Out amid the weed-choked factory lots and the bare yards of housing projects in Birmingham, Alabama, Steve Orel has become a kind of hero. The 50-year-old Orel runs the World of Opportunity School out of an old industrial building. Affectionately known as WOO, the school is a private, shoestring operation that offers students who have fallen through the cracks in public high schools a last chance at getting the high school education or the job skills they need to build a future. This article describes how a term paper Orel wrote suggesting Birmingham students were being "pushed out" of high school by administrators desperate to boost test scores had cost him his job with the government-sponsored adult education program. Orel managed to reopen the school, at first with the help of a local Roman Catholic charity. The $87,000-a-year program now operates as an independent nonprofit organization, and Orel earns less than half the annual salary he made as a public employee.