She said that students will often get their first taste of failure in the ninth grade, and that teachers almost seemed to relish delivering it, in a tough-love kind of way. “Teachers thought that the kids [who failed] would think, ‘I need to work harder,’ ” Duncan said. “Sometimes that happens. But the majority of fourteen-year-olds, if they fail, interpret that as: ‘I don’t belong, I’m not good enough.’ They withdraw.”
