by Paul Tough
K. C. Cohen told me that she and other teachers at Riverdale have talked a lot about affluence and its potentially detrimental effect on students’ character development; in fact, she brought Kindlon to Riverdale to speak to students and teachers on the subject. Both Cohen and Fierst told me that many parents at Riverdale, while pushing their children to excel, inadvertently shield them from exactly the kind of experience that can lead to character growth. As Fierst put it, “Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it okay for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens.”
Cohen explained that in the middle school, “If a kid is a C student, and their parents think that they’re all A’s, we do get a lot of pushback: ‘What are you talking about? This is a great paper!’ We have parents calling in and saying, for their kids, ‘Can’t you just give them two more days on this paper?’ Overindulging kids, with the intention of giving them everything and being loving, but at the expense of their character—that’s huge in our population. I think that’s one of the biggest problems we have at Riverdale.”
This is an issue for all parents, of course, not just affluent ones. It is a central paradox of contemporary parenting, in fact: we have an acute, almost biological impulse to provide for our children, to give them everything they want and need, to protect them from dangers and discomforts both large and small. And yet we know—on some level, at least—that what kids need more than anything is a little hardship: some challenge, some deprivation that they can overcome, even if just to prove to themselves that they can. As a parent, you struggle with these thorny questions every day, and if you make the right call even half the time, you’re lucky. But it’s one thing to acknowledge this dilemma in the privacy of your own home; it’s quite another to have it addressed in public, at a school where you send your kids at great expense.
This is the problem that Randolph is up against at Riverdale as he tries to propel this new kind of conversation about character forward. When you work at a public school, whether it’s a charter or a traditional public school, you’re paid by the state, responsible, on some level, to your fellow citizens for the job you do preparing your students to join the adult world. When you work at a private school like Riverdale, though, you are always conscious that you’re working for the parents who pay the tuition. Which makes a campaign like the one that Randolph is trying to launch all the more complicated. If your premise is that your students are lacking in deep traits like grit and gratitude and self-control, you’re implicitly criticizing the parenting they’ve received—which means you’re implicitly criticizing your employers.
Although they would almost certainly not express it this way, wealthy parents choose a school like Riverdale for their children, at least in part, as a risk-management strategy. If you look at the list of successful Riverdale alumni, you’ll see some impressive names on it—Carly Simon, Chevy Chase, Robert Krulwich, the governor of Pennsylvania, and the junior U.S. senator from Connecticut—but for a school that has been producing highly privileged graduates for 104 years, it boasts very few real world-changers. (Sorry, Chevy.) Traditionally, the purpose of a school like Riverdale is not to raise the ceiling on a child’s potential achievement in life but to raise the floor, to give him the kinds of connections and credentials that will make it very hard for him ever to fall out of the upper class. What Riverdale offers parents, above all else, is a high probability of nonfailure.
The problem, as Randolph has realized, is that the best way for a young person to build character is for him to attempt something where there is a real and serious possibility of failure. In a high-risk endeavor, whether it’s in business or athletics or the arts, you are more likely to experience colossal defeat than in a low-risk one—but you’re also more likely to achieve real and original success. “The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
David Levin says that this is one area where he believes KIPP students have an advantage over their peers at Riverdale. “The day-to-day challenges that our kids go through to obtain an education are very, very different than the day-to-day challenges of the kids who go to Riverdale,” he told me. “As a result, the grit of our students is significantly higher in many respects than the grit of the students who go to Riverdale.”
As Karen Fierst observed, most Riverdale students can see before them a clear path to a certain type of success. They’ll go to college, they’ll graduate, they’ll get well-paying jobs—and if they fall along the way, their families will almost certainly catch them, often well into their twenties or even thirties if necessary. But despite these students’ many advantages, Randolph isn’t convinced that the education they are currently receiving at Riverdale or the support they are receiving at home will provide them with the skills to negotiate the path to the deeper success that Seligman and Peterson hold up as the ultimate product of good character: a happy, meaningful, productive life. Randolph wants his students to succeed, of course—it’s just that he believes that in order for them to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.
13. Discipline
“At KIPP, we’ve always said that character is just as important as academics,” Tom Brunzell was saying. It was six o’clock on a warm Wednesday night in October, and Brunzell was standing at the front of a large auditorium pitching the character report card to an audience of KIPP parents. “We think that even if your children have the academic skills they need—and we’re doing our best to make sure they do—if our young adults grow up and they don’t also have strong character skills, then they don’t have very much. Because we know that character is what keeps people happy and successful and fulfilled.”
Brunzell, who was in his mid-thirties, was the dean of students at KIPP Infinity middle school; it was the third KIPP school in New York City when it opened, in 2005, on one floor of the Roberto Clemente Middle School on West 133rd Street, across from a giant city bus depot. As Infinity’s resident disciplinarian, Brunzell had a very effective stern side, but on this night, he was all smiles, dressed in a pressed button-down shirt and a tie and crisp jeans, looking a little nervous as he clicked his way through the PowerPoint slides on his laptop that were projected on a screen behind him. Brunzell had become the person in the KIPP organization most directly responsible for the character report card; he chaired the monthly meetings of what had come to be called the KIPP/Riverdale character working group. In many ways, though, he was an unusual choice for the job—he had come to KIPP as something of a conscientious objector, an outspoken critic of its system of discipline.
From KIPP’s earliest days, Levin and Feinberg, the founders, were famous—and infamous—for regulating student behavior in direct and often intense ways, prescribing precisely how students should sit and talk and pay attention and walk through the halls. In Sweating the Small Stuff, David Whitman wrote that “paternalistic” schools like KIPP’s “tell students exactly how they are expected to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance.” In Jay Mathews’s account of the founding of KIPP, Work Hard. Be Nice, he describes some of Levin’s harsher moments of discipline, like the time Levin caught a student throwing a wadded-up piece of paper. Levin sat the offender on a chair at the front of the class, put a garbage can on the floor in front of him, and told the other students they were free to throw in the garbage any stray pieces of paper they could find—some of which narrowly missed the student. (Mathews says that Levin later regretted that incident.)
When Brunzell arrived at KIPP Infinity, in 2005, he was completing a graduate degree at Bank Street College, a school of education known for its progressive bent. His thesis, which he researched and wr
ote in his first year and a half working at Infinity, was a thorough critique of the school’s discipline regime. Infinity’s “compliance-based” system “models an atmosphere of punitive dependence,” Brunzell wrote, “which ultimately negates student decision-making.” As a result, he noted, KIPP Infinity students often demonstrated the shallowest kind of good conduct—not contemplating in a deep way the consequences of their actions but ostentatiously behaving well when teachers were watching and then trying to get away with as much as possible as soon as the teachers’ backs were turned.
Though Brunzell was calling into question some of the fundamental elements of the KIPP tradition, he received a surprisingly encouraging response from both Levin and Joseph Negron, the young principal of Infinity, which in its first year achieved remarkable results, even by KIPP standards. The school opened with just a fifth-grade class, recruited from the housing projects and bodegas of West Harlem and Washington Heights and chosen by random lottery. Only 24 percent of the incoming students had passed the state’s fourth-grade English test at their previous public schools; just 35 percent had mastered the fourth-grade math standards. But after a year at KIPP, 81 percent passed the fifth-grade English test and 99 percent passed the fifth-grade math test. And yet, Negron told me, he agreed with Brunzell that things at Infinity weren’t quite right that first year. “We had kids who were doing the right thing for the wrong reasons,” he said. “We didn’t have that many student issues, and we had good results, which was great. But we just didn’t feel like we were the type of school where we were creating happy and fulfilled lives.”
When I met Brunzell, in the fall of 2010, he had been at KIPP Infinity for more than five years, and over that time Infinity had changed, partly in response to his criticisms. Punishments were less severe and of shorter duration, and discipline conversations between students and administrators, though still often intense, were conducted less publicly and with more emphasis on making sure students felt heard and respected. The character report card was, for Brunzell, a critical part of those reforms, providing a different structure for conversations about behavior, one that allowed for deeper reflection and, potentially, more growth.
At the same time, Brunzell had tempered some of his original critique. He told me he had come to appreciate some of the elements of the KIPP behavior-modification system that had once struck him as overly authoritarian. One example was SLANT, a set of classroom habits that KIPP students were drilled on at the beginning of fifth grade, their first year at KIPP. For Brunzell, SLANT, which stands for Sit up, Listen, Ask questions, Nod, and Track the speaker with your eyes, was a useful way to teach code-switching, the ability, highly prized at KIPP and at many other low-income urban schools, to recognize and accurately perform the behaviors appropriate to each different cultural setting. It’s okay to be street on the street, according to the theory of code-switching, but if you’re in a museum or a college interview or a nice restaurant, you need to know exactly how to act or you’re going to miss out on important opportunities. “At KIPP, we are teaching the professional code of behavior, the college code of behavior, the cultural-dominant code of behavior,” Brunzell said, “and we have to teach that every moment of the day.”
This is an area where KIPP’s teachers and Riverdale’s diverged especially sharply. K. C. Cohen, the Riverdale guidance counselor, told me that over the course of the school year, she had perceived a growing disagreement between the two schools over certain indicators on the character report card. It wasn’t that she and other Riverdale teachers valued strengths like self-control less than the folks at KIPP did, she said. It was just that they were beginning to realize that they might define those strengths differently. “If you’re showing self-control at KIPP, for example, you sit up straight and you track the teachers,” she explained. “Here, you can sit in a ball in your chair, and no one cares. We don’t care if you lie on the floor.”
As we spoke in her office, Cohen read through the list of twenty-four indicators on KIPP’s character report card and mentioned a few others that she thought would resonate differently at each school. “Take ‘Student is polite to adults and peers,’” she said (an indicator for self-control). “That’s great, but at Riverdale, kids come up to me and pat me on the back and say, ‘Hey, K.C.!’ And that’s okay. At KIPP, though, teachers are always Mr. This and Mrs. That. There’s a sort of formality.” It’s the confusing thing about code-switching: the kids who are actually part of the dominant culture don’t necessarily act like it at school—or perhaps it is more accurate to say that at a school like Riverdale, slouching and wearing your shirt untucked and goofing around with teachers is dominant-culture behavior.
“We have kids who have to chew gum because they’re so hyperactive,” Cohen went on. “They chew gum, and it calms them down. You would never allow that at KIPP. It’s almost like, we assume our kids already have manners here, so if they need to sit funny in their chair, that’s okay. Whereas at KIPP, it’s like, No, no, no, everyone has to conform, because the conformity is supposed to help them succeed.”
It’s true that gum-chewing is a transgression at KIPP—but it’s also true that as a result of KIPP’s ongoing conversation about character development, some teachers have found a way to make discussions about an infraction like gum-chewing into something more meaningful than a simple matter of conformity. A couple of days before my talk with Cohen, I spoke to Sayuri Stabrowski, a thirty-year-old seventh- and eighth-grade reading teacher at KIPP Infinity, and she mentioned that she had caught a girl chewing gum in her class earlier that day. “She denied it,” Stabrowski told me. “She said, ‘No, I’m not, I’m chewing my tongue.’” Stabrowski rolled her eyes as she told me the story. “I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ Then later in the class, I saw her chewing again, and I said, ‘You’re chewing gum! I see you.’ She said, ‘No, I’m not, see?’ and she moved the gum over in her mouth in this really obvious way, and we all saw what she was doing. Now, a couple of years ago, I probably would have blown my top and screamed. But this time, I was able to say, ‘Gosh, not only were you chewing gum, which is kind of minor, but you lied to me twice. That’s a real disappointment. What does that say about your character?’ And she was just devastated.”
Stabrowski was worried that the girl, who often struggled with her behavior, might have a mini-meltdown—a baby attack, in KIPP jargon—in the middle of the class, but in fact, the girl spit out her gum and sat through the rest of the class and then afterward came up to her teacher with tears in her eyes. “We had a long conversation,” Stabrowski told me. “She said, ‘I’m trying so hard to just grow up. But nothing ever changes!’ And I said, ‘Do you know what does change? You didn’t have a baby attack in front of the other kids, and two weeks ago, you would have.’”
To Tom Brunzell, what is going on in a moment like that isn’t academic instruction at all, or even discipline; it’s therapy. Specifically, it’s a kind of cognitive-behavioral therapy, the practical psychological technique that provides the theoretical underpinning for the whole positive psychology field. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, involves using the conscious mind to recognize negative or self-destructive thoughts or interpretations and to (sometimes literally) talk yourself into a better perspective.
“The kids who succeed at KIPP are the ones who can CBT themselves in the moment,” Brunzell told me. As he saw it, part of the job for him and the other KIPP teachers was giving their students the tools to do that. “All kids this age are having mini-implosions every day,” he said. “I mean, it’s middle school, the worst years of their lives. But the kids who make it are the ones who can tell themselves, ‘I can rise above this little situation. I’m okay. Tomorrow is a new day.’”
14. Good Habits
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is just one example of what psychologists call metacognition, an umbrella term that means, broadly, thinking about thinking. And one way to look at the character report card is as a giant metacognitive strategy. One of the things that fi
rst appealed to David Levin about Learned Optimism, in fact, was Martin Seligman’s assertion that the most fruitful time to transform pessimistic children into optimistic ones was “before puberty, but late enough in childhood so that they are metacognitive (capable of thinking about thinking)”—in other words, right around when students arrive at a KIPP middle school. Talking about character, thinking about character, evaluating character: these are all metacognitive processes.
But Angela Duckworth believes that thinking and talking about character isn’t enough, especially for adolescents. It’s one thing to know abstractly that you need to improve your grit or your zest or your self-control. It’s another thing to actually have the tools to do so. This is the flip side of the distinction Duckworth draws between motivation and volition, or willpower. Just as a strong will doesn’t help much if a student isn’t motivated to succeed, so motivation alone is insufficient without the volitional fortitude to follow through on goals. Duckworth is now trying to help young people develop those volitional tools—a project that is in many ways an extension of her work with Walter Mischel studying the strategies kids used to resist the lure of the marshmallow—and one fall day, I sat in on a professional-development workshop that she led for teachers at KIPP Infinity to brief them on a specific nuts-and-bolts metacognitive strategy that she had tested, over the course of a school year, with the fifth-grade students there.
The intervention, which goes by the rather clunky name of Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions, or MCII, was developed by NYU psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues. Oettingen discovered in her research that people tend to use three strategies when they are setting goals and that two of those strategies don’t work very well. Optimists favor indulging, which means imagining the future they’d like to achieve (for a middle-school student, that might mean getting an A in math next year) and vividly envisioning all the good things that will go along with it—the praise, the self-satisfaction, the future success. Oettingen found that indulging feels really good when you’re doing it—it can trigger a nice dopamine surge—but it doesn’t correlate at all with actual achievement.