Rose shares the stories of the students who come to the UCLA Tutorial Center for help. Although they seem much different than the El Monte or Veteran’s Program students on the outside, they are no less affected “by background and social circumstance” (177). The center is part of what the educational system calls an Educational Opportunity Program, or an EOP, designed to provide additional support for at-risk or marginalized student populations. Rose soon realizes that the “remedial” students at UCLA have a much different pedigree than the students he has taught before; they are “the kids who held class offices and saw their names on the honor roll; they went out for sport and were involved in drama and music and a variety of civic and religious clubs” (172). These are students who had never been on the educational boundary before, and their reactions to finding themselves in Rose’s tutoring center range from depression to denial to anger.

Rose’s new job is mostly administrative—it falls to him to manage the daily affairs of the center while improving its tutoring strategies. Suddenly, Rose has to shift from thinking like a teacher to thinking like a “policy-maker, considering the balance sheet of economics and accountability” (186).