Historically, schools have been designed with a Eurocentric vision of what counts as education, smartness, and success (Collins, 1991; Hatt, 2012, 2007; Luttrell, 1997). Deliberately and inadvertently, this schooling design has been used to regulate black and brown bodies in the US, from the miseducation of Indigenous people (Grande, 2004), to the school-to-prison pipeline (Ferguson, 2001), to English only education (Macedo, 2000). This regulation also differentially allocates educational opportunity and the rewards that stem from this opportunity. In this study, the author shows how the mothering students' transformation within a validating alternative school expands the definition of what counts as smartness, to include a broader engagement with schooling. The teen moms are able to demonstrate different ways to be smart (Hatt, 2012, 2007), and they are rewarded for it. Thus, this study analyzes the educational lives of teen mothers of Mexican-origin, through a feminist standpoint lens (Collins, 1991; Smith, 1989), to understand how the young women reinvent themselves, and in effect reinvent notions of competence and smartness through motherhood. In doing so, this article responds to issues of equity in education by pointing out what must change in mainstream schooling at a structural and cultural level (Collins & Bilge, 2016) from the point of view of some of the most marginalized students (Watson & Vogel, 2017).