I did not do well in high school; my grades put me in the bottom third of my graduating class. When I hit high school, my grades plunged from nearly perfect to nearly disastrous. The explanation for this precipitous drop had nothing to do with my intelligence, nor with a sharp increase in the difficulty of the material we were studying.

No, the plunge in my grades was attributable to the sudden onset of my interest in girls coupled with a keen desire to be accepted by a group of kids whose admissions rules required a distinctly poor attitude toward schools and teachers. Poor attitude=Poor grades. Even kids who are flunking math know that equation.

Those distracting new priorities coincided with increasing trouble at home as my parents began keeping their appointment with adult complexities - mid-life desperations, money troubles and emerging difficulties with alcohol. My home life was tailor-made for a kid who had lost interest in studying; studying in that environment was impossible even had I wanted to do it.

So I left high school engaged to a girl one year my junior, and even more engaged to a future that seemed utterly without prospects. This was Illinois, and when I graduated from high school, there were only a couple of community colleges in the entire state, and they were nowhere near my hometown. Though I'd scored well on the SAT, my high school grades made it impossible for me to gain admission to any of the state colleges or universities, and there was no money for me to go even if I'd been able to get in.

I was sunk. The life laid out for kids from my class background was fairly plain - a pregnant girlfriend by age 18 or 19, a poorly paid job in one of the town's two factories, with layoffs that came along just frequently enough so that no one ever got caught up on the bills, then another baby and a divorce accelerated by strains over money, and, in the best-case scenario, a promotion to line foreman by age 45 or 50.

For recreation, there was the tavern culture that dominates male blue-collar social life in the Midwest, plus membership in a bowling league, plus one week a year up at a lake in Wisconsin fishing for walleyes.

Dreading that future, I hit the road for California. One of the things California offered that Illinois didn't was access to higher education through the entry point of conveniently located community colleges. The system was based on the idea of a second chance for people who, like me, had blown it in high school. Best of all, community colleges were essentially free of charge.

Still, I didn't rush to sign up. I was footloose and, once my engagement was broken off, fancy-free. I had a job, an apartment and enough money to pay for my basic needs, which were the only kind of needs I had just then.

Less than a year later, I was married with a child on the way, and once again, my prospects were not looking good. The job that had seemed adequate now seemed dull and dead-ended, and I had a future to think about. Just as significantly, I didn't like feeling ignorant, even though ignorant was, alas, my condition.

Community colleges held their doors open to "anyone who might benefit from further education." It was, therefore, a club that would have me as a member. I enrolled as a full-time student, taking classes four nights a week while maintaining a full-time day job.

It was grueling, but I was young and motivated. The motivation derived not only from worries about my future, but also from the sheer excitement of learning, a sense of excitement that was not considered out of place here, as it had been in high school where peer pressure defined a desire to learn as the exclusive province of nerds and sycophants.

The classes and teachers I remember from those two years of night classes fall into two distinct categories: the very good ones and the terrible ones. The merely mediocre teachers were the most common, and they've all left my memory, but there were teachers whose enthusiasm and command of subject still inspire me today, almost 40 years later.

The bad teachers contribute to my teaching, too, serving as an ongoing reminder of the kind of teacher I do not want to be, ringing alarm bells when I get too imperious or pedantic, and sending up signals when I forget that students are human beings, not just names on a roster.

The percentages of good, bad and mediocre teachers remained about the same when I transferred to upper division work at a four-year college, and even when I went on to graduate school. My rule of thumb is that 20 percent of teachers are excellent, 20 percent are pretty damn bad and 60 percent are competent, but ungifted, helping students move through the process without leaving much of a mark on their memories.

Community colleges, however, maintain that ratio of good, bad and mediocre teachers at a fraction of the cost per student. California spends over $12,000 per student in the UC system, and over $8,000 per student in the state university system, but less than $3,000 per community college student.

The community colleges are a theater of battle in the war against poor people. The poor tend to be the community the community colleges serve. Democrats, who once stood as a line of defense in that war on the poor, have abandoned the field in far too many skirmishes. Though the majority of students enrolled in higher education in California attend community colleges, a Democratic governor has sought to blunt the disastrous state budget deficit by disproportionate cuts to community colleges.

Students in the UC system have, generally, already benefited from a host of advantages - money, supportive environments, better elementary and secondary schools. They come to college with higher levels of confidence and motivation, and they are, for that reason, easier to reach, and easier to teach.

Implicitly, however, the state has decided that students enrolling in community colleges are only worth one fourth as much as their "betters" at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and worth one-third the expenditures granted to their counterparts at Sacramento State and the other state universities. California, once the country's flagship community college system, now spends half the national average on each enrolled community college student.

Why have community colleges been undervalued and underfunded for so long? Part of the problem would seem to be a matter of simple snobbery. Community colleges don't offer the patina of prestige, don't give legislators and state boosters the bragging rights that come with the mention of a Nobel laureate from Berkeley. We don't do research, so we have no distinctions to point to in those academic arenas. Our alumni, though an impressive lot, don't list their community college work at the top of their resumès, and they often actively hide the origins of their college careers.

Then, too, the very fragmentation of the system augurs against statewide advocacy: 108 college presidents, 108 boards of trustees and a network of redundant administrative functions not only eats up lots of money, but it weakens political clout and thwarts unified action. Budgets tend to get cut where cutting meets the least effective resistance. Far too many people in the huge constituency of students and alumni don't vote, and the community colleges have done a very bad job of public relations.

Though we have a state chancellor's office with a $12 million budget, it is nearly impossible to find news stories extolling community college successes in any media outlet.

For these and other reasons, community colleges remain the stepchild of higher education, the "junior" to more senior institutions. In popular mythology, it is the place where losers go to school. When I began teaching in community colleges more than 30 years ago, they were dismissively referred to as "high schools with ash trays" because smoking was permitted in classrooms.

The term "JC" always carries the connotation of inferior students receiving inferior instruction. At parties, many of my students lie about where they are going to school, laying claim to enrollment at the state university. Hitting on someone by touting your status as a student at a j.c. isn't anyone's idea of a successful pickup ploy.

And here, too, the community colleges are, in part, responsible for their own reputations. Faculty at community colleges have internalized the sense that they are second-rate. Much of the lower division teaching done in the university system, after all, is done by brutally underpaid graduate students, and our equivalency to them is difficult to overlook. Community college teachers must constantly work at maintaining confidence and pride.

Then, too, it is hard to deny that we have often been lax in maintaining standards. Grade inflation is an apparently permanent component of our enterprise. Most of the Bs I give should be Cs, and most of the Cs should be Ds. I have a dozen rationalizations for doing this, but the fact remains that the grades don't mean what I think they should mean. I suspect many of my colleagues are even more lax than I am.

Of course, the same grade inflation is endemic at Harvard and Yale and any college or university you might care to name, but community college grads enter the workforce unshielded by a prestige alma mater. They are often expected to perform poorly and, with employers, that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Academic standards are extremely difficult to maintain in any case. The students who come to us are so far behind any definition of "college-level" that a rigorous application of that standard would virtually empty our halls in a single semester.

Then, too, since the mid-1970s, more and more classes have been taught by part-time instructors. Part-time instructors make up more than half of all community college teaching staffs and, though many of these part-time instructors are as good as or better than their full-time counterparts, their numbers make it difficult to maintain control of standards and content. These instructors cost districts a fraction of what full-time teachers are paid, and they are denied expensive benefits.

Since academic managers win acclaim by balancing budgets, it's no wonder the ranks of part-time instructors have swelled so much in the last quarter-century. Good teaching in the part-time ranks is seldom rewarded; part-time instructors can be dismissed without cause, making them additionally attractive to managers.

On the other hand, nearly all full-time instructors in the community college system are tenured, making it practically impossible to weed out bad teachers. Most administrators don't want to take on that task. Unions tend to rally behind even the worst teachers in an abrogation of professional responsibility and a misguided sense of solidarity.

Still, having said all that, I am proud to have spent my life in this bottom tier of the higher education hierarchy. If my work has not been rewarded by the kind of prestige, percs or pay commanded by my counterparts in the four-year colleges, I have, nonetheless, been rewarded by the sure knowledge that lives have been changed for the better by the work I've done, and the work done by countless colleagues up and down the state.

The community college idea may be constantly undervalued, but if you're a couple years out of high school facing a bleak future, where else are you going to turn? I didn't know when I fit that category, and I don't know now.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that "there are no second acts in American life," but community colleges have written second acts for millions of people's lives, including my own. Women return to school once they've raised their kids, men displaced from jobs come to community colleges for retraining, refugees dislocated from familiar lives throughout the world re-make themselves in community college classes, and people who derail their lives with bad choices can get back on track with the second chance offered by this unique institution.

Community colleges are the most American idea I can think of: the idea that people can begin anew, can redefine themselves and find a locus of hope when fate seems to have forsaken them. It worked for me all those years ago when I was a student, and it's still working today for the people who show up in classes year after year, each of them with the fragile but persistent hope that their lives can be remade.