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

by Paul Tough

flawed conclusion—that racial differences on achievement tests are most likely the result of genetic differences between the races—The Bell Curve carried within it a very important new observation, which was that academic grades and achievement-test results are very good predictors of all kinds of outcomes in life: not just how far you’ll go in school and how much you’ll earn when you get out, but also whether you’ll commit crimes, whether you’ll take drugs, whether you’ll get married, and whether you’ll get divorced. What The Bell Curve showed was that kids who do well in school tend to do well in life, whether or not they come from poverty.

No Child Left Behind law, in 2001.

For the first time, the law forced states and cities and individual schools to compile detailed information on how their students were performing—and not just the student population as a whole but individual subgroups as well: minority students, low-income students, English-language learners. Once those numbers started coming in, the achievement gaps they reflected became impossible to avoid or deny. In every state, in every city, at every grade level, in almost every school, students from low-income homes were doing much worse than students from middle-class homes—they were two or three grade levels behind, on average, by the time they left middle school. And the achievement gap between rich and poor was getting worse every year.

Roxbury Prep in Boston,

syllogism

the schools could become a more powerful antipoverty tool than anything we had previously tried. It was a transformative idea. And it sparked a movement: the education-reform movement.

teacher quality.

cumulatively

Gates Foundation,

Measures of Effective Teaching

First, we don’t yet know how to reliably predict who will be a top-tier teacher in any given year. Sometimes teachers who seem to be failures suddenly make great strides with their students. Sometimes brilliant teachers suddenly go downhill.

cumulative positive effect on the performance of low-income students.

Maybe the effect fades out after a single year.

variations in teacher quality probably accounted for less than 10 percent of the gap between high- and low-performing students.

This is the downside to conflating the education debate with the poverty debate—you can get distracted from the real issue. You start thinking that the only important question is, How do we improve teacher quality?, when really that is just a small part of a much broader and more profound question: What can we as a country do to significantly improve the life chances of millions of poor children?

transcend

other obstacles to employment, such as disability, depression, or substance abuse.

high ACE

secure attachment relationships with caregivers that buffer the effects of stress and trauma;

this in turn means they likely have below-average executive-function skills and difficulty handling stressful situations. In the classroom, they are hampered by poor concentration, impaired social skills, an inability to sit still an...

No one has found a reliable way to help deeply disadvantaged children,

ad hoc

foster homes, juvenile detention centers, and probation officers.

Few of the agencies in this system are particularly well run or well staffed (there is no Teach for America equivalent sending in waves of eager and idealistic young college graduates to work in them), and their efforts are rarely well coordinated. For the children and families involved, dealing with these agencies tends to be frustrating and alienating and often humiliating. The system as a whole is extremely expensive and wildly inefficient, and it has a very low rate of success; almost no one who passes through it as a child graduates from college or achieves any of the other markers of a happy and successful life: a good career, an intact family, a stable home.

But we could design an entirely different system for children who are dealing with deep and pervasive adversity at home. It might start at a comprehensive pediatric wellness center, like the one that Nadine Burke Harris is now working to construct in Bayview−Hunters Point, with trauma-focused care and social-service support woven into every medical visit. It might continue with parenting interventions that increase the chance of secure a...

ones that challenge them to do high-level work.

supplemented by social and psychological and character-building interventions outside the classroom,

Turnaround for ...

OneGoal

KIPP Through College

a program that directs them toward higher education and tries to prepare them for college not only academically but als...

A coordinated system like that, targeted at the 10 to 15 percent of students at the highest risk of failure, would be expensive, there’s no doubt. But it would almost certainly be cheaper than the ad hoc system we have in place now. It would save not ...