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Rutledge slipped into depression. She thought of dropping out, a familiar option for teen mothers. Nationally, only 63 percent of teenagers who have babies before they reach 18 graduate from high school or get their GEDs, according to Planned Parenthood.

But then Rutledge meditated hard on the naysayers and her newborn - and the stay-in-school urgings of her mother, who says she had Rutledge when she was 18 - and used it all as motivation. She's had minimum-wage jobs, and didn't want a life stuck working the supermarket cash register. She's been sardined into public housing, and wanted a chance to own her own home, maybe in the suburbs, with a pool and a Jacuzzi. "Society always knocks kids who grow up in the projects," Rutledge says. "They think we can't do anything."

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