“C’mon, dude,” Jack urges him. He pulls out a mirror and a razor blade, chops the rock into powder. He snorts a few lines, chops up some more, passes the mirror to Mike. Mike closes his eyes and snorts his first line of crank.

Instantly he’s filled with the feeling he’s always wanted and never had: pure happiness. All his problems — in school, with his parents, even his zits — vanish as if they’ve been vaporized by the Star Trek laser gun he played with as a kid.

Mike snorts another line. He can’t sit still. He jumps up.

“Got any more of that shit?” he asks, his heart pounding in his chest.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Sitting in the backseat of his mom’s BMW, his mom chatting with his grandmother in the front, Tristan slips a double dose of Xanax to his stepbrother, Max, and the same to his stepsister, Caitlin. They pass a water bottle, gulping the pills down.

The Xanax kicks in just as they arrive at their cousin’s birthday party. “Let’s go smoke a bowl,” Tristan whispers to his sibs. They sneak out, float to a park nearby, stuff a pipe with pot.

“This stuff is hella strong,” Caitlin mumbles.

“We just got dosed, dude,” Tristan giggles. “This shit is laced with something serious.” Falling all over each other, laughing, they stagger back to the house. Later that night while everyone’s asleep, Tristan creeps into Caitlin’s room. He takes her car keys and the two twenties he finds on her dresser. “She owes me that much for the pot and the pills,” he tells himself.

Tristan drives Caitlin’s VW to his friend Justin’s house. He and Justin split a fifth of vodka. As Tristan’s driving home — sideswiping a few fire hydrants and parked cars along the way — his cell phone starts ringing off the hook, his mom’s number lighting up over and over on the screen. When he gets home she’s in the kitchen, crying. Tristan promises her everything she wants to hear: he’ll never smoke pot, drink, or drive without a license again.

“At least not till next weekend,” he thinks, and falls into bed.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

“We’re the police. Don’t make this any harder than it is.”

Zalika freezes. Two cops are standing in front of her, one black, the other white, their faces lit by the liquor store’s neon sign.

“It’s over for me,” Zalika thinks. All the time she’s been selling rock on this corner, she never thought it would come to this. Marcus had told her what to do if the Five-O came up on her: swallow everything she had. But how can she do that now? She has sixty rocks of crack on her body — five in her mouth, twenty in her pockets, the rest in a baggie stuffed up inside her — and two cops in her face.

Zalika starts swallowing the rocks in her mouth, grabbing handfuls from her pockets. But there are too many to swallow. Too many to hold. The rocks spray from her mouth, her hands; they’re bouncing off her Nikes. Going on pure instinct, she drops to the ground to pick them up.

The white cop pulls her to her feet. “We were just gonna send you home to your parents,” he says, shaking his head sadly. “What are you, seventeen?”

“Almost fifteen,” Zalika answers.

Two more cop cars arrive, lights flashing. Cops swarm all over, scooping up the rocks, the street junkies watching with their mouths hanging open as if the police are snatching their last meal. The black cop handcuffs Zalika. “You have the right to remain silent …”

Mike’s gone. I leave the boys in their Conflict Resolution group, stumble downstairs, stand in the mattress-store doorway staring at the house across the street — as if Mike might come bounding out the front door if I stare at it hard enough.

But no. Mike’s gone.

Now what? Do I call his mom? His dad? His therapist? Get in my car and try to find him? Go back upstairs and pick another kid?

Wait. I know how to track down a missing boy. I’ve had plenty of practice trying to find Jesse. I do now what I used to do then: close my eyes, channel his thoughts. If I were Mike, where would I go?

The bus station, of course. The first thing he’d do is get out of town. There’s nothing for Mike here but heat. No parents, no friends, no money; no cigarettes, no beer, no crank. First, though, I need information. Ron, the day-shift supervisor, looks up from his desk. Mike’s file is open in front of him as if he’s expecting me. I sit down, noticing for the first time a sign on the wall that says, “There are no crises we don’t agree to have.”

“Hakim came to me before breakfast,” Ron begins. “He told me Mike’s bed wasn’t made. A few of his belongings were missing — enough to make a road trip.

“We started the AWOL procedure: searched the property, counted the clients. I called Danny, the police, the parents, the PO. The police came. We gave them Mike’s picture. They’ll put him on a flyer listing him as a runaway child and distribute it electronically to other police departments.”

“What happens when — if — they find him?”

“They’ll ask us if we want him back,” Ron says. “That’ll be up to Danny. Our inclination is to come from a caring place, to make exceptions, especially with someone as charming as Mike. But this would be the second time he’s come here and left.

“What we do here is behavior modification. We don’t cave in like an enabling parent would.” Translation: if the cops catch him, Mike will go straight to the Hall to serve his three-year sentence. Mike knows all of this, of course. And he knows how to disappear to avoid it. The realization lands in my chest with a thud. I might never see him again.

“Do you know what time he left?”

“Between six-thirty and seven. He could have gone through a window or out the front door.”

“Can I see his room?”

Ron walks me through the spotless, silent house. “There may be some good that’ll stay with him,” he says. “A lot has been brought to Mike’s attention, whether he wants to accept it or not.”

I step into the room Mike shares — shared — with Henry. If a room could talk, this one would be saying, “Fuck Center Point.” Hangers, clothes, and shoes are strewn everywhere. Mike’s plaid button-down shirt and black jeans are spread out on the floor, as if Mike were a snowman who melted away in the night. The bed looks as if a battle was fought in it — and maybe indeed one was. Was it a struggle or a reflex, I wonder, this decision of Mike’s to run again?

Only Mike’s dresser is still up to Center Point standards. His bottles of shampoo, acne soap, and deodorant are turned to the wall, as Mike always left them — ever hungry for a morsel of privacy, a crumb of control. Only one of his toiletries has been turned face-out: a bullet-shaped cylinder of mousse called “Head Games.”

As I was trained by my own disappearing son to do, I check the only available indicator of Mike’s intentions. Which shoes was he wearing when he left? The brand-new Stacy Adams desert boots his mom just sent him — his favorites, not yet broken in, unsuitable for walking long distances — are still in the closet. His next favorites, a month-old pair of Adidas sneakers, aren’t. “Face it,” I tell myself. “Mike’s not taking a walk around the block to cool off. He’s gone.”

I ask Ron to call me if he hears anything. I go to my car, leave a message on Barbara’s cell phone, then one for Tess at home. I reach Michael in his truck.

“I raised him to where he’s pretty self-sufficient,” Michael says. “So I’m not really worried about him. There was too much nitpicky bullshit at that place. Mike’s all boy, sure. But pushing a kid like they did — it was too much for anybody.” Michael promises to call me if he hears anything. I start cruising the streets of downtown San Rafael, looking for a tall, husky kid in Adidas, just as I used to cruise the streets of Oakland desperate for the sight of a tall, lean kid in Air Jordans. I notice for the first time how many bars there are, and that they’re all open at eleven in the morning. Might Mike be drinking his first beer in sixty-eight days? No. Not here, anyway.

My cell phone rings. “He’s at his dad’s,” Barbara says breathlessly. I recognize the terrible relief in her voice; I’ve heard it so many times in my own. Who cares if the kid’s wanted by the law, if he’s just screwed up the next three years of his life? He’s safe for the moment. He’s alive.

“I’m praying he’ll go back to Center Point,” she says. “But Meredith, he didn’t run off. He didn’t disappear.” We breathe in that information together. “I’ll call you later,” Barbara says. “I just didn’t want you to worry.”

The phone rings again in my hand. “What’s up, Meredith?” Mike exclaims. “How you doin’?” He sounds elated, energized. Is this a lively Mike I’ve never known, outside the Center Point monotone zone? Or is he already …

“I’m staying in touch with you because I’m not going back to using. And I’m not going on the run. I’m gonna hang out with my dad for the weekend, go see my mom Sunday. On Monday I’m turning myself in.”

“I’m so glad you called,” I say. “But Mike — are you sure you don’t want to try to go back to Center Point, or some other –”

“No way,” he interrupts me. “I’m through with fake-ass Tess and money-grubbing Danny. I’ll serve my time in Juvenile Hall, get it over with, get on with my life. You can come visit me in the Hall. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say. “What made you decide to run?”

“Lyle gave me two LEs last night,” he says. “Then I called Richard a faggot. They put me on Contract. That was it.”

“Did any of the kids know you were going?”

“I told most of ‘em the night before. They didn’t rat on me.” So much for therapeutic community members “supporting” each other.

“Juanita woke me up at six-thirty. I had my bag packed. I went out my bedroom window, ran downtown, took the bus to Rohnert Park. Two seconds after I got off the bus — I swear! — this dude tried to sell me some crank.”

“Where’d you get the money for the bus?” The clients aren’t supposed to have any, ever.

“A friend at Center Point,” he answers evasively, honoring the boys’ own code of confidentiality. “Sue came to the bus stop and picked me up. She’s pretty upset with me.

“Everyone’s pretty upset with me. We went to my dad’s. He’s living in a motor home in my grandma and grandpa’s yard. We ate some Mexican food. It tasted hella good after all that Center Point crap. I’m gonna go see my mom tomorrow. My dad’s gonna bring the jet ski.”

Talk about your mixed messages, I think, feeling a flash of anger at Michael. And then I think, no wonder the program people beat up on parents all the time. Look how easy it is to do.

I hear a deep voice yelling in the background. “My dad’s mad at me for being on the phone,” Mike says. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Fake-ass Tess” calls me as I’m driving home. Even though Mike was raging at everyone in the house last night, she says, she didn’t expect him to run. “Whenever I asked him if he felt like AWOLing, he’d say, ‘No, I’ve already put my parents through enough.’ That was part of the problem: he was always doing it for his parents, not himself.”

Tess says she got more “emotional” about Mike’s AWOL than anyone else on the staff. “Mike’s leaving broke my heart. I invested a lot of time in him. But I don’t know if he ever really attached to me.” Tess is silent for a moment. “Mike’s attachments tend to be superficial. He has a real conflict with independence versus dependence.”

“Unlike most seventeen-year-olds?” I think, but don’t say.

“To be honest,” Tess confides, “I feel very strongly that his parents were a big cause of Mike’s problems.” I wince, knowing what’s coming next. Parent blaming is the hammer in every therapist’s toolbox. Tess wields hers like the avid apprentice she is.

“Mike has a great mom. But the dad still uses. His boundaries with Mike are not appropriate; they’re friend to friend instead of father and child. The kids who are successful in the program are the ones whose parents realize they haven’t been able to do it, so they hand the responsibility over to us. Mike’s parents never did that.”

No, they didn’t. And neither did I when my son was a ward of the court. The day Jesse started getting into trouble was the day I started being blamed for it: for not disciplining him enough — guilty. For not taking enough responsibility for what he said and did — guilty. For raising him in a “broken home,” as Mike’s mom did. For making excuses for him, as Tristan’s mom did. For wanting him to be more like me, or at least more understandable to me, as Zalika’s parents did — guilty, guilty, guilty. There weren’t enough hours in the day for me to feel as bad as I was supposed to feel about the terrible mom I was being — while continuing, apparently, to be one.

Then, suddenly, the accusations changed. Because Jesse was seventeen, not fifteen? Because his crimes became more serious? Because his new probation officer had memorized a different formula? I never knew. But now, suddenly, I was failing to relinquish responsibility, to hold Jesse accountable, to “let go and let him grow up.” The charges were different, but the culpability was the same. And so were the effects on me. When I wasn’t hating myself for screwing up my son, I was hating myself for the relief I felt when a therapist or PO heaped the blame on Jesse’s father instead.

Parent blaming has much to recommend it. It’s endorsed by the psychoanalytic masters, disseminated by their disciples, and so easy to practice; anyone can do it and pretty much everyone does. We’re in a mess with our teenagers — as individuals, as a nation. We need a target for our confusion and our grief. Parents make a good one, or so it seems. They’re everywhere, they’re fallible, and they’ll take whatever anyone’s dishing out on the off chance it might help their kids.

The problem is, it doesn’t. Our kids do best when we think and expect the best of them. The same is true of their parents. The people who helped me be a better mother to Jesse were the ones who pointed out his strengths, and mine, the ones who reminded me that his path was his to stride or stumble down, the ones who showed me a better way to be with him by stepping in and being that way with him themselves. I was already on my knees with self-recrimination and sorrow. There was nothing to be gained for Jesse by knocking me any flatter.

Yes, parents screw up — just about every day, in just about every way. Yes, kids’ problems are a product, in part, of their parents’. But when a kid falls down, the whole family needs a hand up. The institutions and individuals who take care of other people’s kids need to be trained and funded and screened to make sure that’s what they do. To start with, they need to be expert at ferreting out — and expressing — what parents are doing right with their kids, then building an improvement plan from that foundation of mutual respect.

I had the opportunity to do it both ways, so I know this as surely as I know my name. It’s challenging to be the great parent of a teenager who’s doing well. It’s impossible to be the great parent of a teenager who’s not.

The real problem with parent blaming is, we have seen the enemy, and it is us.

At six o’clock on the Sunday evening after Mike’s escape, I pull into the parking lot of the Rincon Valley Seven-Eleven, where he’s chosen to spend his last free moments before he goes back to the Hall. Mike and Barbara are waiting for me in Barbara’s bright blue convertible. She unfolds herself from the car — a tall, well-built woman in an ankle-length black tank dress and platform sandals, her auburn shoulder-length hair streaked with henna. We exchange hugs, and I turn to Mike.

I swear his skin looks better already, his eyes more alive. I’ve never seen him smoking before — the closest thing the boys managed to smuggle into Center Point was chewing tobacco — but he’s making up for lost nicotine now, puffing hungrily on one Parliament after another. “I’m cool,” he answers before I ask. “I’m gonna get this over with. Then I’m never going back.”

Barbara tells me to follow her in my car, and tells Mike to go with me. She says the five-mile ride to the Hall will give Mike and me a chance to catch up, but I suspect she needs a little distance right now herself.

“It’s a hundred degrees out,” Mike says as we pass the McDonald’s where he jumped out of Danny’s truck less than three months ago. “And they got no air conditioning in the Hall.” He stares out the window. “That’s alright. It won’t stay hot for too long.”

He lights a new Parliament with the ember of the last one. “I’m gonna know a bunch of people in there,” he says, exhaling noisily. “That’ll be cool.”

Mike tells me about his “forty-eight hours of normal life,” chilling with his dad and Sue, trying out his new jet ski with his mom. “It’s so peaceful out there by the lake,” he says, his face as soft as a sated child’s. “And I got to spend some time with my grandma too.”

He draws deeply on his cigarette. “So Meredith — we’re still doing the book, right?” I tell him we are indeed, and ask why he wants to do it.

“Because I know I’m gonna make it. Because I have a good story that’s gonna help people understand. I may not be program material …” How many of the trained professionals in his life have told him that? I wonder. “… but I’m definitely book material.”

Ahead of us, Barbara turns left onto Pythian Road. Mike’s body tenses. “Damn. Here I am again.” The signs for Los Guillicos Juvenile Detention Center appear before us. “I can do this. I can do this,” he repeats like a mantra. “I’m gonna make it. I’m gonna make it.”

We park our cars and walk slowly past a cinder-block wall crowned with rusty curls of barbed wire, toward the low white stucco building where Mike will surrender to the law.

“Let’s sit down and talk for a minute, Mike,” Barbara says. She leads us to a picnic table chained to the wall. Barbara looks intently at her son. He busies himself lighting a cigarette. The tension is thick. I look up and see a rough-hewn sign hanging above us, its letters carved into a redwood slab. Order From Within.

“Wow,” I say. “Is that some kind of Zen message? Are they trying to give the kids some spiritual guidance, or what?”

Barbara cocks her head quizzically at the sign, then erupts into peals of laughter. “It’s an ad!” she tells me. “The kids make these picnic tables here. If you want to buy one, you …”

She’s laughing so hard, she can’t finish the sentence. “Order from within,” I say, and soon we’re both hysterical. Mike smokes and ignores us, his eyes on the ground. Barbara chokes and gasps, wipes her eyes with a Kleenex. She looks at her son, suddenly dead serious. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to Center Point, Mike? Why would you rather do three years in here than –”

“I’ll be able to see my parents twice a week,” Mike interrupts her. “Anyway, Mom, I’m not gonna do three years. They just say that stuff to scare us.”

“Mike.” Barbara puts her hand on her son’s, strokes it tenderly. “You’ve already bailed from a couple of programs. They’re not just going to give you two weeks and let you out. Even if they do that, if you want to come live with me, you’ll have to live up to my standards.

“Dave and I have a really peaceful life now. And we like it like that. I don’t want the police coming to my house anymore. I don’t want to drive you for drug testing at seven o’clock in the morning or to Drug Court an hour away …” Barbara takes a deep breath.

“That being said, I’ll go a million miles for you if I think you’re trying.”

“I’ll never use speed again,” Mike declares. “It’s the only way my life’s gonna stay together.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, honey,” Barbara says gently, her hand fluttering to her son’s cheek. “I’m just saying I have to see it. There’s been a lot of times you’ve told me you weren’t using and I found out later it was a lie. Do you understand that?”

“Yeah.” Mike stubs out his cigarette. “But I’ve learned some stuff about myself. For one, I’m a very impatient person. That’s part of why I used the drug I did. I might even have ADD.”

“Were you self-medicating, you think?” Barbara asks.

Mike can’t muster the patience to answer. He jumps to his feet. “I’m ready to do this. Let’s go.”

Barbara stands too, and pulls her son to her. “I know you’re not doing this to hurt me. I know this is your life. I know you’re not a baby anymore.” She starts to cry. “I’m just so sorry I have to take you in there and leave you.”

Mike hugs her quickly, then steps away. “I’ll be okay in a couple days. Don’t worry about me, Mom.”

We walk up to the door marked “Admissions.” Mike knocks. A buzzer sounds. The three of us enter a tiny room. Mike steps up to the counter, spreads his arms apart, palms up. “I’m self-surrendering,” he says into the vent in the glass partition.

“Hi, Mike. It’s Butler, right?” The woman turns away, types into her computer.

“Yeah. How you doin’, Melissa?” Mike greets her. Melissa frowns and turns back to him. “They haven’t signed the warrant yet, Mike. The computer won’t let me accept you.”

Barbara laughs, that hearty, half-hysterical laugh. “I guess you’re coming home with me, Pooh,” she says.

“Come back tomorrow, Mike,” Melissa says. “We’ll get you in.”

“You’d think we were trying to get him into college,” Barbara whispers to me. Melissa buzzes us out. We stand blinking in the sunset’s smoldering glow. Mike is glowing too.

“I never thought I’d be going back out that door!” he crows. He turns to Barbara. “Give me my cigarettes. Give me the cell phone. I gotta call Bobby. He won’t believe this!”

Reprinted with permission of HarperSanFrancisco Publishers, a division of HarperCollins.

Meanwhile, at the same school, classes of 10 or 15 mostly white, mostly affluent students do college-level work in well-equipped advanced-placement classes to which they are admitted on the basis of a test that rules out all but the elite few.

It is a standard brand of academic segregation, one that can be found in most public high schools. But at Berkeley High, for the past three months, there has been yet another kind of class, this one designed to close the gap between students who succeed academically and students at academic risk: In borrowed classrooms, hastily recruited, energetic teachers convene small, no-nonsense gatherings of mostly African-American ninth-graders, each accompanied by a volunteer tutor, all of them focused on raising the academic achievement of kids who have long been left behind.

Where did this extraordinary concentration of energy and resources come from? The answer is PCAD: Parents of Children of African Descent. Near the end of this year’s first semester, these parents discovered that fully half of Berkeley High’s black ninth-graders (one-third of the 875-student freshman class) were already failing English, math and/or history. While acknowledging the history and prevalence, locally and nationally, of the “achievement gap” between white students and students of color, PCAD refused to accept that fate for one more generation of Berkeley High children.

Armed with research that reflects a history of high dropout and flunk-out rates among Berkeley High’s African-American students, and African-American male students in particular — statistics mirrored in schools across the nation — PCAD appealed to the school’s new principal, Frank Lynch, for his help in breaking that pattern. Lynch asked the parents to come up with a plan, and they spent their Christmas break doing exactly that.

Although most of the PCAD organizers did not themselves have children who were failing, their first step was to recruit into their group parents and grandparents who did, so that their input could be incorporated into the PCAD plan.

“On January 30, 2001 a new semester will start at Berkeley High School. At that time, without our intervention, approximately 250 freshmen students will go off track for graduation,” begins the 20-page “intervention plan” that PCAD issued on Jan. 14. “The fact that large numbers of students have been failing at Berkeley High School for years does not change the fact that we are facing a crisis that demands urgent and appropriate action …

“The effects of our failure to aggressively bridge the achievement gap are long-term, deep, and harmful to all of us, whether we are the affected student, parent, classmate, or neighbor … We cannot wait another semester.”

PCAD’s sense of urgency is inspired by a disheartening national trend as well as local disappointment. Calling the racial achievement gap “the most important educational challenge for the United States,” a 1999 national study by the College Board found only 17 percent of black and 24 percent of Latino high school seniors to be proficient in reading, 4 percent of black students to be proficient in both math and science and no black students and 1 percent of Latinos to be advanced in those subjects.

Closer to home, a recently completed four-year study of Berkeley High by the UC-Berkeley-sponsored Diversity Project found student achievement to be lowest among low-income African-American and Latino students and highest among affluent whites. In 1998, white Berkeley High students scored in the top 15th percentile nationally; black students scored in the bottom 40th. And while many white seniors went off to Ivy League colleges, six out of 10 black male students had dropped out, flunked out or otherwise disappeared before their senior year.

The nationwide College Board study named five factors that most affect a student’s educational outcome: economic circumstances; the level of parents’ education; racial discrimination; cultural attributes of the home, community and school; and the quality and quantity of school resources. Remedies recommended by the board read much like PCAD’s (and every parent’s) wish list: making schools smaller, lowering student-teacher ratios, spending staff development money to provide students with better-educated teachers and offering students an academically challenging curriculum.

Many of these remedies have been adopted by the one American school system in which the achievement gap has been addressed with some success: the U.S. military’s. In the 71 schools operated on domestic military bases, 26 percent of black children and 32 percent of Hispanics scored at or above passing level, compared with 7 percent and 10 percent, respectively, nationally.

How does the military succeed where civilian schools fail? One factor is money. Base schools spend 23 percent more per pupil than public schools, fund music and art programs and are well-endowed with computers. Another is parent involvement — a key element of the PCAD approach. The military gives parents an hour off a week to volunteer in the schools.

“If we don’t choose to support educational intervention,” the PCAD report warned, “we can expect an ever-increasing need for expanded social services, police presence, and prisons.” Indeed, the consequences of the achievement gap extend beyond high school. In America today, one in three young African-American men is currently in jail, on probation or on parole. The Justice Department projects that one in four African-American males born in the 1990s will end up in prison at some time in his life.

With these chilling statistics looming, PCAD convened its first community meeting in a Berkeley fire emergency station on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The PCAD invite drew an animated crowd of 75 African-American, Asian, Latino and white parents, grandparents, students and teachers, as well as heavy hitters such as the mayor’s chief of staff, the county’s superintendent of schools and representatives of the League of Women Voters, NAACP, school board and City Council.

While a stew simmered in the kitchen next door, the crowd crammed into a small conference room and listened to the PCAD plan, which addressed many of the factors named in the College Board study, and other studies, as critical to academic success.

Freshmen failing two or more core subjects would be invited to apply to the PCAD program, an “alternative learning community” within Berkeley High. Those students would reenter ninth grade, this time in small classes taught by teachers handpicked for their commitment to improving the achievement of at-risk students.

The freshmen in the program also would be supported by student mentors and consistent tutoring. Their school year would be extended through the summer so they’d have a chance to catch up with their peers and be ready for 10th grade by September. Each student would be assigned an adult “learning partner” recruited from his or her family, school or community. Parents and guardians would sign contracts requiring them to respond promptly to teachers’ calls home.

And all of this, PCAD announced unblinkingly at the Jan. 15 meeting, needed to happen by the start of the new semester on Jan. 30: student candidates and their families identified, assessed and admitted; teachers, mentors and learning partners recruited and trained; classrooms located; curricula developed. Oh, and $500,000 raised, somehow, to pay for it all.

“The time frame within which we are seeking to implement this intervention has been described as impossible,” a PCAD mother acknowledged as soup was served. “But our plan is to change what people believe is possible — from students who traditionally fail at Berkeley High School; from parents of students who traditionally fail at Berkeley High School; from a school district that traditionally fails students of color; from a community that traditionally allows its schools to fail students of color. We’re asking for your support in making it possible.”

The PCAD spirit proved infectious. Demonstrating rare unity of purpose among townspeople as infamous for their factionalism as for their liberalism, parents, politicians and neighbors raised their hands and volunteered — to tutor, to look for classroom space, to hold a fundraiser, to write a check. A few days later the school board allocated $100,000 to fund the program; the city of Berkeley kicked in $40,000 more. It was far less than PCAD needed to serve all the students who were failing, but enough to make a start.

On the first day of school, 46 ninth-graders showed up for their new classes at 8 a.m. — many of them at school on time for the first time, many of them accompanied there, for the first time, by their parents.

During their orientation sessions that week the students named their program Rebound, likening themselves to “the basketball player who goes after the missed shot and gets off a new one.”

“It’s like a new start for ninth-graders who messed up,” said 13-year-old Kandis Session, Rebound student representative to the PCAD Steering Committee. “Since I got in this program I get up in the morning and I want to go to school.

“We’re the Class of ’04. We’re the starting of the high school exit exam. We can’t even get out of here if we don’t pass it! There’s a lot of kids up in here who want to go to a four-year college” Session beamed. “I want to go to Spelman in Atlanta, Ga.” Her dark eyes grew serious. “If you come in here and take it seriously, you have everything you need. You’re guaranteed to get good grades. If they changed the whole Berkeley High to Rebound, the whole school would pass.”

Session may well be right. But Rebound isn’t even able to serve the many students on its waiting list, let alone the whole school, with the limited resources allocated to the program so far. And there are powerful people in the “People’s Republic of Berkeley” who want PCAD to shut up and Rebound to be shut down.

Citing remedial programs already in place, and accusing PCAD of holding the school board and the city hostage to its demands, school board vice president Shirley Issel has become the spokeswoman for the opposition to PCAD, arguing — and voting — against Rebound’s existence.

While calling the achievement gap “Berkeley’s agony,” and asserting that “Berkeley does not suffer lightly leaving some behind,” Issel wrote in an open letter to the community: “That’s a lot of money for 250 students, 40 percent of whom probably don’t live here.” It was a button-pushing, coded message aimed at parents who believe that ridding the school of kids who “don’t live here” — meaning the low-income black and Latino transfer students from neighboring Richmond and Oakland — will rid the school of its problems.

Issel added, “It’s also known that males, particularly African-American males, are especially at risk at Berkeley High School. This is often the reason why parents who can send their sons to private schools which offer more structure, discipline and a peer group that supports academic engagement.”

Some African-American parents took Issel’s last statement as a criticism of their parenting and a disinvitation to their children to attend Berkeley High. “Many of us believe that a private education may be a supportive environment for academic engagement,” PCAD mother Valerie Yerger wrote in response to Issel’s letter, “but many more of us believe in public education.

“A number of parents in PCAD are alumni of Berkeley High. We choose instead to keep our children in Berkeley High and help improve education for more than just our own.”

It is true, as Issel suggested, that there are other remedial programs at Berkeley High, just as there are abundant remedial programs in high schools across the country. Unlike Rebound, though, most are after-school or lunchtime supplements, not full-time alternative learning communities. Unlike Rebound, most have been created by school administrators, not parents. If the existing programs were working, says PCAD, their children wouldn’t be continuing to fail their classes. PCAD believes, and research has shown, that the combination of parental and community support, smaller classes and highly motivated teachers offers the best hope for rescuing failing students.

Despite its abundant problems — borrowed classrooms that necessitate constantly roving classes, noncredentialed teachers who must be chaperoned in each classroom by credentialed substitutes and the ominous grumbling of its adversaries — Rebound ended its first month with support for the program greatly outweighing the opposition.

Principal Lynch told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that “at first, Rebound was a blow to the ego, because what we’d been doing before obviously wasn’t working.” But, he added, “we all want the same success for the students and we should fund as many different initiatives as we can.” The school’s award-winning paper, the Berkeley High Jacket, quoted several enthusiastic Rebound students. “The teachers pay attention to you more,” said one. “They explain the work to you. They don’t make you rush,” said another. Community leaders from the mayor to the local NAACP, as well as many parents of all races and economic backgrounds, continue to be active, vocal advocates of the program.

Neither PCAD nor Rebound is perfect; what happens in its meetings and classrooms isn’t always pretty. Many of the parents are unaccustomed to dealing with school bureaucracy and school politics; the students are young teens accustomed to being seen, and seeing themselves, as failures. It’s too soon to speculate as to how successful Rebound will be, but early signs are hopeful: Three weeks into the program, not one of the students — most of whom had been truant at least 15 days during their first semester at Berkeley High — had missed a day of school.

And this on-the-ground experiment is evoking the kind of parent involvement, teacher enthusiasm and student engagement that decades of research at Berkeley High, and across the nation, have repeatedly identified as key to student success, but have yet to engender. To be in the forefront of an effort to offer equal education to all is a fitting role for Berkeley, whose school district was the first in the nation to voluntarily desegregate its schools, in 1968.

As other districts did then, they are closely watching the Berkeley Unified School District now. Neighboring Oakland is considering the adoption of a similar plan. National school reform organizations have begun to take notice. To a community that claims a commitment to solving what many consider to be its deepest (and most embarrassing) problem — and most important, to the students whose lives it hopes to save — Rebound offers hope as well as controversy.

“I want you to write a group story,” a Rebound teacher tells her sixth-period English class one afternoon before the tutors come in. “Each person write one sentence, then pass it to the person on your right. It can be about anything you want. I just ask that you stick to the Rebound guidelines of language.”

The students giggle and hoot as they pass the paper around the room. When it’s time to read the finished story out loud, each reads what he or she wrote.

“There once was a kid who never went to class,” reads the first student. “And he stayed in the ninth all his life,” says the second.

“And became a crackie head selling crack outside of Walgreens.”

“But then he decided to get his crap together and he went to school.”

“He became really rich and bought a Jaguar.”

“And sold the Jaguar and went back to being a crackhead.”

“He finally realized that crack kills and straightened himself out again.”

“THE END!” yells the last student, triumphantly.

The kids are white again: the shooter and the students he shot. The shooter is a boy again — this time he’s 15, a freshman — and once again, he’s a kid who got picked on at school all the time. It’s another large suburban school — there are 1,900 kids at Santana High School, in Santee, near San Diego. We don’t know much about the boy who did the shooting yet, but from early reports he fit the increasingly familiar profile of the schoolyard gunman — a white teenage boy, a misfit, in a large suburban high school.

According to his best friend, the shooter bragged all weekend that he was going to do this on Monday. He even invited his friends to join him. “But we said no,” his friend says.

“Did he have access to guns?” the reporter asks the peach-fuzzy 14-year-old. The boy nods, yes. “His dad had lots of guns,” he says, and rattles off their calibers.

The mind struggles to understand — How did he know all that? Did these boys play with guns? Did the father take them shooting? But the reporter is on to the next question. “Why didn’t you tell anyone that your best friend was threatening to go to school on Monday and shoot a whole lot of people?”

“At the end of the weekend he said he was just kidding,” the friend answers. “I didn’t want to get him in trouble if he was just kidding.” Against the background audiovisual of sirens screaming around him, his bleeding, dazed classmates being loaded onto gurneys, the SWAT teams sweeping the campus for bombs, the boy adds, “Anyway — he’s not the kind of kid to do something like this.”

Apparently, though, he is that kind of kid. And just exactly what kind of kid, the politicians, pundits and psychologists will spend the next days and weeks pondering, is that? These few things we know.

He was the kind of kid whose father owned guns and didn’t keep his son from getting to them. The kind of kid who was picked on, often, at his large, suburban school. The kind of kid who spent a weekend telling his closest friends — and their parents — that he was going to go to school on Monday and shoot as many of his classmates as he could.

Was he the kind of kid who told these children and adults what he was planning in hopes that they’d believe him, and stop him? Or the kind of kid so used to being disregarded or disbelieved that he spent two days threatening to execute his classmates without fear that his plan would be interrupted?

Was he the kind of kid who looked at every adult who crossed his path at school each day, wondering if this teacher, that coach, maybe the librarian, was someone he could talk to, someone who might have the power to rescue him from his private adolescent hell?

These things we may never know.

“We’ve had drills for this kind of thing,” the distraught principal tells the battalion of reporters, flown instantly to the scene, jostling for position at the impromptu press conference. “We were prepared.” Prepared for a 15-year-old opening fire in the boys’ bathroom? Are we meant to be reassured?

“I should have turned him in,” says the best friend’s father. “I’ll never forgive myself.”

“The best prevention for a tragedy like this,” says our new president, George W. Bush, as the cameras click and whir, “is to teach children the difference between right and wrong.”

The difference between right and wrong. And what, exactly, is that?

Is it right or wrong that we send our teenagers to overcrowded schools the size of factories, staffed with teachers paid (in California, home of this latest high school tragedy) two-thirds the salaries of prison guards, and “counselors” assigned to several hundred students apiece, thereby guaranteeing that few if any adults on campus know our kids’ names, let alone what they need?

Is it right or wrong that we know perfectly well what works for our teenagers — they need smaller schools and classrooms, staffed by professionals with time to get to know them, a rigorous curriculum with solid links to the world of work and community around them — and yet we provide this only for a minority of American kids, most of them the lucky few whose parents can afford to send them to private schools?

Is it right or wrong that most of our children grow up knowing that they’re not worth to us what affluent kids in private schools get: the small, well-equipped campuses; the challenging, intimate classes, staffed by teachers who hold their students and students’ families accountable, and who are themselves held accountable for teaching and caring for their students? Do we think it’s an accident that these types of shootings simply never occur in private schools?

The hue and cry that will arise in the wake of the San Diego school shooting is as predictable as death and taxes. Many will blame the parents. Many will call for metal detectors and zero-tolerance policies in the schools. Others will call for gun control, for prosecuting minors as adults, for building new juvenile detention facilities and jails. We will probe the emptiness of our culture; we will bemoan the alienation of our youth.

But the burning question raised by San Diego — and by the children we have lost at Columbine, at Jonesboro, Ark., or Springfield, Ore.; by the children we have lost to violence in inner-city schools, by the students we are losing far less mediagenically in public school classrooms every day — is not why this is happening, but what we are willing to do about it.

In the course of writing and promoting my last book, “Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School,” I spent time in all kinds of high schools, all over the country. I saw kids at the edges of their seats, on fire with learning; I saw many more kids sleeping through their classes and their lives. I saw schools whose idea of violence prevention involved metal detectors, security cameras and locker searches; I saw private schools and small schools within large public schools — “alternative learning communities,” “academies,” “remedial programs” — that protect, and educate, their kids by knowing and caring about them.

The small schools don’t all succeed in sending every one of their students to Harvard, or even to college. But without exception, the ones I saw succeed in holding their students tight within a framework of values and expectations. They succeed in keeping their students safe from the rage of rejection, the alienation of anonymity.

Our teenagers need to know that they matter. Whether their parents can afford private school or not, they need to see that in their classrooms, in their school libraries, in their teachers’ eyes. They need to know that those who are entrusted with giving them what they need — their parents, yes, but their country, too — will give them the best we have to offer.

As long as American public schools are monuments to our ambivalence about what, exactly, our children deserve, our teenagers will rightfully conclude that nothing they feel, or learn, or do, really matters. We have seen the consequences of that conclusion, and it is deadly.

“Hold teachers and schools accountable,” demand Republicans from President Bush on down. “Test early and often. Use vouchers to save good kids from bad schools.”

And what should we do when our teenagers drop out, act out, cry out? “Shrinks! Prozac! Ritalin!” advise the bleeding hearts. “Lock ‘em up!” demand the right-wingers.

Smack-dab in the middle of the country, and smack-dab in the middle of this raging national debate, on a picture-perfect campus 35 miles west of Chicago, one public high school is employing many of these methods at once, with results that are stunningly successful by some measures, controversial — scary, even — by others. It is an institution that appears to answer the question, “If money were no object, could our schools be saved?”

At the Illinois Math and Science Academy, the curriculum is challenging and engaging. The student population and the classes are small, gender-balanced and ethnically diverse. The teachers are handpicked, well-paid and methodically evaluated; testing is frequent and rigorous. State funding subsidies and grants serve like vouchers, providing each IMSA student with a private-school-quality public education at a cost to parents ranging from zero to $940 a year. These teenagers are indeed locked up: Aside from periodic weekend furloughs, IMSA students never leave the campus.

And one more thing: The complex, competitive IMSA admissions process eliminates two-thirds of applicants — all but the state’s highest-achieving teens.

“The vision of the Illinois Math and Science Academy,” says the school’s mission statement, “is to create a learning enterprise that liberates the genius and goodness of all children and invites and inspires the power and creativity of the human spirit for the world.”

It is a heady goal in an era when most public high schools dare aspire no higher than to graduate the majority of their students, and teachers are hard pressed to notice, let alone liberate, genius or goodness in the 150 to 200 students they face in their classrooms each day. It doesn’t take an IMSA brainiac to deconstruct the disparity: Most American public high schools spend $6,000 to $10,000 per year to educate each student. IMSA spends $20,000.

Normally, K-12 schools are funded by their states’ boards of education. But when IMSA was established by the Illinois General Assembly in 1985 to “assure technological skills for the work force, and assist in the preparation of professionals to serve the interests of Illinois in such fields as engineering, research, teaching and computer technology,” it was also decreed that IMSA would be endowed by state-appropriated general funds, which now make up 85 percent of its budget. Most of the rest of IMSA’s $14.3 million in operating expenses comes from private and government grants and contracts.

This rich bounty is offered in exchange for fulfillment of the school’s two-pronged legislative charge: “to serve the people of Illinois as a preparatory institution, and the school system of the State as a catalyst and laboratory for the advancement of learning.” In addition to producing the techno-geniuses who, it is hoped, might help keep Illinois and America competitive in the global marketplace, IMSA also consults with state education policymakers and provides model programs and training for Illinois teachers.

IMSA’s critics cry foul. The “gifted” kids who are least in need of extra help get more of it, they say, while the vast majority of high schoolers in Illinois founder in schools whose budgets can’t begin to meet their needs. Although IMSA’s funding isn’t drawn from the same pot that feeds the state’s “normal” schools, critics argue that IMSA offers the state’s best and brightest teens the kind of education to which every child is entitled — yielding results that every school would envy, especially in this climate of frenzied fixation on standardized test scores and other traditional indicators of success.

Indeed, IMSA boasts astronomical SAT scores and the second-highest ACT score in the nation. Ninety-nine percent of IMSA graduates go to college; two-thirds go on to earn degrees in science or math. The persistent nationwide “achievement gap” between Caucasian vs. African-American and Latino students is far narrower at IMSA, as is the historic gap between males and females in the realms of math and science achievement. In 1998 the mean SAT score for female IMSA students was 1400, compared to 1017 for females nationwide; the school’s first Rhodes scholar and Westinghouse Talent Search winner were both girls.

“There needs to be a place for people who have exhausted the standard high school curriculum and are looking for a better challenge before college,” says IMSA junior Jessica D’Souza. “IMSA is that place, at least for those of us here.”

“The average teen doesn’t have the maturity to attend this school,” adds senior Kelly Willis. “In fact, a lot of IMSA kids don’t have that maturity, but they get by in a cloud of teacher sympathy and student camaraderie. There’s a lot of people at IMSA who never fit societal norms, and they come together here.”

Bearing “in loco parentis” responsibility for 650 teenagers, with a level of control possible only in a school that monitors its students around the clock, the IMSA staff closely evaluates students’ psychological as well as academic well-being.

“We have many systems and structures in place so that we intervene early in a way that meets the needs of the particular student,” says IMSA counselor Deb McGrath. “The teachers, the counselors, the resident counselors really get to know their kids. Those students who we feel are at risk for depression, anxiety, perfectionism, sexual identity issues — anything that might interfere with a student’s ability to be successful at IMSA — are assessed along with their families.”

Sometimes that assessment leads to a phone call to the student’s parents, or the suggestion that the student join a support group. In an undisclosed number of cases, the assessment results in a visit to an off-site psychiatrist and a prescription for antidepressants.

“I didn’t start on meds till I came here,” an IMSA junior confides. “If you go into the nurse’s office, there’s a huge sign-up list for medications and a Tupperware thing, and it’s almost all Prozac.” A classmate, listening in, nods knowingly. “I know a lot of people who were OK before,” she says. “Then they came here and had to get back on their meds.”

“Supposedly we’re too smart,” a third IMSA girl explains. “Our brain produces a lot of weird chemicals. And we think about stuff way too much.”

McGrath attributes this disturbing phenomenon to homesickness, to the perfectionism that often characterizes gifted students and to “the documented susceptibility of the gifted population to depression.”

Medicated or not, thinking too much or not, IMSA students, teachers and administrators alike describe the school as a tightknit, loving community in which not only ideas and intellect but individuality and personal growth are cherished and encouraged. How unusual for a public high school is that?

It’s way unusual. To anyone who’s spent time at any other public high school in America, the spiffy, serene IMSA campus feels like a parallel universe: an educational Oz of abundant resources, high-performing students and top-notch teachers and administrators.

The libraries and labs, the greenhouse and music rooms (music rooms!), overflow with state-of-the-art equipment. In carpeted classrooms, eager students perch on the edges of their seats — transfixed, engaged, learning. On Wednesdays — “Inquiry Day” — no classes are held. Students gather instead in their Internet-wired dorm rooms, or in IMSA’s high-tech Center for Imagination and Inquiry or in one of the school’s many cushy common areas, collaborating on such student research projects as “Bioinformatics and Recurrence Analysis in Detecting Correlative Patterns in Amino Acid Sequences,” “Achievement Levels in Gender Segregated Classrooms” and “Antiretroviral Effects of C-Reactive Protein Against HIV.”

And if the IMSA kids seem a bit like Stepford students, gliding through a Stepford school devoid of the messy, necessary chaos of adolescence — the screaming and the sullenness; the spitballs and the stolen cars — absent, too, is the threat of theft or violence on campus.

In many high schools a backpack isn’t safe in a locked locker; a scuffed sneaker will trigger a fistfight, or worse. But at IMSA, backpacks are shed fearlessly outside the cafeteria door; the students come and go casually in and out of dorm rooms, greeting one another and teachers with calm affection as they pass in the halls.

The multiracial clusters of kids hanging out in the Student Life Center; the high visibility of gay, bisexual and gender-bent boys, girls and others; the lunchroom tables where magenta-haired, profusely pierced punks gobble spaghetti beside bespectacled bookworms picking at their salads — all attest to a remarkable level of tolerance.

Where are the scenes of chaos, of rage, of neglect that dominate many American public high schools? Where are the dealers and slackers roaming dark, decrepit halls; the janitors painting over (and over) graffiti scribbled on puke-colored walls; the picketing teachers, the sewage-stinking bathrooms, the lunchtime brawls?

The pristine walls of IMSA are adorned instead with staff-authorized, student-made posters: “Party Clean — go drug free.” “Get Buff — Carry Your Stuff.” “Prayer Meetings M-T-Th-Fri, 7 a.m.”

The anxiety that simmers beneath the surface here is not fear of crime, but of failure. “For some of our kids, failure is getting a B,” says McGrath. “There’s a question that many of our students have. ‘Am I really qualified to be here? Am I really up to this?’ Even once they realize that they are, it’s a matter of rising to the level of their own expectations: straight A’s and perfection on every assignment. That’s a pretty high expectation for a teenager to have.”

“It’s the constant push for perfection that sets the environment and the people at IMSA apart from the ‘normal’ high school,” says student Grace Woo. “Most of the pressure, we put on ourselves.”

“Much of IMSA’s budget goes into advertisement, and often it’s painfully clear to the students that we’re being put on display so the school will seem worthy of receiving more money,” says senior Kelli Willis. “I try my best to work up to my potential in school; but my activities and my mind-set are my own. My standards for my life and my future are my own and they’re based on what makes me happy.”

“IMSA consists primarily of two types of people,” asserts junior Lisa Yung. “Those who procrastinate at their own expense, neglecting whatever opportunities they may have just from attending this institution, and those who become engrossed in the obsession with college applications: ‘I want to go to an Ivy League.’ Why do I stay, then?” Lisa answers her own question: “Because this is as perfect as things may get.”

Whether one sees IMSA as admirable or elitist, or both, the contrast between IMSA and the typical high school raises disturbing questions. Is it only our “gifted” children who deserve an IMSA-quality education? If tomorrow’s nuclear physicists are worth $20,000 a year to us, how much should we spend on tomorrow’s dancers, or teachers, or bus drivers?

If the state of Illinois can muster the public and private support required to offer this all-too-rare gift — an excellent public school education, designed to foster the particular gifts and passions of its students — to the few hundred gifted kids at IMSA, why can’t every state and school district offer it, in one form or another, to every American teenager? And what might we save by educating kids today, instead of paying for their welfare checks, their therapist bills and their incarceration tomorrow?

“IMSA’s existence begs a few key questions,” says University of Illinois at Chicago researcher Susan Klonsky, who studies schools in Illinois and the nation. “IMSA was meant to address the inequities across the state by providing certain kinds of learning that local school districts do not provide. It does a pretty fine job of this for the kids who attend IMSA. But what about the other 99 percent of kids? They need special attention, too.”

“When the idea of IMSA was first conceived,” says student Willis, “it was meant to be a test school. If things went well, other gifted residence schools were meant to be built in other parts of Illinois. It’s obvious that IMSA has been a success, but the board decided it would cost too much money and chose to not build other academies across the state.

“The techniques IMSA uses — small class sizes, highly educated teachers and a commitment to ethical leadership — are universally known as necessary in an educational environment,” Willis says. “But other schools aren’t given the money, so the students suffer.”

“The whole definition of ‘giftedness’ and of ‘gifted education’ is questionable,” Klonsky adds. “Why not change the local school to accommodate the needs of the so-called gifted, instead of segregating these kids in a separate residential school? High schools are the anchor of strong communities.

“We have to ask: What is traded off in removing high school students from the bosom of their families and from their neighborhoods?” she continues. “What do we lose by removing, as a matter of state policy, the highest-achieving students from the community?”

“Our students have higher-level thinking skills,” argues IMSA counselor McGrath. She cites the application process, during which the IMSA staff considers applicants’ interviews, essays and letters of recommendation along with grades and test scores, to ensure that the school accepts “critical thinkers, not just test-takers.”

“Kids like ours need the academic challenge provided by peers of similar ability. And being a residential school, we can give our students access to resources — laboratories, computers, teachers — during the day, in the evenings and on weekends. They get extended learning time for mentorship and leadership opportunities.”

Extended learning time means diminished family time — a distinct downside, McGrath avers, of IMSA student life. “To be here, obviously, our students must be removed from their families. They’re separated from Mom and Dad, from the family dog, from people in their church, their home community. Those people become a step removed from the lives of these children. They communicate more by e-mail and phone than in person. Of course there’s a loss with that.

“But for the vast majority,” McGrath says, “the gains far outweigh what they have to give up or do in a different way. Girls, in particular, benefit from the strong sense of community at IMSA, from the built-in acknowledgment that girls are good in mathematics and science, from the readily accessible female role models on our faculty and staff.”

“At some points, I wish I were just a normal high school student without much work, who could drive around with friends and party,” says Jessica D’Souza. “But being here is worth the sacrifice.”

Klonsky concedes, “IMSA is not the problem. It’s a symptom of the essential problem — which is that schools are too big and too impersonal, teaching loads are too large and it is too difficult for teachers to unearth or recognize the individual gifts of their students. If schools were smaller and more able to customize their programs to meet the needs of each child, there would be less need to create special programs to meet special needs and talents.”

Whatever one’s opinion of “giftedness,” or residential schooling, or any of the other particularities and peculiarities of IMSA, the school’s existence and achievements prove a simple, disturbing truth. All handwringing and campaign speeches notwithstanding, IMSA proves that we know how to educate our children, and educate them well. We know how much it costs, and when we decide it’s worth paying for, we know how to find the money.

As Klonsky says, if we choose to allocate IMSA-level resources to all of our public schools, we might discover that all of our children are gifted in ways that we can’t yet imagine and don’t presently value. And if those gifts were to be noticed and nurtured, maybe we wouldn’t need schools like IMSA — or Tupperware bowls full of Prozac, or juvenile halls — as much as we seem to need them now.