The Outsiders

After 28 years of educating students who slip through the cracks, Donna Johnson is looking forward to one thing in retirement: doing it all over again, online.

It’s late May in eastern Kentucky, and the dashboard clock on Donna Johnson’s beige SUV reads 3:30 p.m. Class has been dismissed at Hope Hill Children’s Home Alternative School, where she teaches troubled, abused, and mentally disturbed teenage girls. But as she takes the curves of the county road that leads home, her working day’s only half done.

“The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to serve these kinds of kids—dropouts and potential dropouts,” she says in her gentle Kentucky accent, apropos of how her 26-year career in education has led to this point. We’re passing weathered barns, some with boards missing, others falling in on themselves, all bordered by a seemingly endless ribbon of fencing, and talking about the consequences of not graduating from high school. About how some students can’t learn the way most do and how that inability, no matter how intellectually capable they are, can sentence them to a life of poverty.

“For many of these kids, the difference between minimum wage and welfare is a high school diploma,” Johnson notes. “It sets the stage for them to set their...