Wearing a crisp white dress shirt and tie as he heads off to his new job in a high-rise office building in Portland, 25-year-old Aaron Johnson has a purposeful look about him. This is a young man with a plan, heading somewhere in life.

When he pauses over a cup of coffee to think about who he was a decade earlier, he has trouble dredging up a clear memory. "That was a long time ago," he says.

At 16, Johnson had just dropped out of Portland's Jefferson High. Disenchanted and uninterested in school, pulling a paltry 1.8 grade point average, he didn't see the point in sticking it out any longer. "I never got a grip on what school was supposed to do for me," he recalls. He wasn't a troublemaker, at least not in obvious ways. "I was quiet, but that doesn't mean I was good. Sneaky was more like it," he admits. He felt hemmed in at home, which he shared with a grandmother who was also his adoptive parent.

"It was clear I wasn't going to succeed by following the normal course, so I figured I'd find another identity," Johnson recalls. He left home, moved in with a girlfriend, and was tempted to earn some quick money in the street culture that had sucked in many of his peers. "That could have given me a new identity, a different kind of membership," he admits. As a young black man without an education or a job, he had trouble imagining a decent future for himself.

But for Johnson, an alternative came along. His grandmother, who is a teacher, told him about Portland Night High School. From his first night there, he knew he had arrived somewhere different.

The teachers treated him in a way he had never experienced before, either. "From the start, you get the feeling that somebody cares about you. Before, I felt like I had been branded as a failure. These teachers, though, refused to accept that. I responded to their faith in me." He felt his curiosity stir. One class discussion about the stock market grabbed his attention, and he wasn't ready to stop learning at the end of class. He cornered his teacher in the hallway. They made time to continue the discussion later, outside of school.

"That teacher became a mentor to me, and that was cool," Johnson says. "For the first time, I had a way to imagine myself as someone successful."

Johnson also found a day job as a messenger at a Portland law firm, where he encountered more role models. Suddenly, his own life seemed full of paths and possibilities.

At night school, the absence of traditional letter grades worked to Johnson's advantage. "If your work is not up to par, you do it again. There's none of the stain of failure."

Within a year and a half, Johnson had graduated from night school and began taking general education courses at Portland Community College. "That was another big step for me. At first it felt like a brick wall," he admits. He drew support from the night school teachers who had become his friends, allies, cheerleaders. "I knew I could always go back to them," he says.

Johnson took another leap and enrolled at Whitman College in Washington. He graduated in 1997 with a degree in philosophy. Now, he's working in the human resources department of the Northwest Regional Educational Lab while also pursuing graduate studies in philosophy at Reed College.

His dream today? Johnson aspires to earn his doctorate and become a professor of philosophy. It's a field of study he first encountered at Portland Night High School. "At night school, teachers would ask me, 'What do you think, Aaron? What's your voice saying?' That was different from memorizing a set of facts. Learning how to think for yourself is the whole point of an education. It's the single most important paradigm, asking yourself, 'Why am I here?'"