'Mr. P' Learns His Lesson

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Job-hunting and networking were like dating, a mix of exhilaration and humiliation. Organizations I wanted to work for didn't want me. The ones that wanted me weren't a fit. September was coming. I wasn't quite panicking, but I could feel the nervous energy emanating from my wife, who had patiently indulged my second career. Not only hadn't I saved a nickel as a teacher, but my daughter's private-school tuition exceeded the take-home pay from my $43,000 annual salary. Unemployment was not an option.

In August the phone rang. It was the mother of one of my former students. Two years earlier I had encouraged Angela Davila to have her daughter Amber apply to Prep for Prep, a New York nonprofit founded in 1978 that seeks out the highest-achieving kids in schools like mine, gives them 14 months of "academic boot camp," then helps place them in the some of the country's best private schools. Amber had made it into Prep, and now Angela was calling with the news that she had won a full scholarship to Manhattan's Trevor Day School. As if she could read my mind, she was telling me to not give up, to remember that I could make a difference. I realized I had dramatically changed the life of at least one terrific kid. It was the single greatest moment in my professional life.

The call hit me like a hammer: I needed to go into the business of creating more Ambers. The second act of my second career began to emerge almost unbidden. I stopped looking for a job and started focusing on the high-achieving, low-income children I felt I had failed as a teacher.

An idea I had put away to launch an after-school program for bright, inner-city kids someday suddenly moved to the front burner. If the job I wanted didn't exist, I would create it. Another sign from the gods: The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation issued a report called Achievement Trap affirming that as a nation we are doing a poor job with our most promising low-income kids. A book proposal and op-eds about the issue began to emerge on my laptop as if by their own volition. I was on fire. Who needed a job? I had a mission.

A few weeks later, an automated alert I had set up months earlier on idealist.org, a Web site for job-seekers in the nonprofit world, sent a job notice to my inbox. Prep for Prep, the organization that had accepted Amber—the very organization on which I had started to model my nascent after-school program—was looking to hire its first communications director. I've never sold myself harder in my life.

Prep offered me the job and is letting me be both an employee and a client, tapping into its Smart Connections consulting arm to try to get my after-school program off the ground. The book project bubbles along as well. My feelings of frustration have been replaced by a sense that if teaching was a false start, education was not. I have found a niche and a need.