On Grant Street, Bennet had surrounded himself with some brilliant, determined people, among them Brad Jupp, who had helped design the model program to pay teachers for increasing achievement and, in an earlier incarnation as a middle-school teacher, persuaded inner-city adolescents to share his love of Ezra Pound. Jupp feared that Bennet’s increasing obsession with Manual was consuming a disproportionate amount of time. There were five or six other troubled high schools in the district; an entire middle-school program in need of reform; and overcrowded elementary-school classrooms whose amelioration would cost millions of dollars that the district didn’t have. The teachers upon whom everything depended were overwhelmed by new curricula and grading standards, and considered Bennet’s proposal for a salary increase—two per cent—disrespectful. Meanwhile, Bennet’s top aides were rushing to pick up the soda for the next gathering of mentors and students at Manual, or hastily assembling a college fair in the gym, or trying to find out why one Manual principal had sent students to a course in rope climbing when they should have been registering for next year’s classes.

“But these are the last weeks before we lose these kids for the summer,” Bennet told Jupp, his voice unusually plaintive. He rose from the conference table, phoned another top administrator, and sent him off to Manual, too. There were five hundred and fifty-eight students now left at Manual, and many citizens saw the fate of those children as emblematic of the broader reform, and of the sincerity of his commitment to minority kids.

After a semester of being yelled at by Julissa and her peers, Bennet had begun to see them more clearly, and to see as well that, in his ardor to save them, he had managed to add to their troubles. He’d been asking them to be optimistic about their futures, and about their intellectual capabilities—capabilities no longer abstract to him—while simultaneously broadcasting the evidence that their education had thus far been a farce. As Norberto put it, “Manual gave me my pride back, then Bennet took the pride away.”

In the past, when Bennet had been faced with a complex problem, his charm had helped him solve it. But, to the Manual students, that quality—they called it slickness—was simply a part of his privilege. They knew that he was a millionaire and had gone to a fancy private high school—more, they contended in anger, than the man would ever know about them.

In a neighborhood whose stores were fronted with orange banners—“Glass Pipes for Sale!!”—the odds were high that a former drug dealer would backslide, so parents, friends, and relatives hedged their bets. Thus it was only at the end of Norberto’s junior year that he realized he wasn’t his family’s big loser anymore. A male cousin had gone to federal prison, female cousins were leaving school to have babies, and he alone still had a chance to get a high-school diploma.

Absorbing that spring’s talk of high expectations, he’d begun to think that his former goal, to supervise a drywall crew, had been set a little too low. And perhaps the wisdom of his elder relations regarding college—“If you study too much, you forget to get married until you’re so old that nobody wants you”—contained an element of self-justification? But to have expectations, it seemed to him, a person had to have a sense that his life was in his control.

“People say, ‘Oh, your family can’t get ahead,’ but actually we get ahead all the time,” he said. “It’s just that then one of the trucks breaks—my dad and I need them for the jobs—or one of my parents is out of work, then we slip right back down.” He thought that he coped fairly well during slippages: “For one thing, I found this store where you can get twenty cups of noodles, the supposably shrimpy kind, for four dollars and forty cents.” But extreme poverty gave his mother “worry breakdowns,” and, on and off all spring, these had dictated that he miss classes to work full time. Typically, his grades fell when he took such jobs, and the additional income was not guaranteed: the drywall crew most willing to hire him contained some heavy drinkers, given to sleeping through Mondays and getting the whole crew fired. Back at school, he’d find his teachers as angry as his bosses had been. Then he’d go home to the basement and cry. He knew only one line of work in which he could earn the money his family needed while keeping his dream of a diploma alive, and the Southside Sureños had let him know that they were hiring.

Arriving at the Manual graduation, Bennet was braced for anger, and, when he passed out diplomas, some graduates refused to shake his hand. To his relief, though, most had come to celebrate. One of the graduation speakers cried out, to bedlam, “We’re the future, like it or not!” Afterward, Bennet went back to work.

He was going to try something new that summer for the five hundred and fifty-eight. Since taking the job, he had thought a lot about his own education, with its challenges, expectations, and webs of social connections; he knew that his adulthood would have looked quite different had he lacked them. So he arranged a summer internship at a law firm for his mentee, one of the shyest boys in the school, and opened a wing of Manual as a computer-filled “resource center,” where counsellors might make similar connections for others. Many children were too busy working to avail themselves of the center’s tutoring, internship, and college-planning services, but Julissa made herself at home. She began to advise the adults on what Manual should offer when it reopened as a model high school while considering prospects of her own. An official in the city government’s youth-development program had been impressed by her spirit during the protest, and now urged her to take a summer job with the city.

She’d worked every summer since she was thirteen, including a stint as a roofer for a dollar an hour. The city youth program paid nine times that much—real, family-helping money, especially since her fourteen-year-old sister, Ashley, stood a chance of being hired, too. So one afternoon, after several changes of T-shirts, the two girls took the bus and the light rail to southwest Denver to be interviewed. Their appointment was in a neighborhood that felt like a suburb, as it had commuter colleges, big-box stores, and a Six Flags amusement park. They were excited, until they got off the train.

It was the beginning of rush hour, and the large intersection outside the station was snarled with traffic. Julissa and Ashley surveyed the scene uncertainly, as the lights changed three times. Finally, they tore, heads down, across one boulevard, then another, keeping the pace as they approached a residential block of white frame houses. “I represent East Side and I don’t know who represents what here,” Julissa said unhappily, eyes darting from left to right. “No idea.”

Their directions had involved landmarks—the parking lot of a store called King Soopers, a Taco Bell. But which Taco Bell? Or was it Burger King? Panicked and confused, they went off course. Julissa used up her cell-phone minutes calling her mother for moral and directional support; her eldest sister, Dominique, rushed over from her workplace to serve as a guide. Eventually, an hour after getting off the train, they found the government building. On the elevator, the girls pressed against the wall as if pinned by centrifugal force—“Hate elevators,” Julissa said—and reached the office just as it was closing. “Oh, don’t worry, just come back next week,” a friendly receptionist said. Julissa tried to smile back. It was not a journey she wanted to make again.

South High sat in an equally mysterious part of town, and, despite the reassurance of resource-center counsellors, its appeal faded, too. “I don’t want to just stick to my kind, but I’m scared to go,” she said. Ashley, who had been accepted into a small, competitive program at another public high school, was uneasy, too, and, anyway, there were flyers at Wal-Mart about a publicly funded online charter school a few blocks from home. One of the people involved with the program had been a Denver Nugget, and his daughter was the R. & B. singer India.Arie. Students did their work on the Internet, and it was graded by teachers in an office somewhere else. Plus, they could train to be nurses or doctors, or something; the details weren’t clear. Still, after a stressful year, the chance to stay near home, with Internet access and relational proximity to India.Arie, seemed soothing, so two of Manual’s star students changed their plans.

“DENVER SCHOOLS PICK UP THE PACE,” read the headline in the Rocky Mountain News one day in August. Although Bennet’s ideas still hadn’t been fully implemented, his district was posting historic increases on state exams in reading—single-year increases that were greater, in grades five through ten, than in the past four years combined. Math scores were up, too, and minority children had improved more than white children—though it would take eighteen more years of such incremental improvement for the minority kids to pull even.

Bennet considered the instruments of standardized testing primitive, and their results incomplete. Besides, a single year’s increase could be a fluke—or the fruit of a predecessor’s efforts. Still, if a person held the numbers up to a certain light, after a celebratory bourbon, he might see in them the power of plain and unrelenting expectation.

For a few days, feeling hopeful, Bennet tried to relax. He read a book of Buddhist reflections, and many “Mr. Putter & Tabby” books with his daughters. Some mornings, though, he woke up with a feeling that had chased him all summer, of something unpleasant about to occur. He sensed that he was about to fail at something he’d worked hard at, and for the life of him he didn’t know why.

It was his particular skill, his wife believed, to distinguish the worthy challenges from the impossible ones. But when he ran into Manual parents and students and inquired about plans for September, their answers struck him as alarmingly vague. It seemed increasingly clear that, despite his efforts, he had failed to reach the five hundred and fifty-eight. A mass dropout now seemed likely.

Driving through his neighborhood one Saturday with all this on his mind, he passed an election sign with a familiar name on it. One of his friends in Democratic politics had started a run for the state senate. From past experience, Bennet could envision how the candidate would spend that summer weekend, and every other one until November: studying maps marked by colored pins showing clusters of voters, then going out to knock on hundreds of doors. He called an aide, a veteran of political campaigns, and asked, Could we capture some children this way?

A strapping boy named Pedro, half-awake, half-naked, stared perplexed through a torn screen door. “Sorry to wake you up,” Bennet said. It was a Saturday morning last fall. “We’re from the schools. Can we come in?” The boy put on a shirt, and Bennet and Jaime Aquino, his chief academic adviser, walked into a living room crammed with beds. One of them was occupied by a boy who slept through their entrance, an announcer on a blaring television saying, “A lot of people have been talking about this, it’s a revolution in blackjack tournaments,” and the frantic barks of two emaciated Chihuahuas clad in zip-up hoodies, which had come skidding into the room. School had started five weeks earlier, but Pedro had not shown up, according to the printout that Bennet held in his hand. “So you’re a senior,” he began, over the barking. “Can I sit down?” For a moment, the boy studied the man settling in on a sofa between some boxer shorts and an aquarium that reeked of decay. And then, in a Spanish somewhat different from what Bennet recalled from St. Albans, Pedro began to map the distance between Bennet’s ideas and his own economic obligations.

First, Pedro wanted it noted: his younger sister, one of the five hundred and fifty-eight, was continuing high school, and he was proud of her. But because of family finances, he had dropped out to work the night shift at McDonald’s—a job he’d held for a year despite not having a car to get him home at two in the morning. Mentors and college fairs were beside the point. Pedro looked expectant when he finished, as if hoping for a thanks and goodbye, but Bennet and Aquino had begun to confer. After a year, the boy was a proven employee, and there was another McDonald’s within walking distance of a high school that offered evening classes. If he transferred to that restaurant and switched over to the day shift—what were the hours of the day shift, exactly? It would work, then: Pedro could attend school after his shift, and get work-study credit for the job. Bennet’s aides could call the managers of both restaurants, and get things moving along.

For nine weeks, Bennet and two dozen aides and volunteers had been fanning out across neighborhoods like Pedro’s, trying to sell school to skeptical kids. The campaign had been harder to start than a political one, since many of its targets were illegal and didn’t want to be found, and the goal was not just a trip to the polls. Still, with the help of Julissa and seven other students who were hired as peer counsellors and part-time sleuths, the district managed to locate all but ten of the former Manual students. Weekend visits began, and hundreds of reclamation projects got under way. “Oh, I’m in school, it’s going great,” said almost every child to whom Bennet spoke, especially on the days when Univision sent a cameraman to accompany him. Then he got better at asking the questions.

In the first month of school, four hundred and sixty-three former Manual students showed up—a better rate of return than after previous summers, and a number that averted a public-relations debacle. The first weeks meant little, though: math had not yet become confusing and term papers weren’t due. Bennet and his people kept pounding on doors and shaking chain-link gates—better not to surprise the dogs, they’d learned. And the number of children in school held steady.

Aides rode the bus with pregnant girls, showing them a school where they could bring their babies, and argued with parents about the value of a high-school diploma. A band of outreach workers, the educational equivalents of repo men, arranged part-time jobs and night-school curricula for other resisters. “We’ve been trying to erect reforms over this weak political, economic, and cultural scaffolding,” Bennet said after one long day of visits. “It’s not impossible, but, God, it’s really, really hard.” Absenteeism remained high, and every success was contingent; it took a month to get Pedro into school, whereupon he failed all of his courses. But one rainy night last fall the head repo man, Steve Dobo, sensed that something had changed when he asked a young man hanging out on a corner if he knew how to find a certain kid. “You the police?” was what he expected, along with the rolling of eyes. Instead he got “You the schools?”

Bennet didn’t have much time, then, to think through what he’d set in motion: a systematic pursuit of the sort of student who lowered aggregate test scores and teacher morale. Owing to a statewide crackdown on illegal immigrants, kindergartners were showing up at school without a record of a home or a parent; teachers were complaining that the pace of reform left them exhausted; and he’d started a crusade against the lacklustre achievement at North High—this time, involving the community first.

Still, the fight to reclaim the former Manual students had no precedent in the age of No Child Left Behind. Out of panic, and of motivations that involved personal vanity as well as social justice, a safety net was being strung under a school system’s hardest cases—one involving parents, mentors, fast-food restaurant managers, United Airlines executives and city-council members who knocked on doors, an engrossed media, nonprofit organizations, and student leaders like Julissa Torrez. Meanwhile, Bennet had persuaded foundations to donate staff and funds to keep the tracking effort going for three years, after which the effort’s impact would be studied for application in other Denver schools, and in other cities, too. The notion of high expectations for poor children had been converted from the rhetorical to the specific and pragmatic, and a rescue effort that once seemed a sinkhole of time and effort began to look like a prototype.

Norberto Felix-Cruz knew that something was up when he returned from work one Saturday evening to hear that he’d missed a visit from a freckled guy in sneakers, and, more important, a reporter from “9NEWS.” They wanted to know what he and his cousins were thinking about school. What Norberto was thinking was simple: fear of jail had ruled out drug dealing that summer, and now the lack of drug-dealing income ruled out school. But, as he did his drywall the next week, he wondered whether the man in sneakers was in league with the J.R.O.T.C. teacher, who seemed to be on his case, too.

People were waiting for him at North High; that was the line, and he didn’t quite believe it, since his presence in school had barely registered before. But, on his way to and from work, he passed kids whose presence had registered even less than his own, kids whom Julissa had marked, in her yearbook, with an “x.” They were heading to the bus stop with backpacks of books. They wore T-shirts that said “Manual Survivor.” One morning after a job was finished and the rent had been paid, he drove to North High and enrolled. J.R.O.T.C. was social death there, too, so the battalion-commander job was his. It felt O.K., until he was driving home on the freeway a week later, and the driver next to him lost control of his car. Norberto was unhurt, but the truck on which his jobs depended had five thousand dollars’ worth of damage. His mother told him to quit North High the next day.