L. Todd Rose would never have been voted Most Likely to Succeed in his Utah middle school, said Francie Latour in The Boston Globe. Suspended for throwing stink bombs at a blackboard during seventh grade, he was on his way to dropping out of high school with a 0.9 grade point average and nothing but a low-wage stockroom to support his pregnant girlfriend. “When my son was born,” he says, “that was the first turning point for me, in the sense of realizing that I was about to mess up my kid’s life if I didn’t do something.” Some of Rose’s middle-school teachers might be surprised to learn that he soon earned a GED, took home a doctorate from Harvard in 2007, and now lectures at Harvard’s school of education.
“Square Peg”—the phrase Rose chose as the title of his new memoir—“is putting it mildly,” said Sarah Sweeney in the Harvard Gazette. Not only did the young Rose feel like a “hillbilly” when he got to Harvard Square, he also decided that what he was being taught about education didn’t match the way he’d become educated himself. So today he’s pushing to reform education so that early labeling doesn’t cut off a child’s path to success. “If you take a kid like me—I was a little more impulsive, a little overactive—how in the world that should be a predictor of failure is beyond me,” he says. Rose wants to improve the odds for kids like he was, for the whole society’s good. “When we create rigid
environments that teach to the average,” he says, “everyone loses.”
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