The Education of Patrick McCabe

That morning McCabe discovered that Newbridge School had debts of nearly $250,000 and a total of $900 in cash. That week he met a polite IRS employee named Lester, who presented McCabe with an overdue payroll tax bill for $130,000. McCabe also learned that Newbridge was being sued by a former administrator, represented by Gloria Allred's law firm, who claimed her firing had been the result of sexual discrimination.

Three weeks later McCabe came to work and found that during the weekend someone had broken into Newbridge and stolen the computers and office equipment. Also, the school's pet puffer fish, Mr. Fugu, was dead. When two Santa Monica cops arrived, one mentioned that school thefts were common in the neighborhood. McCabe, outraged at the very notion, became agitated and had to be told firmly to calm down.

It might be timely to mention here that Pat McCabe is (a) 6-foot-4 and weighs 290 pounds; (b) a child of privilege, a devoted husband and father, and affluent by any conceivable definition of the word; (c) a person who had neither taught at nor administered any private or public school before July 2, 2001; and (d) was exactly 21 days into the most challenging, frustrating and personally fulfilling year of his life.

Last month, to not-quite-unanimous acclaim, McCabe started another school year at the helm of Newbridge--and another turn in his corkscrew journey through the American Dream. He hasn't exactly taken a scholastic vow of poverty. And unlike former Colorado politico-turned-Los Angeles Unified School District honcho Roy Romer, he hasn't taken on the challenge of turning around a 750,000-student urban school system. But let's face it: These days, when everyone from W on down has his own pet theory on how to solve the nation's educational woes, McCabe has gotten his hands dirtier and gotten closer to the solution than any think-tank theorist.