This was very inspiring, and I did in fact cry. Great girl, great family.

One other thing that was in the original LA Times article was that many of the kids, including the top scholars, are undocumented ("illegal"), so they aren't eligible for any federal or state aid. Well, excuse me, but is cancer cured? We as a society cannot afford to NOT be educating people--especially those who have shown intelligence, interest, and drive--considering that we desperately need their brainpower to solve our problems! You never know but what the kid who couldn't get a scholarship would have been the next Jonas Salk. Give them a chance, for our sake as much as for theirs!

Here in Wake county, North Carolina, probably one of the best school districts in the state, at least 35% of the students entering high school don't make it all the way through. And we call that a success. Of course we don't have people sneaking across barbed wire and dodging drive-bys and that straight outta Compton shit so it's all good.

It's a reminder of why we should never give up on any group of people in our society--because they haven't given up on themselves. We should encourage anyone who is willing to work hard, to ensure that they have the opportunity to succeed--because we all benefit from their talents, drive, and dedication.

All of the top-10-ranked seniors at Fremont are girls.

"At a school like this, guys get pressured to do a lot of things … gangs, drugs... Girls don't have that kind of pressure," she says.

Obviously, this shows the need for more girls only educational programs and funding. Let's start a special girls only program at Harvard to bring more women into the hard sciences.

ajbuckle, the reason is because in a lot of these neighborhoods the girls can't aspire to much higher than being a girlfriend/babymomma of one of those drugged out gangster males if they don't have an education. Those girls know it. There isn't a boy crisis, these girls (and many others) are simply aware of where they stand without an education. Girls know they have to work harder, walk the line, and do everything better in order to not get into a position where they have to rely on some loser to take care of them. Maybe as women assume more dominant positions in society and industry, the men will realize that the tragedy is not that education is slanted, but that the boys are too stubborn to play catch-up. Stop blaming women, and hit the damn books.

You are blaently sexist in your statements, and I, for one, am offended by your attitude toward these poor boys.

"hit the damn books" has been used repetedly by jim crow era whites (and modern racists) to describe the lack of black school acheivement. Non racists see that there are systematic issues that keep blacks back, and as a result, we have a number of programs specifically targeted at helping blacks. You are using the same Klan-like logic to sully the reputation of these poor hispanic boys by calling them stubborn.

The logic of this is simple. People start out essentialy the same, and a difference in outcome is the result of a difference in treatment (treatment in school and by the larger society society). If it were 10 boys on top, and no girls, there would be howls from the chorus here on Broadsheet (see Larry Summers). You dont get to belittle these boys just because you don't want to put the resources and effort into boys that we put into girls in our public educational system.

Girls know they have to work harder, walk the line, and do everything better in order to not get into a position where they have to rely on some loser to take care of them.

While the boys just want to be a bunch of losers who can't keep a decent woman around? C'mon. I'm not ready to jump on the alarmist bandwagon yet, but the (sadly common) "street feminism" that I see in all kinds of neighborhoods that says "we don't need any men around anyway" is certainly not helping to get the boys motivated.

I fond it really hard to believe that the girls in this neighborhood are given more or better educational opportunities than the boys. In my experience, kids in those neighborhoods are given damn near nothing regardless of gender. I will agree that not all the boys in these neighborhoods are losers, I may have chosen my words poorly in that case. But the point remains: women have a lot of incentives to gain independence, and I'm sure that seeing how other women in situations similar to theirs can end up is a powerful motivator. Whether it's being co-dependent on a man, their parents, etc., it seems that society is less willing to accept female failure, since they've been given so many breaks if you ask ajbuckle. It seems like boys can get away with flaunting their mediocrity and can be rewarded for it, while girls don't get the same luxury. How much affection do you think society would have for female versions of George Bush or Larry the Cable Guy? The fact remains, girls have to work harder, and I think the successful ones know that. In an area like Fremont, where the playing field is level at close to zero, the boys' only disadvantage is their complacency.

As a teacher in an alternative high school that is predominantly minority, I can tell you that what I see is a socio-economic difference between the expectation for boys and for girls. In many families, the boys are expected to go out and get a job to help pay the family's bills. The parental attitude seems to be that it is more important for the boy to bring in money now than to worry about any future such as post-secondary education--or even a diploma. (After all, you "can always get a GED.")

For the girls, the biggest problem is pregnancy. Many of our parents had their first child when they were 15, 16, 17. They don't see anything unusual in their own child following in their footsteps. I am now teaching the pregnant children of my former pregnant students--and that is sad. Children are wonderful, but a teen mother is not likely to have the time, energy or finances to continue her education. There are exceptions but they ARE exceptions.

The students who succeed either have strong parental role models--"I don't want you to be uneducated and work in minimum wage jobs like I have to," or someone, somewhere has convinced the student that there is more to life than a minimum wage job.

My high school has a very good success rate, but we also have more girls graduating than boys because the lure of the paycheck now seems to trump the possibility of a better future while we have made SOME headway in preventing teen pregnancy.