How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

by Paul Tough

Perry Preschool.

glancingly,

their IQ scores were no better than the control group’s.

resonated

Compared to the control group, the Perry students were more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be employed at age twenty-seven, more likely to be earning more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year at age forty, less likely ever to have been arrested, and less likely to have spent time on welfare.

reports from teachers in elementary school rating both the treatment and the control children on “personal behavior” and “social development.” The first term tracked how often each student swore, lied, stole, or was absent or late; the second one rated each student’s level of curiosity as well as his or her relationships with classmates and teachers. Heckman labeled these noncognitive skills, because they were entirely distinct from IQ. And after three years of careful analysis, Heckman and his researchers were able to ascertain that those noncognitive factors, such as curiosity, self-control, and social fluidity, were responsible for as much as two-thirds of the total benefit that Perry gave its students.

rootless, unsettled childhood.

“I didn’t really have a family family,” Kewauna told me the first time we spoke. We were sitting in a coffee shop in the Kenwood neighborhood. It was the middle of a harsh Chicago winter, and the windows were fogged over. Kewauna has dark skin, big, sympathetic eyes, and straight, dark hair, and she sat forward, warming her hands on a foam-topped mug of hot chocolate. “I was scattered all over the place, no father, with my grandma sometimes. It was all messed up. Jacked up.”

At the end of her freshman year, her GPA was a miserable 1.8. By the middle of her sophomore year, it had climbed to 3.4.

Or was there something deep within her own character that inclined her toward the idea of hard work and success,

How do our experiences in childhood make us the adults we become? It is one of the great human questions, the theme of countless novels, biographies, and memoirs; the subject of several centuries’ worth of philosophical and psychological treatises.

arbitrary

capricious;

preor...

trans...

We haven’t managed to solve these problems because we’ve been looking for solutions in the wrong places.

start over with some fundamental questions about how parents affect their children; how human skills develop; how character is formed.

ambitious

perv...

mysteries of life: Who succeeds and who fails? Why do some children thrive while others lose their way? And what can any of us do to steer an individual child—or a whole generation ...

illicit romance

supplement

meager

looking for new strategies:

looking for a whole new playbook.

intently

He introduced a restructuring plan for Fenger that included hiring an outside contractor to coach the school’s teachers in reading and writing instruction. He created a freshman academy at the school, a separate, dedicated floor where incoming students would get special attention for their entire freshman year. In 1999, he created a math-and-science academy at the school, complete with a $525,000 NASA-sponsored science lab. Two years later, he made Fenger a magnet school, specializing in technology.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,

High School Transformation,

eighty million.)

illustrious:

But throughout all of the two men’s well-intentioned and often quite expensive reforms in Chicago, the grim statistics from Fenger High School stayed more or less where they had been in 1995: Between half and two-thirds of each incoming freshman class dropped out before the end of senior year.

New Leaders for New Schools,

Most of the new teachers were young, ambitious, and non-tenured, which meant they would be relatively easy for Dozier to replace if they didn’t measure up to her standards.

A quarter of the female students were either pregnant or already teenage mothers, she said. And when I asked her to estimate how many of her students lived with both biological parents, a quizzical look came over her face. “I can’t think of one,” she replied. “But I know we have them.”

in 2008, eighty-three school-age teenagers were murdered in the city, and more than six hundred were shot but survived.

adjudicate.

afterschool programs in anger management and trauma counseling

began to refer to counseling not just students but their families as well.

mentoring p...

not her students’ academic deficits, though those remained acute and distressing, but a deeper set of problems, born out of her students’ troubled and often traumatic home lives, that made it difficult for them to get through each day.

remediate

Many of the children she saw in the clinic seemed depressed or anxious, and some of them were downright traumatized, and the stress of their daily lives expressed itself in a variety of symptoms, from panic attacks to eating disorders to suicidal behavior.

symposiums

social issues—the province of economists and sociologists—are actually best analyzed and addressed on the molecular level, down deep in the realm of human biology.

medical-journal article that Whitney Clarke,

“The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead.”

Vincent F...

Adverse Childhood Experiences

ACE