I am the first in my family to go to college. My maternal grandparents came from southern Italy at the turn of the twentieth century and settled in Toledo, Ohio, where my grandfather became a house painter and my grandmother raised nine children. My paternal grandparents were born and raised in central Ohio and lived much of their adult lives in Toledo as well. My grandfather was a machinist for the railroad, my grandmother a housewife. I am not certain of the level of formal education my grandparents attained (this was not a topic discussed in my family), but I’m pretty sure no one finished high school.
My own parents did complete high school but were unable to go on to college. My mother was midway in birth order through the nine children in her family and was needed to help raise the younger children. My father, who graduated at the height of the Great Depression, took on a series of blue-collar jobs and then went into the army shortly before December 7, 1941. After the war, when they married and began their baby boom family, my parents both worked steadily but did not cultivate careers. My father, using his army experience as a starting point, was lucky to get a job after the war as a warehouseman, a position that was followed by a succession of positions that required little or no formal training or certification. After my brother and I began school, my mother got her real estate license and began selling tract homes in the rapidly growing Santa Clara Valley in California, now known more commonly as Silicon Valley.
We were able to live a comfortable life in a succession of what appeared to me at the time to be nice middle-class neighborhoods, in part because such neighborhoods were still possibilities for a family with one solid blue-collar income and a supplementary secondary income. The differences between my family and those of my friends, many of whose fathers worked at the newly opened IBM plant down the valley, were never readily apparent. As far as I knew, I was just another middle-class kid. My parents’ occupations and education levels did not mark me in any discernable way.
My brother and I attended reasonably good schools, many of which were brand new when we attended them due to the influx of baby boom children. Partly because I am a good test taker, I was always placed in the highest groups at each grade level in these schools, which always seemed to have well-defined tracks. School came easily to me, and it never seemed very difficult to do well in class.
Although the warning signs were clearly there in middle school, it wasn’t until high school that trouble began in earnest. My freshman year saw the beginning of a series of bad decisions and choices on my part and by those around me. I ran with a crowd a bit older and quite a bit rowdier than I had in elementary school. In my ability-tracked high school, I was placed initially into the top track, while my friends all ended up in the middle or bottom track. Needless to say, this was distressing to a young person who was most interested in hanging out with friends.
My solution, after getting kicked out of a few classes for correcting teachers, interjecting my version of clever remarks and observations, and generally exhibiting what was listed on my record as “defiant behavior,” was to march into my counselor’s office and demand that I be placed in a lower academic track. Mind you, I was initiating this, not the school. My counselor, a mild-mannered man and by all indications a good person and citizen (he served on the local city council), barely missed a beat in agreeing with me and then reworking my schedule, with copious input on my part, to get me into classes with most of my friends. In his defense, he did give me the obligatory speech about being able to perform at a higher level if I would only work up to my potential, which, he said, was very high, but that whole line of reasoning meant little to me. I had no idea what my potential was, let alone what I would have to do to work up to it.
To say I was crushingly bored in the middle-level track would be an understatement, but I amused myself by helping my friends, many of whom were a grade ahead and had already flunked the class in question at least once. It wasn’t until a chance encounter during lunch in the second term of my sophomore year, when progress reports had been issued to all students, that an event took place that caused me to question myself and the whole situation into which I had gotten. My social group prided itself in doing as poorly as possible in school, and as each person showed up at lunch with his progress report (yes, all guys), he announced the number of Fs he had received. Each announcement was made with a combination of pride, amusement, and defiance.
I remember one young man enthusiastically exclaiming that he had five Fs. His bravado elicited a rejoinder by someone in the group who suggested this might be the result of his not being very bright (I’m rephrasing the exact language used to express this sentiment). The young man replied somewhat indignantly, “Hey, I could get all A’s if I wanted to; I’m just not working up to my potential.” Well, that sounded very familiar to me, so I asked him, “Who told you that?” “My counselor,” he replied.
And then I knew the terrible secret. The counselors must be telling everyone that they could do well if they only worked up to their potential. This sent a chill down my spine. Could I do better, or was my assortment of Cs, Ds, and Fs a reflection of the fact that I really wasn’t so bright after all? Being the quintessential Type A personality underneath it all and extremely competitive even when no one was really competing with me, I resolved to get straight As the next term just to see if I could do it.
I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t been able to do so, but that’s not the end of the story and not really the point. Getting good grades in the middle academic track is not a tremendous accomplishment and not enough to prepare a student for college who would be first in his family to go beyond high school. My parents certainly supported and valued education, but they were not at all clear about what specifically I should be doing to prepare for life beyond high school or, for that matter, what they should be doing to help me. College would be a good thing, they both agreed, and I was always encouraged to consider it.
But what did that mean? In the crowd I ran with, no one was preparing to go to college (in fact, almost no one in my crowd went beyond high school). Counselors were people to see only if you wanted something, say, to get lunch period changed to, you guessed it, hang out with friends. The administration considered me vexing and would have liked to have gotten rid of me (and tried to do so a couple of times). My teachers were all very well intentioned, and I think they did the best they could, but none of them seemed to have a handle on what I should do beyond completing their classes successfully—and not giving them too hard a time in the process. I wish I could say I had that one teacher who took the time to set me straight and inspire me to reach my potential, but I didn’t. I did have a Spanish teacher who had, he said, been a Formula 1 race car driver, and he had lots of good tales to tell (unfortunately all in English), but that’s another story altogether.
I did get the word that there was this thing called the SAT and that you needed to sign up to take it, and that it was given on a Saturday, if you could believe it, at 8 o’clock in the morning. So I signed up, and that was about it. I had no preparation whatsoever, and apparently I forgot to set my alarm clock on the night before the test was to be given. My mother was gone for that weekend, so it fell on my father to be in charge of the kids. Waking me up for the SATs was apparently not on his list of responsibilities, so I slept until 7:55, when I just happened to look over at the clock through drowsy eyes. It didn’t take me long to realize I wasn’t going to be able to get dressed and drive to the test site in five minutes, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. That was the last we heard about the SAT.
This small logistical error ended up being much more important when, during my senior year, I considered, however briefly, my post-high school options, of which there were few that I found attractive. Not wanting to make a career of my part- time job at a local gas station or to enter the military at that time, I saw community college as basically my only other choice. In my case, “choice” meant doing nothing before showing up the first day of fall classes to register. Enrolling in what was left of the courses, I managed somehow to end up in the Associate of Arts baccalaureate transfer program, a stroke of luck for which I have no direct explanation or attribution. The transfer program gave me some much-needed structure because I had fewer chances to continue making bad decisions. I had only to complete a designated set of requirements and would be eligible for admission to the state’s four-year universities. In California, this included the University of California at Berkeley. Was it possible that someone with my rather meager academic credentials and lack of foresight would be able to be admitted and graduate four years later, after a total of six years in postsecondary education, from one of the top universities in the nation? As it turned out, the answer was yes.
I will be forever grateful to Clark Kerr, the author of California’s Master Plan for Higher Education. That plan, which envisioned a multitiered postsecondary system, allowed students the opportunity to truly reach their full potential by being able to have a second chance that led to higher education. It gave me the opportunity to make up for the many missteps I had made throughout high school (I have chronicled only a few of them here). California policymakers at the time believed that a college-educated citizenry paid dividends to the community, state, and nation, and I hope I have been able to repay the faith of those visionaries in some small way throughout my postbaccalaureate career.
I am one of the few from my high school who somehow navigated the high school-to-college transition, however poorly and inefficiently. My concern, and the reason to some degree that I conduct the research I do and that I wrote this book, is that many, many young people are still allowed to make the same mistakes I did. An ever- increasing number will not have the second chance I had. Those who do oft en find it much more difficult now to make a successful transition to postsecondary education and complete a college program of study.
These young people will be affected much more than my grandparents, parents, or even my cohort by not being able to achieve their full educational potential. The world they are entering is far less forgiving of someone without high levels of formal education, certificates, and degrees, not just experience. It is incumbent on those of us who are able to do so to change the system so that secondary students cannot make bad decisions and have every opportunity to achieve their potential, whether or not they fully understand what that potential is.
Excerpted from College and Career Ready: Helping All Students Succeed Beyond High School. (2010). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. All rights reserved.
Creating College Readiness 
