade. For most of their academic careers, these late drops had not earned significantly lower grades than the students who would eventually graduate in the bottom third of their class. The average fourth-grade GPA among late drops was 2.26, compared with 2.27 among those who graduated from high school in the bottom one-third. Though the grades of dropouts and those of the bottom one-third of graduates both declined dramatically from elementary school to high school, late dropouts had the steepest drop. The transition to high school seemed to do them in.

At the time, she had believed what the popular stereotypes and studies had suggested—that dropouts were fundamentally and academically different from graduates, and that those differences would show up long before high school. But if most dropouts were virtually indistinguishable from graduates until they entered high school, then perhaps it wasn’t the high school dropouts themselves who were the problem, but rather the actual high schools, or something about the transition to them. Her Boston colleagues had their answer—they should begin to focus more intensively on ninth grade, rather than on eighth. But it would take another couple of decades and a series of studies in Roderick’s adopted hometown, Chicago, to figure out why.

In April 1995, Roderick and a team of researchers from the University of Chicago began interviewing ninety-eight Chicago eighth graders as they transitioned to high school. She was now an associate professor at the university, teaching statistical research methods to graduate and undergraduate students. The study, which she called the Student Life in High School Project, would begin to provide answers about why ninth grade seemed to be such a turning point for so many teens. At the time, Chicago students were as likely to drop out as they were to graduate. Fifty-fifty odds. A coin flip. Why, at a time when a high school diploma had become a virtual prerequisite for a shot at the middle class, was the average Chicago student unwilling or unable to stay in school long enough to earn a degree?

The Fall River study had provided a starting point—clearly something was happening to students in the transition to high school. But what? Answering that question, Roderick decided, would require talking to students and spending time in schools. She developed a plan to follow Chicago students from the end of eighth grade to the end of tenth grade. She and a team of researchers would interview students once every three months, collect transcript data, and survey their teachers and parents. She hoped these conversations would provide her with some theories about dropping out that she could test quantitatively.

The study got off to a shaky start. Roderick had deliberately chosen to follow students from relatively high-performing elementary schools. Since the average Chicago student who dropped out did so in high school, Roderick wanted to follow average students who seemed like they could go either way when they got to high school. After the first round of interviews in eighth grade, her team panicked, worried that they would not learn anything about the dropout problem by studying these particular students. They were too smart, too motivated, too good to drop out.

One clear standout was Malik. More than twenty years later, Malik remains “the kid,” the one Roderick names first among all the students who have helped her see children and schools differently. She has taught his case to a new group of graduate students every year for the past two decades.

Malik lived with his father and younger sister on Chicago’s South Side. It was a perilous time and place to be fourteen years old. The crack epidemic that had infiltrated Chicago’s neighborhoods in the late 1980s was still exacting a deadly toll, particularly on the city’s teenagers. The previous year had been the most violent year on record for Chicago’s youth. In 1994, 278 children and young people between the ages of eleven and twenty were killed citywide.

Malik stood out among his peers and seemed poised to beat the odds. During his first interview in eighth grade, he came off as charming, confident, and determined. He had crafted an identity around being good—the best, even.

“What are your goals for high school?” one of Roderick’s research assistants asked him.

“To be captain of the basketball team headed for valedictorian,” he replied.

He said he loved learning and appreciated teachers who held students to high standards, “’cause it makes you wanna push to do better.” He added that his friends called him “Little Malcolm X” because he “liked to read a lot of black books.”

“How are smart students at your school treated?” the researcher asked.

“Most of the time, they happy for ’em, but some might try to talk about ’em and call them nerds, and things,” he explained. “In a way, it’s a compliment, ’coz they admittin’ that I’m smarter, and it’s kind of like they’re a little jealous.”

“What does that do to you?” the researcher probed.

“It makes me want to do even better and make them even MORE jealous!”

Malik’s eighth-grade teachers generally saw him as he saw himself. They identified him as a standout, even though his grades and test scores in elementary school were just average. In a study survey they were asked to complete about Malik, they unanimously agreed that he was likely to go to college and very unlikely to struggle in high school. “Malik is an acute student. He does his work,” one teacher noted. “Academically he does well.”

During eighth grade Malik had moved in with his father because, as he put it, his mom was drinking and acting “kind of wacko.” Loving and strict, Malik’s dad made sure Malik attended church regularly and contributed to household duties. He described his own strengths as a parent as “role modeling, work, responsibility, promptness, and consistency.” He had dreams that Malik would be a lawyer, though he worried that he would “give up on education, following in his relatives’ footsteps and have low motivation in the face of low opportunity.”

Malik had opted to enroll at a vocational school on the city’s South Side. With an entering class of seven hundred students, it was one of the largest high schools in the city, and it had a solid if not spectacular academic reputation.

Malik’s first semester at “South Side High” was not a disaster, but neither was it a triumph. He played on the football team and earned mostly B’s and C’s—plus an F in algebra. During his interview after the first semester of freshman year, he uttered a line that Roderick would quote for many years. “I used to be a good math student,” Malik lamented. “I mean, I just wonder, how come I can’t get that algebra? It just makes me mad that I can’t get it.”

Roderick loved the line because it neatly summed up the experiences of so many of the students she was following that year. The material wasn’t that much different than the material they had mastered in elementary school, and yet they were struggling mightily with it the second time around. The problem, it seemed, actually had very little to do with academics.

In elementary school (most of the elementary schools in Chicago run from kindergarten through eighth grade), teachers taught the same students for much of the day and knew them all personally. They noticed when they were absent, badgered them to get their work in, and provided extra support when they struggled. In high school, students were far more anonymous, in part because there were just so many more of them to keep track of. At the time, the average Chicago student experienced a 500 percent increase in the size of their grade cohort when they entered ninth grade. They were expected to already know how to get themselves to class, turn in their work, seek help when they needed it, and to generally take charge of their own academic futures. The problem was, most of them had never been taught how to do these things.

During Malik’s interview after his first semester in high school, he spent a lot of time talking about how much he was struggling with the freedom that had been foisted upon him.

“If you were giving advice to a current eighth grader about high school, what would you tell them?”

“To expect a big change,” Malik replied. “The grammar school teachers are more on you about getting your work in. But in high school, if you don’t get it in, it’s your fault.”

At the same time that Roderick and her colleagues were interviewing Chicago students, they were also collecting quantitative data from Chicago Public Schools that showed that Malik’s experiences were not an anomaly. Roderick’s colleagues at the UChicago Consortium conducted biennial surveys of students and teachers. One of the striking patterns in the surveys was the extent to which students’ engagement in school and perceptions of their teachers dropped off then they entered high school.

Eighth graders reported working hard to complete homework and grapple with new material, and they reported that most of their teachers held them to high standards and were willing to help them with academic or personal issues. As tenth graders, they were less likely to report that their teachers were willing to help them with personal problems, to expect them to do their best all the time, or to encourage extra work when they didn’t understand. Like Malik, students across the district were struggling with their newfound level of freedom, which they interpreted as an invitation to work less. When no one seemed to notice or offer additional assistance, they withdrew further.

Derrika, one of the teens who participated in Roderick’s study, seemed to speak for many of her classmates when she articulated how her relationship with her teachers had deteriorated during the transition to high school. She said she appreciated her elementary school teachers because “if you don’t want to learn, they are going to make you learn.” In contrast, her high school teachers seemed to think, “If you fail, you just fail. It ain’t our fault. You’re the one that’s dumb.”

After Malik returned from winter break, he started down a path that would lead him further and further away from his goals of being an athletic star and valedictorian. He began skipping classes, particularly his academic prep course, because he didn’t like his teacher. His grades went from B’s and C’s first semester to D’s and F’s third quarter, making him ineligible to play basketball for the school team. Things got worse from there. During the spring quarter he missed eighteen days of Biology and eight days of Algebra, despite missing only one full day of school. He was almost always in the building—he just chose not to attend those classes, both of which he ended up flunking.

His freshman-year teachers described him in very different terms than his eighth-grade teachers had used. “Student has excellent potential. Student is lackadaisical and little motivated until the last minute to do his work…. He does not get serious until time for grades,” one teacher wrote.

Malik conceded he had “played” too much freshman year.

“So, tell me about what happened second semester,” the researcher prompted him in an interview over the summer between ninth grade and tenth grade.

“You see the problem was, I don’t know why I started hanging around two guys and they got to playing cards and then it’d be, like, one of them, like, ‘Aw, you can miss this class this one day to go in the lunchroom.’ And I do it and that’s what messed me up, this following them and trying to do what they do.”

He also admitted that he was really struggling to understand algebra.

“Did you ever ask your algebra teacher for help?”

Malik confessed that his pride had prevented him from seeking out assistance. “It wasn’t beyond me. I don’t never think I need help in nothing.”

Malik’s dad was disappointed and attempted to right the ship, though by the time he realized just how deep a hole Malik had dug, the damage to his transcript had already been done.

“He been on me a lot and getting me on the right track and I’m on punishment until the end of time,” Malik lamented.

“Until the end of time?”

“Until I move out of the house!”

Malik enrolled in summer school and earned his algebra credit. He started sophomore year determined not to repeat the mistakes of freshman year, but his resolution didn’t last. Though he continued dutifully to show up at school, once there he only sporadically attended class. Again, he frittered away hours at a time in the cafeteria, playing Spades with friends. He recognized that he was sabotaging himself, but seemed powerless to reverse course.

“What would make you feel better about school?” the researcher asked him.

“Well, if I didn’t play so much. If I could just come back, do what I’m supposed to do … I don’t know … I’m not focused. I’m still really messing up in grades and that. I stay focused for a minute and then I get lazy.”

“What do you think it’s gonna take to help you get off that particular track?”

“To be honest, I just don’t know.”

Most of his teachers didn’t care whether he showed up or not, Malik insisted. He was particularly negative about his English teacher. “He a white teacher. I guess he just come and occupies the class with the amount of time he’s supposed to and then leaves! And you know, he’s not too much worried about whether we get ahead in life or not. Every day no more than ten people come. He doesn’t seem to care.”

Roderick was coming to believe that one of the biggest problems in high school was just how easy it was for Malik and other students in her study to skip class, itself an indication of a larger pattern of benign neglect, if not of outright negligence. Often her subjects were hiding in plain sight—in the cafeteria, outside school, in basement corridors. In addition to Malik, there was Omar, who had a 95 percent attendance rate in elementary school but missed twenty-seven of ninety days in the first semester of ninth grade; and Oscar, who tested two grade levels ahead in math and had perfect attendance in elementary school, but failed freshman-year algebra after missing thirty-nine days of class second semester. During the second semester of freshman year, two-thirds of Malik’s classmates across the district missed two or more weeks of instruction in at least one major subject like English or math. And these were not just disaffected students. Forty-two percent of the highest-performing ninth graders in the system missed at least two weeks of class during the second semester in 1996.

Of course, not every teacher took a laissez-faire approach to attendance or learning. Malik’s relationship with his sophomore year geometry teacher was an example of how much one teacher could influence whether students engaged in coursework—or not. Malik rarely missed this teacher’s class, he explained to Roderick, because she “makes you want to learn.”

“She just comes and say, ‘You all, I’m making sure you’re all learning something. You all ain’t gonna be sittin’ here doing nothin’.’ … Even people that don’t never do nothin’, they somehow find ways to learn. And it’s fun the way she teaches us. She makes it a challenge against everybody. She told us at the beginning of the year, two cuts is an automatic F. Scared everybody. Class is full every day. Nobody misses her class.”

Malik’s geometry teacher came to appreciate him too. “Malik did very little work the first semester. This last marking period, Malik realized he was at risk of failing and has been making more effort, coming for help sometimes during lunch,” she wrote in an end-of-the-year evaluation. “I have grown to like Malik a great deal and appreciate his enthusiasm and energy. However, he often frustrates me because, like most sophomore boys, Malik is often silly. But I have seen some growth from Malik this year, which gives me hope for his future.”

Malik didn’t share her optimism. He could no longer muster a fraction of the confidence that had so defined him in elementary school. His interview after tenth grade was somber. He resisted talking about his future and sounded depressed. “I’m just gonna have to wait ’til I get out of high school ’cause right now, I can’t see myself in the future now,” he confessed. He spoke almost inaudibly and avoided eye contact.

Malik was barely recognizable as the buoyant fourteen-year-old he had been two years prior. This Malik was talking about himself as if he were a stranger whose motivations were opaque and suspect. “It just feels awkward, not knowing which way I want to go,” he said. “But I wanna do the right thing…. I know it just seems hard for me. When I was a little kid, I was so focused on doing good at school. But now in high school, to be honest, I don’t even care about the future no more.

“You can get into the habit of not doing it right and then when you know it’s time for you to do right, it’s just so hard for you to do it. It’s just like, ‘I’m trapped, man!’”

He concluded his sad soliloquy. “I never wanted to be a lawyer anyway. That was my parents’ dream.”

In the winter of eleventh grade, Malik dropped out of high school. The researchers lost track of him, though they believe he went on to earn his GED from an alternative high school.

Malik’s story neatly illustrates the findings from Roderick’s Fall River research by showing that ninth grade was Malik’s make-or-break year for high school graduation. Prior to ninth grade, there was no way to predict that a kid like Malik would drop out of high school.

Malik’s experiences also help explain why ninth grade is such a pivotal year for students. At the very time he was trying to figure out who he was—as a student, a learner, and a person in this world—he had failed. He was no longer the “Little Malcolm X” to his teachers and friends. He was a screwup wasting his potential. Afraid that asking for help would signal that he wasn’t smart enough, he remained silent, hiding out in the cafeteria, which exacerbated his academic problems.

Roderick knew something about how that felt. She had hid out too. The difference was, someone had found her. As a freshman at Bowdoin, she had felt like an oddity. She was a lesbian in a school that didn’t admit its first fully coed class until 1971; a working-class Portuguese kid among the WASP-y offspring of doctors and lawyers. She had enrolled in a freshman seminar on James Joyce and couldn’t understand a thing the teacher or other students were saying. She had no idea how to write a paper longer than two pages or to prepare for a class discussion. She went from being something of a local superstar to being miserable and close to dropping out.

On Friday nights she had a routine that she had carried over from high school. As her classmates partied, she would retreat to the library stacks and read through the great works of American literature. The books tethered her to her life before college and reminded her that there was a vast and varied world beyond campus. One Friday night, a young, female African American professor found her in the stacks. Roderick was reading a book by Alice Walker. The two struck up a conversation. The professor was impressed by Roderick’s passion for literature, and a friendship developed. Roderick admitted that she was struggling in her classes. The professor assured her that she was plenty smart—she simply needed to learn how to be a student. She offered her help, and Roderick accepted. The professor demystified Ulysses for her. She explained that it was based on a Greek myth and that it was about transubstantiation, a matter that a Catholic kid from Fall River knew something about. She told Roderick to talk about her ideas and she would help her get them on paper. She taught her to write a cogent essay and gave her the confidence to speak up in class.

“She totally saved me,” Roderick said. “She saved my life.”

The fact that nobody had done the same for Malik appalled her. More than two decades later, she still can’t talk about the kids from that study without getting very sad or angry. The initial panic among the researchers, that the kids they were interviewing were not the types of students who would struggle with school, proved to be unfounded. Ultimately, about half the students Roderick followed dropped out, almost perfectly matching the dropout rate for the district as a whole. It was good for the study and utterly depressing for the researchers involved.

Among the most devastating case studies was the story of Alex, the kid that Roderick became most personally invested in over the course of the study. When Roderick met Alex in eighth grade, he seemed betwixt and between, not yet an adult but no longer a child, not particularly engaged in school but grimly determined to earn a high school diploma and support his mom and four younger sisters. Roderick jotted down these cursory impressions of Alex after their first meeting: “Student is small and thin. Shaved head. Baggy clothes. He seems very serious and appears more mature than his age. He appears to be the ‘man of the family’ and supports his mother. No father is mentioned in the interview…. Student appears to be struggling with gangs and his own discipline problems. It is also clear that he is very bright.”

Alex lived on Chicago’s West Side in a largely Latino neighborhood where more than a dozen street gangs battled for control. Over the summer between eighth and ninth grades, Alex lost two friends to gang violence. Despite loads of circumstantial evidence to the contrary, Alex claimed he was not in a gang. “Just because we live here, they think we’re gangsters. I can’t do nothing. I mean, I live here. That’s all,” he told Roderick. He worried about going to his neighborhood high school, “West Side,” where he believed he would be a target. “I don’t like it over there,” he told Roderick. “There’s a lot of gangs over there.”

West Side was about a mile from Alex’s house. The majority of its students, like Alex, were Latinos from low-income immigrant families. The fact that West Side wasn’t doing well by its students was evident to even a casual observer. The school was huge and chaotic. It was on four different bell schedules, making it a constant struggle to work out where a particular student or teacher might be at any given time. Students came and went throughout the day, and teachers wheeled all their materials from classroom to classroom on portable carts. During one visit to West Side, Roderick recalled walking by seven consecutive classrooms and finding absolutely nothing going on in any of them, except a fight in one. The area surrounding the school was so dangerous that students would race from the school’s parking lot to the bus stop at a dead sprint, moving as if their lives depended on it. Sometimes they did.

When Roderick went to conduct her first ninth-grade interview with Alex in October, she found him “beside himself.” He told her that he was regularly being threatened and beaten up, both at school and around it. Someone had even pulled a gun on him and his brother while they were on their way to school one day. He sounded defeated, declaring there was no point in asking adults for help. No one at school could do anything, he said dejectedly. “I’m all alone.” Later, Roderick found out that he had appealed for help from some adults at the school, but they had dismissed his concerns because they believed he was a gang member. Alarmed, Roderick sent her own memo to the principal informing her that Alex was being physically threatened in and around school. As far as she knows, nothing ever came of it.

Alex was also clashing with his teachers. He especially disliked his English teacher, whom he considered to be a bully. He was galled in particular by one incident that had taken place in that class. A physically imposing boy had started a fight with a much smaller boy. Alex said the whole class witnessed the larger boy beating on the smaller one, but the English teacher had blamed the smaller boy and sent him to the office. Alex was convinced that the teacher had sided with the larger boy because he intimidated the teacher.

Alex responded by disengaging in English class. “I don’t do nothing, ’cause he don’t respect me,” Alex told Roderick. Though he continued to attend school regularly, he had already resigned himself to the likelihood of having to repeat classes in summer school. Alex ended first semester of freshman year with C’s and D’s in all of his subjects except English, which he failed. Second semester was worse. By the winter quarter, Alex was attending school sporadically and, by his own admission, rarely completing any assignments. He ended freshman year with D’s in Biology and Typing and F’s in History, English, and Algebra. In order to catch up, he would have to do twice the work, making up old classes while also staying on top of his sophomore-year classes.

When Roderick interviewed Alex during the summer between ninth and tenth grades, he appeared clinically depressed. He talked about gang pressures and his desire to switch schools. While he talked, he rested his head on the table, barely making eye contact.

“How about you? You have to think about yourself, including good, bad, or okay. How do you feel about yourself?” Roderick asked.

“I feel bad,” he answered succinctly.

“Why?”

“’Cause, I feel like I ain’t going nowhere,” Alex said.

“So, what do you mean?”

“I’m in the same place,” he reiterated.

“You’re in the same place as what?”

“Like, I always live, I always live right here …,” he said, trailing off, the last part of his comment inaudible.

“And you’ve been feeling that way?” Roderick said.

“No, it just started.”

“In the future you want to sort of get out of here, right?”

“Yeah, make something out of myself, that’s what I’m trying to say.”

“But why don’t you feel like you’re making something of yourself right now?”

“I don’t know,” Alex responded morosely.

He begged Roderick to help him switch schools, but she knew it wouldn’t be easy. His grades disqualified him from most of the city’s magnet programs, and most open-enrollment schools near his house were overcrowded. It was unlikely that a principal was going to take a chance on Alex. A week into the school year, Roderick received a message on her answering machine from Alex asking her to call him immediately. When she connected with him later that day, the story spilled forth. One of his best friends had been shot and killed days after being initiated into a gang. Gang members had also been harassing his brother as he walked to school. His mother was distraught and had ordered both boys to stop going to school. Again, Alex pleaded with Roderick to help him change schools.

Roderick stepped up her efforts and called in a favor from a colleague on the Board of Education. The board member called in a favor at the magnet school that Alex was eager to attend. The school had a strong arts program, a multiracial population, and an excellent principal. It also had a reputation for having teachers who reached out to students who were struggling. Roderick went with Alex and his mom to West Side High to formalize the transfer process. The vice principal told Roderick he was glad to see Alex go.

Alex didn’t immediately thrive at his new school, but he did find teachers and administrators who were supportive of him and more willing to intervene when he was in trouble. When he told his counselor that he was being harassed by some gang members, she had security escort him to the bus. And when he told his gym teacher that he was thinking about dropping out, she encouraged him to stick with it. Alex described the difference between his old school and his new school in a hopeful interview with Roderick in the middle of sophomore year.

“I was talking to her and she’s like … you know, ‘Keep on coming to school,’ you know. ‘I know you’re a smart guy.’ So … I guess … I’m not really sure, but I guess if it wasn’t for her, I mean … I don’t know … so I really liked that and—”

Roderick interrupted, “Did she have any ideas about what to do with the gang stuff?”

“No, not really … but she just told me, you know, ‘Keep it up’ …’cause … and now … I’ve been doing good … so, yeah.”

He also loved his English teacher, who gave meaty writing and reading assignments and kept the class engaged and laughing.

“So, in general it sounds like you’re liking your teachers better than last year?” Roderick asked.

“Yeah.”

“You certainly like this English teacher better than the last one!”

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah,” Alex agreed, laughing.

“How about the school in general though? Do you think teachers are in general better or nicer or—”

“Mmm … I think they’re better …’cause they get into it … they get into the students.”

“They like the students,” Roderick supplied.

“Yeah.”

Roderick’s final interview with Alex took place about a month before the end of his sophomore year. When she called to set up the interview, she thought he sounded excited to see her. When she arrived, she found him “ebullient.” The principal at his school had recently established a night program for students like Alex who were many credits short of graduation. Alex was working hard in the classes and had also recently secured a job at a fast-food restaurant. He told Roderick that this school year had been “a good struggle.” “He was beside himself with pride,” Roderick recalled. He also was concerned about his friends and brother whom he had left behind at West Side.

“So … a lotta your friends have dropped out,” Roderick ventured.

“Yeah…. They will tell me to go with them, to join with them,” Alex admitted.

“Why’d they all drop out?” Roderick asked.

“Of West Side? Ahhh, ’cause of West Side!”

“And you stayed in [school]?” Roderick prompted.

“’Cause, ’cause I had you!”

“Right….”

“It wasn’t for you, I woulda been outside right now.”

Roderick was flattered and also surprised that her efforts had meant so much to him. Alex concluded the interview with a plea to help some of his friends and his brother return to school. He was particularly concerned about his brother, who had recently been in trouble with the police. Roderick promised to try. The thing Roderick remembers most from that interview and Alex’s earlier ones was his “care for other people, his constantly saying, ‘This is not just about me.’” In interview after interview, he insisted that he did not just want to improve things for himself, but for all the kids at West Side High and in his neighborhood.

“Do you think your friends are pretty supportive of what you’ve done this year?” Roderick asked during that final interview.

“Yeah.”

“They feel good about you?”

“Yeah, but I don’t want that. I don’t want them to look up to me. I want for all of us to go up together.”

“Together,” Roderick echoed.

“Right now.”

A month later, he was dead.

On the last day of school, Alex left early and hitched a ride with friends to a park near his home. He stopped to talk to a group of his brother’s friends gathered on the corner. Around 11:00 a.m., a car pulled through an alley. A boy jumped out and pointed a gun at his head. He shot twice. Alex lived one more day. They never caught his killer, though there was speculation that the shooting might have been payback for something involving his brother, who had become increasingly enmeshed with gangs while at West Side.

On his last report card, Alex received an A in English, a B in History, and C’s in his Computer and Geometry classes. His history teacher said of his performance, “Alex went from an F quarter one to a C quarter two, and quarter three to a B. He has improved tremendously. I’m not sure why.” Roderick thought she did know the secret behind Alex’s turnaround. Alex hadn’t changed, but his surroundings had. He had found a school where he felt known and supported, where adults focused on the best, rather than the worst, version of him, a school determined to prevent failure.

Based on the interview data and quantitative data on all the ninth graders who had entered high school in fall 1992, Roderick and other UChicago researchers published Charting Reform in Chicago: Th Students Speak, a scathing report on the state of city high schools. The report found that freshman year in Chicago was, in a word, disastrous. Ninth-grade failure was so widespread, so routine, that it had to be considered an institutional breakdown. Fully 42 percent of freshmen failed at least one course freshman year. Half of all males failed a course during their first semester. At one particularly troubled high school on Chicago’s far West Side, 70 percent of the freshmen failed a course first semester of freshman year. Across the entire system, students who entered high school performing at grade level, precisely where they should be from an academic standpoint, still had a 30 percent chance of failing a class freshman year.

The study had uncovered a litany of challenges: vulnerable students, a treacherous transition to high school, and a total disconnect between students and staff at many high schools. Teachers didn’t really know their kids, and kids didn’t really know their teachers. The report’s final paragraph is at once an indictment of Chicago’s high schools and a call to action. “The overall picture that emerges from this analysis is one of broad-based institutional failure in response to students’ needs—a failure to help students succeed during the transition, a failure to help students recover when they encounter difficulty, and more broadly, a failure to encourage students to form strong attachments to their school and build upon their strengths. Unless these deep-seated problems are addressed, the future for many students will be in jeopardy.”

Roderick’s takeaway from the study was one part analytical, one part moral outrage. Students were not ready to navigate the underregulated, often chaotic world of high school, and it was indefensible that nobody was helping them learn. “No one said to them, ‘You’re super smart, man. Let’s just catch you up. You just don’t know how to do the work—yet.’ And they just imploded. We do this to kids all the time,” Roderick reflected bitterly. In her opinion, the adults in the building had a moral obligation to do everything in their power to prevent students from failing, and they had failed.

Obligation, the notion that to whom much is given, much is expected, is one of the virtues that run through Roderick’s stories, which are always teetering on the edge of parable. During an interview in her Chicago home, Roderick explained that she uses the case studies from the Student Life in High School Project to teach about the limits of personal resiliency, particularly the resiliency of teenagers. “You can’t be resilient all the time,” she railed, her voice rising. “Communities have to come together.” This reminds her of another story about the need to create systems and structures that ensure young people succeed, rather than expecting them to manufacture their own success, which was one of the key lessons she learned from Malik and Alex and their classmates.

“There’s this amazing story,” she began. “I was interviewing kids from North Side High. The principal grabbed me and said, ‘I have a big problem. My valedictorian, who is homeless, got rejected from college.’ So I called up Penny [Sebring, a colleague] from Grinnell [College] … and the Grinnell president fell in love with her. She got a full ride. Graduated two years ago. And one day I told the story to M.A. [Pitcher, another colleague], who started yelling at me, ‘LISTEN, are you going to save ONE KID AT A TIME, or create a SYSTEM that saves THEM ALL?’”