by Paul Tough
Kewauna’s grades actually improved in her second semester, and at the end of her freshman year, her cumulative GPA stood at 3.8. There were still three years to go, lots of time for things to go wrong, for setbacks and mistakes and crises. But Kewauna seemed certain of where she was heading and why—almost unnervingly so. What was most remarkable to me about Kewauna was that she was able to marshal her prodigious noncognitive capacity—call it grit, conscientiousness, resilience, or the ability to delay gratification—all for a distant prize that was, for her, almost entirely theoretical. She didn’t actually know any business ladies with briefcases downtown; she didn’t even know any college graduates except her teachers. It was as if Kewauna were taking part in an extended, high-stakes version of Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, except in this case, the choice on offer was that she could have one marshmallow now or she could work really hard for four years, constantly scrimping and saving, staying up all night, struggling, sacrificing—and then get, not two marshmallows, but some kind of elegant French pastry she’d only vaguely heard of, like a Napoleon. And Kewauna, miraculously, opted for the Napoleon, even though she’d never tasted one before and didn’t know anyone who had. She just had faith that it was going to be delicious.
Not all of Kewauna’s fellow OneGoal students are going to take to the deal with the same conviction. And it won’t be clear for another couple of years whether the leadership skills Kewauna and her classmates were taught are powerful enough to get them through four years of college. But so far, OneGoal’s overall persistence numbers are quite good. Of the 129 students, including Kewauna, who started OneGoal as juniors at ten Chicago high schools in the fall of 2009, ninety-four were enrolled in four-year colleges as of May 2012. Another fourteen were enrolled in two-year colleges, for an overall college-persistence total of 84 percent. Which left only twenty-one students who had veered off the track to a college degree: twelve who left OneGoal before the end of high school, two who joined the military after high school, two who graduated from high school but didn’t enroll in college, and five who enrolled in college but dropped out in their freshman year. The numbers are less stellar but still impressive for the pilot-program cohort, students for whom OneGoal was a weekly afterschool class. Three years out of high school, 66 percent of the students who enrolled in the program as high-school juniors are still enrolled in college. Those numbers grow more significant when you recall that OneGoal teachers are deliberately selecting struggling students who seem especially unlikely to go to college.
Jeff Nelson would be the first to admit that what he has created is far from a perfect solution for the widespread dysfunction of the country’s human-capital pipeline. Ideally, we should have in place an education and social-support system that produces teenagers from the South Side who aren’t regularly two or three or four years behind grade level. For now, though, OneGoal and the theories that underlie it seem like a most valuable intervention, a program that, for about fourteen hundred dollars a year per student, regularly turns underperforming, undermotivated, low-income teenagers into successful college students.
5. A Better Path
1. Dropping Out
In the fall of 1985, when I was a freshman at Columbia University, at the same precarious stage of life as Kewauna Lerma in the fall of 2011, I did something Kewauna is determined never to do: I dropped out of college. It felt at the time like a weighty and fateful choice, and it still does. It is a decision, in fact, that I have revisited many times over the last twenty-five years, often with regret. I certainly thought about it a lot while reporting this book. When I was sitting in room 104 of ACE Tech Charter High School with Kewauna and the rest of Michele Stefl’s OneGoal class, I would sometimes feel a little ashamed, to be honest: graduating from college was such a consuming goal for those students, and I often wished that when I was their age, I had thought as hard and as responsibly as they were doing about what I wanted from my college experience.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that many of the researchers I’ve written about in this book—everyone from James Heckman to Angela Duckworth to Melissa Roderick to the authors of Crossing the Finish Line—have identified dropping out of high school or college as a symptom of substandard noncognitive ability: low grit, low perseverance, bad planning skills. And I think it’s true that I was lacking in some of those important skills when I made my decision to leave. But my reporting for this book has also provided me with a more generous way to interpret my choice. It came in my conversations with Dominic Randolph, the head of the Riverdale Country School, who made a persuasive case that failure—or at least the real risk of failure—could often be a crucial step on the road to success. Randolph was worried, you’ll recall, that his mostly affluent students, caught up in the modern American meritocratic machine of private schools, private tutors, Ivy League colleges, and safe careers, were being shortchanged by their families and their school and even their culture by not being given enough genuine opportunities to overcome adversity and thus develop their character. “The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph told me. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
I wrote an article about KIPP and Riverdale and character, drawn from the reporting I did for this book, that was published in the New York Times Magazine in September of 2011. The article produced an unexpected flood of responses from readers, many of whom said they related to Randolph’s ideas about failure and success. Some of them contributed comments on the Times’s website about their own experiences, like “Dave,” who wrote that he had been one of the kids Randolph was talking about, the ones who got high test scores and lots of praise but never developed the grit that came from confronting real challenges. “I’m left now, in my thirties,” Dave wrote, “often wondering how much more I could have accomplished if I wasn’t terrified of failure, and prone to shying away from ventures where my success wasn’t guaranteed.”
Not long after the article was published, and while I was immersed in the research on college persistence, I found myself wondering anew about my decision to drop out. Why had I done it? I dug through a box of old papers from that era, looking for clues, and I discovered a letter that I’d almost forgotten, a long exegesis of my decision to quit that I wrote in my Columbia dorm room over Thanksgiving weekend that freshman fall. It was eight pages long, single spaced—and, to give you an idea of the technological age we’re talking about, it was written not only in longhand but in cursive. I pulled out the letter—it had a couple of coffee stains, but it was still legible—sat down in my office, took a deep breath, and reread it. It was, as you can imagine, pretty embarrassing. There is no soul more overwrought than that of an eighteen-year-old trying to make a life-changing decision. But I was glad I had found the letter, and despite its moments of adolescent insufferability, I felt a good deal of compassion for my conflicted younger self.
I had been a high-achieving student in high school, with good grades and good standardized-test scores. I arrived at college excited but confused, lost on a campus and in a city where I didn’t know a soul. I was glad to be in New York but less glad to be sitting in lecture halls. Even in high school, while I was being such a responsible student, I had felt grave doubts about my relationship with formal education. I had a rebellious streak—I was a teenage Kerouac reader—and like millions of high-school rebels before me, I was convinced that what I was learning in the classroom didn’t really matter, man. And on that November day at Columbia, I decided I had finally had enough. “I have been being educated for fifteen years and three months, which is 84 percent of my life,” I wrote, with characteristic precision (for the record, I was counting from the first day of nursery school). “Going to school is all I know. Education is a game, and let’s face it: I’m good at it. I know the rules; I know how to perform all the required tasks. I even know how to win. But I’m sick of the game. I want to cash in my chips.”
; It is always hard, the eighteen-year-old me wrote, to quit doing something that everyone tells you you’re good at in order to do something you’ve never tried before. But that was precisely what I felt I needed: to do something uncertain, unsafe; something I didn’t know if I could succeed at. The specific trial I fixed upon for myself was a long journey, an odyssey of sorts: I would take some of the money I was about to spend on my next semester’s tuition, buy a touring bicycle and a tent, and pedal my way, alone, from Atlanta to Halifax, sleeping in state parks and the backyards of strangers. It was an odd idea. I’d never been on a long bicycle trip before, and I’d never been on even a short one by myself. I’d never been to the American South. I wasn’t particularly good at talking to strangers. But I somehow felt compelled to subject myself to this mission. I had a notion that I might learn more along the road than I would on campus. “This may be a total failure, a flop, a disaster of gargantuan proportions,” I wrote. “It may be the most irresponsible thing I’ll ever do. But it may be the most responsible.”
A couple of days after the New York Times Magazine story on KIPP and Riverdale came out, a reader sent me an e-mail message saying he thought I should watch the commencement address that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005. There were a lot of parallels, he wrote, between Jobs’s thoughts on failure and character and the debates that I’d tried to capture in the article. After Jobs’s untimely death, the Stanford speech got a lot of attention, but as it happened, this was a few weeks before he died, and I’d never seen or read it. I clicked the YouTube link the reader had sent and watched Jobs speak, and I soon realized I didn’t know much about his life story. Watching that speech, I learned that in his freshman year, Jobs had dropped out of college—Reed College, in Oregon. And believe me, if decades after you drop out of college, you’re still trying to justify your decision, there’s nothing more reassuring than finding out that one of the most successful and creative businessmen of modern times did the same thing. And what’s more, that he had no regrets. In his speech, Jobs explained that dropping out had “been one of the best decisions I ever made.” It even paid off for him, and for Apple, in one very specific way: Freed from course requirements, Jobs sat in on courses that interested him more than his assigned classes had, including one on calligraphy and typography. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” Jobs said. “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life”—until, of course, a decade later, when he and Steve Wozniak were designing the Macintosh and decided to include, for the first time, creative typography in a personal computer. That flourish helped distinguish the Mac from everything that had come before.
What struck me most about Jobs’s speech, though, was the story he told about his greatest failure: being fired from Apple, the company he created, just after his thirtieth birthday. “What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating,” he said. “I was a very public failure.” What he wasn’t able to see at the time, Jobs said, but that became clear later was that the experience of such a dramatic failure allowed him to reorient himself and his work in a way that led to his greatest successes: buying and transforming Pixar, getting married, returning to Apple rejuvenated. As Jobs put it in his speech: “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.” That was, I think, exactly what I was looking for in that Columbia dorm room: the lightness of being a beginner.
A month or so after writing my dropout letter, I did, indeed, drop out. I bought a bike and a tent and a Coleman stove and a one-way plane ticket to Atlanta, and from there I bicycled to Halifax, through many rainstorms, flat tires, and strange encounters. It took me two months, and at the end of the journey, I felt it was the best thing I’d ever done. I gave college another try a few months later, back in my native Canada—McGill University, in fact, where a decade or so later Michael Meaney would begin to discover such amazing things about rat mothers and their licking habits. And then three semesters after that, I dropped out again to take an internship at Harper’s Magazine. This time, the dropping-out stuck. I never went back to college, never got a BA, and, haltingly, I began a career as a magazine editor and a journalist. I didn’t go on to found Apple, or even NeXT (Jobs’s failed computer company), and in fact I continued for the next two decades to struggle with some of the same questions I had been wrestling with in that dorm room—Should I do something I’m good at or something I love? Take a chance or play it safe?—until on another fall morning, twenty-four years after dropping out of Columbia, I found myself dropping out of another esteemed New York City institution, the New York Times, again without much of a safety net. This time, the strange adventure I set out on was not to pedal a bicycle halfway across the country; it was to write a book. This one.
2. High-LG Parenting
These days, when I contemplate success and failure, I think less frequently about my own prospects and more often about those of my son, Ellington. I figure I’ve already turned out more or less the way I’m going to turn out. But Ellington? Anything could happen. I started reporting this book right around the time he was born, and it will be published just after his third birthday, so the years I spent working on it coincided almost exactly with the period in his life that neuroscientists tell us is the most critical in a child’s development. The experience of writing the book—and especially encountering the brain research that I wrote about in chapter 1—has profoundly affected the way I think about what it means to be a parent.
When Ellington was born, I was like most anxious parents under the influence of the cognitive hypothesis, worried that he wasn’t going to succeed in life unless I broke out the brain-building flashcards and the Mozart CDs in the maternity ward and then kept bombarding him with them until he got a perfect score on his preschool- admission test. But the brain researchers whose work I had begun to read pointed me in a different direction. Yes, they said, those first few years are critically important in the development of a child’s brain. But the most significant skills he is acquiring during those years aren’t ones that can be taught with flashcards.
It is not as if I suddenly stopped caring about Ellington’s being able to read and write and add and subtract. But I became convinced that those particular skills would come to him sooner or later no matter what I did, simply because he was growing up surrounded by books and had two parents who liked to read and were comfortable with numbers. What I felt less confident about were his character skills.
Yes, it feels a little ridiculous to use the word character when you’re talking about a toddler. And yes, the development of an individual’s character depends on all sorts of mysterious interactions among culture and family and genes and free will and fate. But to me, the most profound discovery this new generation of neuroscientists has made is the powerful connection between infant brain chemistry and adult psychology. Lying deep beneath those noble, complex human qualities we call character, these scientists have found, is the mundane, mechanical interaction of specific chemicals in the brains and bodies of developing infants. Chemistry is not destiny, certainly. But these scientists have demonstrated that the most reliable way to produce an adult who is brave and curious and kind and prudent is to ensure that when he is an infant, his hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functions well. And how do you do that? It is not magic. First, as much as possible, you protect him from serious trauma and chronic stress; then, even more important, you provide him with a secure, nurturing relationship with at least one parent and ideally two. That’s not the whole secret of success, but it is a big, big part of it.
When Ellington was an infant, the research that influenced me most was Michael Meaney’s. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but while I was playing with baby Ellington, I was often thinking about baby rats. I spent a lot of time, in fact, mulling over exactly what it might mean
to be a high-licking-and-grooming human parent. Those high-LG dams, I realized, were not helicopter parents. They didn’t hover anxiously. They weren’t constantly licking and grooming their pups. They did their LG-ing mostly in one very specific situation: when their pups were stressed out. It was almost as if the dams were trying to teach their pups, through repetition, a valuable skill: how to manage their inflamed stress systems and restore them to a resting state. The equivalent skill for human infants, I think, is being able to calm down after a tantrum or a bad scare, and that’s what I concentrated on trying to help Ellington learn how to do. To be clear: I didn’t lick my son. I didn’t even really groom him much, to be honest. But if there is a human equivalent to high-LG parenting, it involves a lot of comforting and hugging and talking and reassuring. And my wife, Paula, and I both did a lot of that when Ellington was little. My guess is that doing those things with Ellington in his infancy will turn out to have made a bigger difference in his character, and in his ultimate happiness and success, than anything else we do.
As Ellington grew older, though, I found, as countless parents had found before me, that he needed something more than love and hugs. He also needed discipline, rules, limits; someone to say no. And what he needed more than anything was some child-size adversity, a chance to fall down and get back up on his own, without help. This was harder for Paula and me—it came less naturally to us than the hugging and comforting—and I know that it is just the beginning of the long struggle we will face, as all parents do, between our urge to provide everything for our child, to protect him from all harm, and our knowledge that if we really want him to succeed, we need to first let him fail. Or more precisely, we need to help him learn to manage failure. This idea—the importance of learning how to deal with and learn from your own failures—is a common thread in many of the chapters in this book. It’s what Elizabeth Spiegel, the chess coach, was such an expert at. She took it for granted that her students were going to fail a lot. Every chess player does. As she saw it, her job was not to prevent them from failing; it was to teach them how to learn from each failure, how to stare at their failures with unblinking honesty, how to confront exactly why they had messed up. If they could do that, she believed, they would do better next time. Just like Steve Jobs at Apple the second time around.