Based on a systematic research study of high school valedictorians, this book looks at the question of what doing well in school actually means. Following the academic and non-academic lives of 81 high school valedictorians for 14 years after graduation, Arnold documents not only a generation beginning their adult lives in America during the 1980s and '90s, but the viability of some of our fundamental assumptions about what our schools measure and reward, and the obstacles - gender and racial - that hinder our once future leaders.