Every graduation is the result of a set of decisions made by parents and by students, implicit and explicit. The choice of which neighborhood to live in, of school to attend, of classmates to hang out with, of organizations to join, each one of these decisions increases or decreases a young person's chances of completing an educational path. Policy decisions play as great a role as personal ones. Politicians decide which schools to fund, and which to underfund, which principals to hire and which dedicated professionals to ignore. Legislators decide whether they can break off a small piece of the money we so easily commit to Iraq so that we can build a solid infrastructure of schools. And they decide how much money to commit to state universities, implicitly deciding who can attend based on tuitions and other constraints. When data are released that report that the number of African American men in college--about 350,000--is smaller than the number in jail--nearly a million, it becomes obvious that there is an issue. This article suggests the transformation of the quality of K-12 schools and the elimination of violence in areas around them.