Paul Tough’s first book, Whatever It Takes, about the Harlem Children’s Zone, inspired a movement to bring that comprehensive cradle-to-diploma education program for low-income students to Athens. In his latest book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, he delves into the brain, asking what it is about poverty that causes some children to fall behind and what can be done to reverse it.
Tough will speak about the book at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 1 at the University of Georgia Chapel. He also recently spoke to Flagpole about his findings, which could help in Athens, a community with high poverty rates in public schools.
Paul Tough
Flagpole: You’ve visited Athens before, is that right?
Paul Tough: Yes. I think it was 2010 that I came there to speak to a group of people organized by Whatever it Takes Athens.
FP: When you were here, did anything strike you about our school system?
PT: Not enough that I could comment intelligently on it. One of the things I was impressed with was Whatever It Takes. I’ve traveled around and visited a lot of Promise Neighborhood groups. I’ve traveled around in different cities and Whatever It Takes really struck me, from what I can see, as one of the best and most organized. So I heard from them (WIT) about the promise and the possibilities in the school system, but I didn’t get to see much of it myself.
FP: How do you think a college town like Athens with a high poverty rate can make better use of our educational resources?
PT: I think it’s difficult to be a family growing up in poverty anywhere, but I think there are certain potential advantages for ameliorating poverty in a city where there are a lot of other resources. I did a lot of reporting on the south side of Chicago, and part of the problem there is there’s lots of poverty, but it also just goes on for miles and miles and there aren’t a lot of resources around. The places where I feel most optimistic about the possibility for change, especially through a proper neighborhood group, is in a city like Athens, where there are these other resources, where there’s philanthropic money and I think especially having a university there, especially a big university like UGA, can be a tremendous resource, sort of a community partner, particularly in terms of working directly with schools. I find in lots of other communities that I’ve visited [that] making that connection is not always happening. I think some colleges can feel pretty separate from the towns where they’re located, but my sense from talking to people from Whatever It Takes and at UGA is that there is a real inclination there to try to make those connections. And I think when that does happen it can be a really positive thing.
FP: What lessons from a program in Harlem do you think can be applied in a place like Athens?
PT: I think lots of things. I think individual programs for kids, what kids need to succeed when they’re growing up in poverty, is the same no matter where they are. A program like Harlem Children’s Zone that tries to provide a comprehensive set of integrated services. And I think education with social services and health services, family services. I think that’s the right approach for any family, whether it’s happening on a bigger scale or a small scale, in a big city or a town. I think there are some things that are different in terms of geography and how accessible different resources are, but my sense is, yeah, in terms of individual programs, what works in classroom, what works in a family, it’s exactly the same wherever you are.
FP: What are some similarities in the programs that have been most successful in fighting the learning curve that goes along with poverty?
PT: Well, I’d say two things: One is that the most successful programs are the ones that are more comprehensive, that don’t look at just the academic obstacles facing kids in poverty, but really try to combine services, social services, family services, and address all of the problems in those children’s lives that are holding them back from doing well in school. And then the other principle that I talk about in my new book is this idea of focusing on non-cognitive skills, or character strengths. I think that programs that look more holistically at all of the effects of poverty, the way it affects kids psychologically and physically, as well as cognitively, that points the way to a better set of interventions that can help kids more.
FP: Why is character so important for kids to achieve academically, and what can schools do to build more character in their students?
PT: The reason I believe character is important is data. There’s a lot of data out there from economics and psychology and neuroscience pointing towards the effectiveness of non-cognitive skills in terms of how well kids do. And then some of the programs that I’ve looked at, like the OneGoal program in Chicago is, I think, the one where the data is most clear, that for kids who are growing up with a whole matrix of obstacles, giving them a way to improve their non-cognitive skills lets them leverage their other skills really effectively. It’s also true I think that it’s easier to change your character strengths, your non-cognitive skills, than it is to change your IQ. And so kids who get to high school without having had good educational opportunities, even if they have low test scores, it is possible through non-cognitive interventions to succeed at a really high rate. It’s really about non-cognitive skills being the most sort of effective and efficient and cost effective lever for change if you want to change a kid’s life quickly.
FP: What can schools do to help build character?
PT: That definitely gets more complicated. I don’t think we have a perfect curriculum out there that helps build character, and I think in some ways it depends on what kind of school we’re talking about. I wrote about independent schools, private schools and low-income private schools. When I talk to private school parents, I feel like what their kids need the most in terms of character development is for them to back off a little bit and to let their kids experience a little more adversity and have more of those character building opportunities. For kids who are growing up in low-income neighborhoods, they don’t need more adversity, they need less, they need more protection from adversity, but there are I think some of these interventions like OneGoal that can directly affect how kids do on these measures of character. I think really they work just by talking about character, by giving kids the message that their character can change, and by, I think especially with teenagers, by sort of showing them what they can achieve if they are able to leverage those non-cognitive strengths more. So, well, you read the chapter on OneGoal, so you know how that worked in the life of Kewauna Lerma and a lot of her classmates at ACE Tag. They just got and really heard the message that if they worked on these character strengths, they were going to do a whole lot better, they were going to get to college, and having that goal was such a powerful motivation for them.
FP: Do you feel like the traditional classroom still works, or do you think the whole education system needs to be rethought?
PT: That’s a good question, I mean, I think in a lot of ways, the question isn’t about the structure of education. I do think there is an increasing disconnect between high schools and especially how high schools are oriented and the skills that kids need to succeed in college and beyond. One of the things I hadn’t known about before I worked on the book that interested me was that high schools were actually not intended to prepare kids for college. They were really intended to prepare kids for the office and the workplace of the ’50s, where mostly what you had to do was follow orders and just do what people tell you to do. And that’s not true in college. In college, I think kids need a much more complicated set of skills to succeed. You need a lot of perseverance, and you need to be able to bounce back from setbacks. You need to be able to find creative solutions to problems, work independently, and high schools aren’t really focused I don’t think on those kinds of skills. I don’t think it necessarily has to be about changing the structure of a classroom, but I think it’s more about changing the whole mission of a school so that it’s not just information and confidence skills that schools are focused on, but it’s also the other sorts of skills that kids are going to need to not just to get to college, but to make it through college.
FP: What do you think is the biggest obstacle to that sort of change in the average school?
PT: You know, I think the same obstacles that are always there to change people are used to doing things a certain way. It’s hard to reorient any kind of big institution, whether it’s a school or a whole school system. I think also that so far no one’s really putting those demands on them. The way that the system works, when a child goes off to college, makes it through a year or two and then drops out, no one’s really accountable for that. It doesn’t count against the high school’s record, it doesn’t count against the college’s record, it really is seen as just the student’s problem. But I think there’s lots of evidence that both the high school and the college can do things differently to help those kids persist, and so I think somehow we’ve got to make them feel more responsible for that, or at least feel more empowered to try to fix that situation. And the one more thing I’ll say about that is dropping out of college, as opposed to not going to college, can be an additional problem especially with college financing working the way that it is. We know that getting a BA, especially if you’re a kid from a low income family, can really change your trajectory of success in all kinds of ways including salary. You make more money if you have a BA than you do if you just have a high school diploma. The problems is, you end up taking out a lof of loans if you get a BA, especially if you’re from a low-income family, which is economically a good idea, it’s worth that investment. But if you go to school for two or three years and then drop out, you actually don’t get much of a boost in salary from being a some-college person and you end up with a ton of debt. And so that’s why I think that college persistence as opposed to college access is increasingly something that people in the education world are focusing on. For a kid without a lot of financial resources, going to college for a couple of years, racking up a ton of debt and then dropping out is the worst case scenario.
FP: How do instructors in these programs handle the race, class or gender gap between themselves and the parents who’s kids they’re instructing and if they encounter resistance how do they handle that?
PT: I think it’s complicated. I think any time there’s cross-cultural, cross-racial boundaries between parents and students, there’s an additional challenge to try to be culturally sensitive and make the right connections and communicate in a way that makes sense to everybody, but I think good teachers are able to do that, I think it’s an art as much as a science. So I would say yes, that crossing those cultural lines, making those kinds of [connections] is sort of more hard to find, but I also think there are a lot of teachers who get overly anxious about it and feel like they can’t talk to kids about the deep stuff if they’re not from the same background or not like them, and I think in reality, if it’s done sensitively, the parents and kids are really eager to hear these kinds of messages especially if it’s done in the language of success. You know, it’s not like, ‘You should be more self-controlled because that’s what you’re supposed to do and you’re a good person if you do, and that’s kind of the middle class way of doing things.’ I think it’s much more effective if it’s expressed in the language of success, so it’s like ‘If you do these things, you’re going to be more successful. These are the character strengths that lead to success in all kinds of ways. It makes you happier and healthier, as well as having the potential to earn more money.’ I think that’s what parents want for their kids, that’s what kids want for themselves. They don’t always know how to get it and so I think a good teacher who can talk to kids in that way and really convey that they care about the kids they’re teaching and that they want them to do well, my sense is the parents and kids [will respond well to that].
FP: Do you know if there are plans to make programs like KIPP more widespread throughout the country?
PT: Well, KIPP specifically is continuing to expand. They’re not actually expanding to any more cities for the next little while, they’re just building up within the cities where they already have schools because they feel like the most effective approach for them is they’ve reached kind of a critical mass in the cities where they have lots of schools in one community. I think they will continue to expand to different cities in the future, but I think for now, that’s their strategy.
FP: What are your next steps after this, where do you think this kind of research might take you after this book?
PT: That’s a good question. I’ve been thinking about it a lot but I don’t know the answer. I’m sort of wrapped up in this book right now and will be for the next couple of months. But one of the nice things about getting to travel around a lot is that I’m hearing about a lot of different programs and ideas and so I’m figuring out which of those is most interesting to pursue next.
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