EDUCATION: An exploration of ideas, issues and trends in education : Model of Success Pushes School, Not Luck : Chris Gardner, a rags-to-riches philanthropist, says he carries one central message to students--hard work pays. He tells them, ‘If I can do it, you can.’

Chris Gardner’s Chicago stock and bond brokerage is on track to do $10 million in business this year. He drives a red Ferrari he bought from basketball legend Michael Jordan. And when he works in his New York office, he stays at his condo in Trump Tower.

Yet when he goes to schools, as he frequently does to talk to students about how to achieve success, he tells them not to follow his path.

At his lowest point, he was homeless and caring for his 16-month-old son, the two of them spending some nights in the restroom of a subway station in Berkeley.

“I’m probably the worst role model anybody should have,” he said in an interview.

Today, Gardner, 45, is the Gardner in Gardner Rich Co., a brokerage that specializes in investing public employee pensions. His clients include the city of Los Angeles and the states of Alabama, Illinois and California. From his 60th-floor office, he can see the apartment building where he launched the business a decade ago.

As the business has grown, Gardner has begun sharing the wealth, giving $500,000 over the past four years to educational causes. He is a major sponsor of the National Teacher of the Year program and supports a Chicago program that provides disadvantaged youths with summer internships in financial firms.

Most recently, he gave $50,000 to the American Federation of Teachers to help produce a slick brochure that essentially appeals to students’ greed to persuade them to take tough courses, study hard and go to college.

On the cover of the booklet, called “Hard Work Pays,” are images of dollar bills and a picture of Gardner’s Ferrari. Written in an edgy, semi-hip tone, it is to be distributed to 100,000 seventh-graders nationwide, including those in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Kids have very high aspirations, but they have no idea what you have to do to get them met, and that’s what we’re talking about in this book,” said Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

From Hardship Came Success

Researchers have found a strong connection between taking advanced high school courses and college attendance, regardless of household income, gender or ethnicity.

Yet white students in California are more than twice as likely as black students and more than three times as likely as Latino students to take Advanced Placement tests. About 28% of African American graduates and 24% of Latino graduates in California in 1998 took all the courses required to enter the University of California; for whites, the figure was 40%, and for Asian American students it was 55%.

“Kids who came from where Chris Gardner came from are not usually living in an atmosphere in which they get pushed to do challenging work,” Feldman said.

As Gardner has gotten involved in educational causes, he has spent more time with students. And when he does, he says, he has two sales tools that help him get across his message to stay in school and study hard.

One is his undeniable success.

“The first question is always, ‘How much money do you make?’ ” Gardner said. “What that really means is, ‘Why should I listen to you?’ You mention some numbers to them, and they say, ‘Oh, OK.’ ”

The second tool is his own rags-to-riches story. It is an improbable tale of as many tough breaks as lucky ones, in which hard work and intelligence triumph over credentials and connections.

“I tell them, ‘If I can do it, you can do it. But you don’t have to do it the way I did,’ ” he said. “You can be a lot smarter about it.”

Gardner grew up in Milwaukee, where his mother was a schoolteacher. He got good grades in school, especially in math.

By the time he was in high school, he was distracted by the social disruptions of the late 1960s. He says now that he was America’s “first black hippie.”

His father wasn’t around--Gardner didn’t meet him until he was 28--but he had several uncles who had been in the military and had served in Korea, Europe or the Philippines.

Their stories inspired him to see the world, so he lied about his age and, at 17, enlisted in the Navy. Four years later, he mustered out and became a research lab assistant in San Francisco.

He later began selling medical and scientific equipment but, after meeting a stockbroker who drove a Ferrari and earned $80,000 a month, decided to change careers.

The transition was not smooth. After 10 months of interviews with brokerage firms, Gardner was finally promised a spot in a training program. He then quit his sales job.

But when he showed up to start, no one knew who he was. The man who had offered him the slot had been fired.

The 29-year-old began doing odd jobs to make ends meet but came home one day to find that his wife had left with their son and had taken all his belongings.

Sitting on the curb in front of the house trying to figure out what to do next, with his car double-parked nearby, a police car pulled up.

Gardner had $1,200 in unpaid parking tickets as well as several moving violations. Unable to pay the fines, he was sent to jail and the car was confiscated. That prevented him from showing up for a job interview he believed was his last chance to get into a training program for stockbrokers.

The Struggle to Make It

Rather than give up, he called and rescheduled the appointment. When he showed up, he was still wearing the bell-bottom jeans and sneakers he was wearing when he was arrested. Gardner was accepted into the program after telling the interviewer the truth.

He stayed on friends’ couches, then scraped together enough money for a boardinghouse. His wife soon reentered his life--just long enough to hand off his son, who was by then 16 months old.

Gardner and his son, also named Chris, would spend almost six months in homeless shelters. Each morning, Gardner would leave pushing his son’s stroller and carrying a duffel bag of baby clothes, a bag of diapers and his own suit over his shoulder as he made his way to the subway.

After dropping his son off at a day-care center, he would go to the training program and return to the shelter at night. Sometimes, though, there was no room, and he and his son spent several nights camped out inside a locked bathroom.

After he passed his licensing exam, Gardner began working 12 hours a day as a junior trader at Dean Witter, making 200 or more cold calls a day. Soon he was recruited by Bear Stearns & Co.

Marshall Geller was manager of five Bear Stearns offices at the time, including the one in San Francisco. Geller said Gardner’s desire to succeed and his work ethic made him stand out among the more than 1,800 employees he managed.

“We had a philosophy at the time,” said Geller, who later was a founder of Geller and Friend Capital Partners, a merchant bank on Los Angeles’ Westside. “We didn’t hire a lot of PhDs. We hired PSDs. They were guys who were poor, smart, with a deep desire to get rich. Chris was a perfect PSD.”

Even so, Gardner’s living situation was still uncertain. He was digging himself out of debt and trying to save money to move into an apartment. Some nights he would sleep under his desk, leaving his son with women who baby-sat in their homes.

Within two years, he transferred to New York, and two years after that moved to Chicago to start his own company.

That was 10 years ago and he is still in business, with 12 employees and a satellite office in New York. “That says more about what I am or who I am than anything else,” Gardner said. “I’m so focused on what I’m doing and making sure that I’m hitting the [revenue] number I’ve got to hit.”

He hasn’t been so focused that he didn’t make sure that his son took a more traditional path toward adulthood. His son is enrolled in a college in Charlotte and works during the summer in his father’s office. Gardner also has a 13-year-old daughter from a second marriage who lives with him.

“It was important for me to be there for my kids,” he said, given that he didn’t know his own father. “I had to break the cycle.”

He also has begun trying to play a positive role for other youths, trying to pass on the lessons he has learned.

But his message is to do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do.

The license plate on his Ferrari says: “Not M.J.” as in, “Not Michael Jordan.”

That has a double-meaning. As a tall, fabulously well dressed, fashionably bald and handsome black man, Gardner might easily be mistaken for a rich athlete.

The additional meaning, Gardner says, is this: “If I can convince one young, black guy, to forget Mike, be like Chris, that would be all right. . . . There’s other ways to get things besides sports.”

Richard O’Reilly, the Los Angeles Times director of computer analysis, contributed to this story.