Book Review - NY Times

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NY Times – 6/10/2016


“Helping Children Succeed,” by Paul Tough

Review by Kevin Carey -- Director of the Education Policy Program at New America (a non-profit non-partisan research organization based in Washington DC) and frequent author of both articles and 4 books [The End of College (2015), Stretching the Higher Education Dollar (2013), Reinventing Higher Education (2011) and Accountability in Higher Education (2010).]


Four years ago, the New York Times Magazine journalist Paul Tough published a book titled “How Children Succeed,” which argued that the modern obsession with increasing student scores in reading and math misses most of what matters in education. Instead, character traits like grit, curiosity, persistence and self-¬control are the keys to success in school, college and life.

Test-weary parents and teachers embraced the message, and Tough spent the next few years speaking, traveling and reporting on programs laboring to put these ideas into practice. But in doing so, he noticed a “paradox” — many of the educators who were unusually good at teaching grit and self-control didn’t use those words to describe their aims. Often, they weren’t even aware that they were avatars of what Tough believed was a groundbreaking new approach to education. Why? And what did that mean? Tough’s new book, “Helping Children Succeed,” describes his attempt to find out.

Less a full-length sequel to “How Children Succeed” than a short companion, “Helping Children Succeed” argues that skills like emotional regulation and stick-to-it-iveness can’t be taught in the same way children are trained to decode phonemes and solve quadratic equations. “No child ever learned curiosity by filling out curiosity work sheets,” he notes. Instead, character is the product of environments in which children form strong, secure attachments to teachers and caregivers, and are taught in ways that stimulate their autonomy and ability to solve problems.

For young children burdened by the mental scars of toxic stress and impoverished childhoods, this approach can break a pervasive cycle of failure. “Neurocognitive dysfunctions can quickly become academic dysfunctions,” Tough writes. “As they fall behind, they feel worse about themselves and worse about school. That creates more stress, which often feeds into behavior problems, which leads, in the classroom, to stigmatization and punishment, which keeps their stress levels elevated, which makes it still harder to concentrate — and so on, and so on.”

Tough is adept at translating academic jargon into precise, accessible prose. “Helping Children Succeed” employs the standard heroic narrative of progress in the sciences — social, cognitive, neuro- and more. New research findings are usually some flavor of groundbreaking, counterintuitive or revelatory. Addressing early childhood, where American social policies are particularly weak, he sees great opportunities to help distressed parents improve their parenting, uncomfortable as the judgment implied in that may be. Affordable early learning centers for the children of working parents — that is, most children — can help low-income students catch up to their more affluent peers.

But Tough acknowledges that the early years pass quickly. Most of the hard ¬character-building work will need to happen in “profoundly broken” public schools. To find examples of how schools could be better, he looks mostly to national school networks like Expeditionary Learning and Achievement First. Tough knows this is complicated, and complicating, because charter schools like Achievement First are often seen as relentlessly focused on improving student test scores in reading and math — the very “cognitive” skills that his prior book argued are overemphasized, to the detriment of character.

Many charters, Tough explains, have moved to a more balanced approach, with less harsh discipline and more willingness to let students struggle, fail and learn from the experience. Otherwise, their expert test-takers will founder in college and beyond. The larger lesson seems to be that while character traits are educationally and neurologically distinct from traditional academic expertise, the kinds of schools that best teach both sets of skills may be one and the same.

How to create more such schools, which remain few and far between? “Helping Children Succeed” leaves that question, the great unsolved puzzle of modern education policy, unanswered. Which means that teachers, lawmakers and school leaders will need plenty of the qualities that Tough promotes so persuasively: grit in the face of rising economic inequality, curiosity to look beyond settled educational dogma, persistence and self-control when budgets shrink and attentions wane. The science of character has become a valuable new window on what education should be. But building great schools remains an old challenge, still unresolved.