How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough Page A
Authors: Paul Tough
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‘Okay, our first class was the fifth-highest performing class in all of New York City,’” Levin told me. “‘We got ninety percent into private and parochial schools. It’s all going to be solved.’ But it wasn’t.” Almost every member of the Class of 2003 did make it through high school, and most of them enrolled in college. But then the mountain grew steeper: Six years after their high-school graduation, just 21 percent of the cohort—eight students—had completed a four-year college degree.
Tyrell Vance was part of that original KIPP class, and in many ways his experience was typical. When he first arrived at KIPP, he felt overwhelmed, bewildered by the rituals and rules and energy. “It was like a culture shock,” he told me. “I had never seen anything like it.” Vance considered homework to be optional, but at KIPP, it was mandatory, and that difference of opinion led to a long series of battles between Vance and the KIPP staff. When the class took off on a trip to Vermont in seventh grade, Vance was left behind to catch up on his homework. Still, it was clear that KIPP’s teachers were devoted to him and his fellow students, and he became devoted to them as well. “They were my second family, in essence,” he told me. “That’s the vibe we all ended up getting, that we were like a family.”
Like so many students in that class, Vance was a math star in middle school, acing the citywide test, passing the ninth-grade state math course when he was still in eighth grade. But when he got to high school, he told me, away from KIPP’s blast furnace of ambition, he lost his intensity. “I didn’t have the drive that I had when I was at KIPP,” he explained. He started coasting, and his report cards were soon filled with Cs instead of the As and Bs he’d been getting in middle school. The way Vance sees it today, KIPP set him up for high school very well academically, but it didn’t prepare him emotionally or psychologically. “We went from having that close-knit family, where everyone knew what you were doing, to high school, where there’s no one on you,” he said. “There’s no one checking if you did your homework. Then we had to deal with all the stuff that everybody goes through in high school, just growing up. And none of us were really prepared for that.”
After high school, Vance enrolled in a four-year public college in upstate New York to study computer information systems, but he found the subject boring, so he switched his major to casino and gaming management. He didn’t get along with the head of that department, so he dropped out, took a little time off and worked at a shoe store, and then enrolled in another school in the state system, planning to major in history. Before long, though, his tuition money ran out, and this time Vance dropped out altogether. Now in his mid-twenties, he has spent the last few years working in call centers for AT&T and Time Warner Cable, answering customer-service questions. He enjoys the work, and he is proud of what he’s accomplished, but looking back, he has regrets too. “I had a lot of potential,” he told me, “and I probably should have done more with it.”
2. Learned Optimism
For David Levin, it was painful to watch those first students struggle through their college experience. Every month or so, it seemed, he would get word that another student had decided to drop out. Levin took the college data personally: What could he have done differently? The whole point of KIPP was to give his students everything they needed to succeed in college. What had he failed to include?
As the dropout reports rolled in, not just from the first KIPP class but from the second and third too, Levin noticed something curious: The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP. Instead, they seemed to be the ones who possessed certain other gifts, skills like optimism and resilience and social
Tyrell Vance was part of that original KIPP class, and in many ways his experience was typical. When he first arrived at KIPP, he felt overwhelmed, bewildered by the rituals and rules and energy. “It was like a culture shock,” he told me. “I had never seen anything like it.” Vance considered homework to be optional, but at KIPP, it was mandatory, and that difference of opinion led to a long series of battles between Vance and the KIPP staff. When the class took off on a trip to Vermont in seventh grade, Vance was left behind to catch up on his homework. Still, it was clear that KIPP’s teachers were devoted to him and his fellow students, and he became devoted to them as well. “They were my second family, in essence,” he told me. “That’s the vibe we all ended up getting, that we were like a family.”
Like so many students in that class, Vance was a math star in middle school, acing the citywide test, passing the ninth-grade state math course when he was still in eighth grade. But when he got to high school, he told me, away from KIPP’s blast furnace of ambition, he lost his intensity. “I didn’t have the drive that I had when I was at KIPP,” he explained. He started coasting, and his report cards were soon filled with Cs instead of the As and Bs he’d been getting in middle school. The way Vance sees it today, KIPP set him up for high school very well academically, but it didn’t prepare him emotionally or psychologically. “We went from having that close-knit family, where everyone knew what you were doing, to high school, where there’s no one on you,” he said. “There’s no one checking if you did your homework. Then we had to deal with all the stuff that everybody goes through in high school, just growing up. And none of us were really prepared for that.”
After high school, Vance enrolled in a four-year public college in upstate New York to study computer information systems, but he found the subject boring, so he switched his major to casino and gaming management. He didn’t get along with the head of that department, so he dropped out, took a little time off and worked at a shoe store, and then enrolled in another school in the state system, planning to major in history. Before long, though, his tuition money ran out, and this time Vance dropped out altogether. Now in his mid-twenties, he has spent the last few years working in call centers for AT&T and Time Warner Cable, answering customer-service questions. He enjoys the work, and he is proud of what he’s accomplished, but looking back, he has regrets too. “I had a lot of potential,” he told me, “and I probably should have done more with it.”
2. Learned Optimism
For David Levin, it was painful to watch those first students struggle through their college experience. Every month or so, it seemed, he would get word that another student had decided to drop out. Levin took the college data personally: What could he have done differently? The whole point of KIPP was to give his students everything they needed to succeed in college. What had he failed to include?
As the dropout reports rolled in, not just from the first KIPP class but from the second and third too, Levin noticed something curious: The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP. Instead, they seemed to be the ones who possessed certain other gifts, skills like optimism and resilience and social
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