Column: Suddenly, 'I flunked algebra' is a ticket to success

Jackie Goldberg, the president of the Los Angeles Unified School Board, said publicly last month that she was so turned off by high school that she nearly quit after 11th grade to take her GED, rather than stick around for a diploma.

Rich Leib, the chair of the UC Board of Regents, recently told a reporter that when he was in high school, he scored in the bottom 2% on his SAT subject tests in math and English. That, along with his less-than-50th-percentile score on the general SAT, helped lead to his rejection by UC Berkeley, he said.

In January, Gov. Gavin Newsom described himself as an unhappy elementary school student: “I couldn’t read, and I was looking for any way to ditch classes. I’d fake stomachaches and dizziness.”