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In late high school and early college, I held a string of random jobs: Skate School figure skating instructor, costumed cashier at a local Halloween store, dog walker, college entrance essay editor.

Why can one school figure out how to live without such support and the other can’t?

“I was making decent money for my age, and I just wanted to finish school, figure out my life and my passion and not have to worry about the responsibility of another human being.”

In 1999, she was the national champion in School Figure, a technique of making figure-eight patterns on the ice.

The concept sounds simple: take a good school, figure out what’s happening to make students successful, and re-create those elements to spread the success somewhere else.