by Paul Tough
11. Quantifying Character
As they began consulting with Angela Duckworth and her colleagues on character, David Levin and Dominic Randolph were easily persuaded that self-control and grit were essential character strengths for their students. Yet those didn’t seem like the only strengths that mattered. Seligman and Peterson’s full list of twenty-four, however, felt too unwieldy, too difficult to turn into a practical system of instruction for their schools. So Levin and Randolph asked Peterson if he could narrow the list down to a more manageable handful, and Peterson identified a set of strengths that were, according to his research, especially likely to predict life satisfaction and high achievement. After a few small adjustments, they settled on a final list of seven:
grit
self-control
zest
social intelligence
gratitude
optimism
curiosity
Over the next year and a half, Duckworth worked with Levin and Randolph to turn the list of seven strengths into a two-page evaluation tool, a questionnaire that could be completed by teachers or by parents or by the students themselves. For each strength, teachers suggested a variety of possible indicators, statements much like the twelve indicators Duckworth chose for her grit questionnaire, and she road-tested several dozen of them at Riverdale and KIPP, asking teachers to rate students and students to rate themselves on a five-point scale for each indicator. She eventually settled on the twenty-four most statistically reliable indicators, from “This student is eager to explore new things” (an indicator of curiosity) to “This student believes that effort will improve his or her future” (optimism).
For Levin, the next step was clear. Back in 2007, at a small, invitation-only conference on positive psychology that Randolph organized at Lawrenceville, he had hit on the idea of grading KIPP students on character in the same way they were graded on math and science and history. Wouldn’t it be cool, Levin had mused at the time, if each student graduated from school with not only a GPA but also a CPA (for character point average)? If you were a college-admissions director or a corporate human-resources manager selecting entry-level employees, wouldn’t you like to know which ones had scored highest in grit or optimism or zest? And if you were a parent of a KIPP student, wouldn’t you want to know how your son or daughter stacked up against the rest of the class in character as well as in reading ability? For Levin, the answer to all these questions was a clear yes, and as soon as he got the final list of indicators from Duckworth and Peterson, he started working to turn it into a specific, concise assessment that he could hand out to students and parents at KIPP’s New York City schools twice a year: the first-ever character report card.
Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” he explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”
Still, he did agree with Levin that the inventory Duckworth and Peterson had compiled could be a useful tool in communicating with students about character. And so he took what one Riverdale teacher described to me as a “viral approach” to spreading the idea of this new method of assessing character throughout the Riverdale community. He talked about character at parent nights, asked pointed questions in staff meetings, connected like-minded members of his faculty and encouraged them to come up with new programs. In the winter of 2011, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grade took the twenty-four-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The staff discussed the results, but they weren’t shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren’t labeled report cards.
Randolph’s deliberate pace is in part a consequence of his personal style—he enjoys what he calls the dialogic process, meandering conversations that gradually change people’s minds. It also has a lot to do with the culture of Riverdale, a school where teachers are hired not for any particular interest in pedagogy but for their mastery of the content of their field. “Teachers come here because they want to have a level of independence,” Randolph explained. “In theory, I could probably say, ‘We’re just going to do this, and that’s the way it is.’ But everybody would say, ‘Get lost.’”
As I spent time at Riverdale, though, it became apparent to me that the debate over character at the school wasn’t just about how best to evaluate and improve students’ character and how quickly to adopt new ways of doing so. It went deeper than that, to the question of what character really meant. When Randolph arrived at Riverdale, the school already had in place a character-education program of a sort. Called CARE, for Children Aware of Riverdale Ethics, the program was adopted in 1988 in the lower school, which at Riverdale means kindergarten through fifth grade. It is a blueprint for a certain kind of well-mannered niceness, mandating that students “treat everyone with respect” and “be aware of other people’s feelings and find ways to help those whose feelings have been hurt.” Posters in the hallway remind students of the virtues related to CARE (PRACTICE GOOD MANNERS; AVOID GOSSIPING; HELP OTHERS). In the lower school, many teachers describe it proudly as an essential part of what makes Riverdale the school that it is.
When I asked Randolph about CARE, he grimaced, a revolutionary forced to tip his cap to tradition. “I see the character strengths as CARE 2.0,” he explained delicately. “I’d basically like to take all of this new character language and say that we’re in the next generation of CARE.”
In fact, the character-strength approach of Seligman and Peterson isn’t an expansion of programs like CARE; if anything, it is a repudiation of them. In 2008, a national organization called the Character Education Partnership published a paper that divided character education into two categories: programs that develop “moral character,” which embodies ethical values like fairness, generosity, and integrity; and those that address “performance character,” which includes values like effort, diligence, and perseverance. The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, but the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin chose for their schools leaned much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence, and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.
The two teachers Randolph chose to oversee the school’s character initiative were K. C. Cohen, the guidance counselor for the middle and upper schools, and Karen Fierst, a learning specialist in the lower school. Cohen was friendly and thoughtful, in her mid-thirties, a graduate of Fieldston, the private school just down the road from Riverdale. She was intensely interested in character development, and, like Randolph, she was worried about the character of Riverdale students. But she was not convinced by the seven character strengths that Riverdale had chosen. “When I think of good character, I think, ‘Are you fair? Are you honest in dealings with other people? Are you a cheater?’” she told me. “I don’t think so much about ‘Are you tenacious? Are you a hard worker?’ I think, ‘Are you a good person?’”
Cohen’s vision of character was much closer to moral character than performance character, and during the months I visited Riverdale, that vision remained the dominant one. When I spent a day at the school in the late winter of 2011, sitting in on a variety of classes and meetings, messages about behavior and values were everywhere, but those messages stayed almost entirely in the moral dimension. It was a hectic day at the middle school—it was pajama day, plus there was a morning assembly, and then on top of that, the kids who were going on the two-week class trip to Bordeaux for spring break had to leave early in order to make their overnight flight to Paris. The topic for the assembly was heroes, and half a dozen stud
ents stood up in front of their classmates—about three hundred and fifty kids in all—and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen: Ruby Nell Bridges, the African American girl who was part of the first group to integrate the schools in New Orleans in 1960; Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor whose self-immolation had helped spark the recent revolt in that country; the actor and activist Paul Robeson; the boxer Manny Pacquiao.
In the assembly, in classes, and in conversations with different students, I heard a lot of talk about values and ethics, and the values that were emphasized tended to be social values: inclusion, tolerance, diversity. (I heard a lot more about black history at Riverdale than I did at the KIPP schools I visited.) A photo exhibit at one end of the school’s gorgeous sunlight-drenched cafeteria featured portraits of pointedly diverse families—gay couples, blind parents, mixed-race families, adopted kids. One eighth-grade girl I asked about character said that for her and her friends, the biggest issue was inclusion—who was invited to whose bat mitzvah; who was being shunned on Facebook. Character, as far as I could tell, was defined at Riverdale mostly in terms of helping other people—or at least not hurting their feelings. I heard much less talk about how possessing character strengths might help a person lead a more successful life.
Yet Randolph told me that he had concerns about a character program that didn’t go beyond those kinds of nice-guy values. “The danger with character is if you just revert to these general terms—respect, honesty, tolerance—it seems really vague,” he said. “If I stand in front of the kids and just say, ‘It’s really important for you to respect each other,’ I think they glaze over. But if you say, ‘Well, actually you need to exhibit self-control,’ or you explain the value of social intelligence—this will help you collaborate more effectively—then it seems a bit more tangible.”
When I spoke to Karen Fierst, the teacher who was overseeing the character project for the Riverdale lower school, she said she was worried that it would be a challenge to convince the students and their parents that there was anything in the twenty-four character strengths that might actually benefit them. For KIPP kids, she said, the notion that character could help them get through college was a powerful lure, one that would motivate them to take the strengths seriously. For kids at Riverdale, though, there was no question that they were going to graduate from college. “It will just happen,” Fierst explained. “It happened to every generation in their family before them. And so it’s harder to get them to invest in this idea. For KIPP students, learning these strengths is partly about trying to demystify what makes other people successful—kind of like, ‘We’re letting you in on the secret of what successful people are like.’ But kids here already live in a successful community. They’re not depending on their teachers to give them the information on how to be successful.”
12. Affluence
Dwight Vidale teaches English to middle- and high-school students at Riverdale. He is a Riverdale alumnus, class of 2001, and as an African American, he is something of a rarity in the Riverdale faculty lounge; when I met him, he was the only black teacher at the high school. Vidale grew up in the Bronx and was raised by his mother, a secretary, and his stepfather, an electrician. He came to Riverdale in high school, a scholarship kid, and though he loved the school’s vast resources and the academic challenge of the classes, he told me, the wealth of his white classmates was hard to get used to. In ninth grade, he was paired with a girl in his class on a school project, and she invited him to her family’s home on the Upper East Side to work on it. “I will never forget walking into her apartment,” he told me. “I was just blown away by the opulence.” That experience, he said, made him keep some distance between himself and many of his classmates. In all his years at Riverdale, he told me, he never invited his white friends to his house. He felt his life was just too different from theirs.
Now, teaching kids growing up amid similar wealth, Vidale finds he has a more nuanced view of affluent childhoods. Though he came from what he calls “very humble beginnings,” he drew strength from the fact that his mother was always in his corner, always there when he needed to talk. Many of his students seem to have more distant relationships with their parents. He sees a lot of what the Riverdale staff call helicopter parents—“always hovering around, ready to swoop in for the rescue”—but, he said, “that doesn’t mean they’re making emotional connections with their kids, or even spending time with their kids.”
On one professional-development day when I was at Riverdale, Dominic Randolph arranged a screening for his entire faculty of Race to Nowhere, a movie about the stresses facing mostly privileged American high-school students that had become an underground hit in many wealthy suburbs, where one-time showings at schools, churches, and community centers were bringing out hundreds or even thousands of concerned parents. The movie paints a grim portrait of contemporary adolescence, rising to an emotional crescendo with the story of an overachieving teenage girl who committed suicide, apparently because of the ever-increasing pressure to succeed that she felt both at school and at home. At Riverdale, the film seemed to have a powerful effect on many of the staff; one teacher came up to Randolph afterward with tears in her eyes.
Race to Nowhere has helped to coalesce a growing movement of psychologists and educators who believe that the systems and methods in place to raise and educate well-off kids in the United States are in fact devastating them. One of the central figures in the movie is Madeline Levine, a psychologist in Marin County who is the author of a bestselling book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. In her book, Levine cites a variety of studies and surveys to back up her contention that children of affluent parents now exhibit “unexpectedly high rates of emotional problems beginning in junior high school.” This is no accident of demographics, Levine says; it is a direct result of the child-rearing practices that prevail in well-off American homes. Wealthy parents today, she argues, are more likely than others to be emotionally distant from their children while at the same time insisting on high levels of achievement, a potentially toxic blend of influences that can create “intense feelings of shame and hopelessness” in affluent children.
Levine’s book draws on research done by Suniya Luthar, a psychology professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who for the past decade or so has made a specialty of researching the specific psychological challenges of children growing up in affluence. (She attended the Lawrenceville conference in 2007 at Randolph’s invitation.) When Luthar began her research, she was interested primarily in the problems of low-income adolescents. But in the late 1990s, she decided she needed to find a comparison group to help her better understand how the patterns she was seeing in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods compared to those of less troubled demographic groups. And so she undertook a study comparing more than two hundred mostly white, mostly wealthy suburban tenth-graders with a similar number of mostly African American, low-income urban tenth-grade students. To Luthar’s surprise, she found the affluent teenagers used alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, and harder illegal drugs more than the low-income teens. Thirty-five percent of the suburban girls had tried all four substances, compared with just 15 percent of the inner-city girls. The wealthy girls in Luthar’s survey also suffered from elevated rates of depression; 22 percent of them reported clinically significant symptoms.
Luthar was soon asked to consult at another middle school in an even more affluent town, where she followed a cohort of middle-school students for several years. About a fifth of these high-income students, she found, had multiple persistent problems, including substance use, high levels of depression and anxiety, and chronic academic difficulties. This time, in addition to collecting information about psychological distress and delinquent behavior, Luthar polled students on their relationships with their parents. She found that parenting mattered at both socioeconomic extremes. For both rich and poor
teenagers, certain family characteristics predicted children’s maladjustment, including low levels of maternal attachment, high levels of parental criticism, and minimal afterschool adult supervision. Among the affluent children, Luthar found, the main cause of distress was “excessive achievement pressures and isolation from parents —both physical and emotional.”
Dan Kindlon, an assistant professor of child psychology at Harvard, found further evidence of the specific pressures on well-off children in a nationwide survey of affluent families he conducted for a book he published in 2000. Like Luthar, Kindlon discovered disproportionately high levels of anxiety and depression among wealthy students, especially in adolescence, and he found that the emotional disconnection that existed between many affluent parents and their children often meant that the parents were unusually indulgent of their children’s bad behavior. In Kindlon’s survey, parents making more than one million dollars a year were, by a wide margin, the group most likely to say that they were less strict than their own parents.