How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (26 page)

There are three main elements to the OneGoal curriculum. The first and most straightforward is an intensive unit of ACT prep in junior year, designed to give students the essential content knowledge and test-taking strategies to raise their scores from terrible to not bad. These days, OneGoal teachers are regularly able to match Matt King’s accomplishment, helping their students improve by about three points on the ACT over the course of their junior year, moving them from about the fifteenth percentile to the thirty-fifth percentile.

The second element is what Jeff Nelson calls a “road map to college.” When Nelson was planning the curriculum that first summer, he often found himself thinking of the process at New Trier: the school’s college-counseling office employs eight full-time counselors, who begin working on college planning with students and their parents early in the sophomore year. “It’s a machine,” Nelson told me with a laugh. “They give you an incredibly clear and structured path from the middle of high school through the day you step onto a college campus.” He recognized that he couldn’t afford to transplant New Trier’s entire college-prep machine to the South Side. “But there were pieces of what was happening at New Trier,” he said, “that I thought could be translated to low-income schools and could make a massive difference.” So OneGoal students get help not just with applications but also with their entire college-admission strategy: choosing match schools rather than undermatch schools; deciding whether to apply to schools close to home or far away; writing appealing application essays; finding scholarships. (One morning in a OneGoal class at a Chicago high school I watched as the school’s college counselor ran through a list of increasingly obscure scholarships. “Is anyone here Greek?” she asked. Twenty-five black and Latino faces looked back at her skeptically. “Do we have any multiracial students?” she asked hopefully. “Yeah,” replied one impeccably dressed African American boy, deadpan. “South Side black and West Side black.”)

But still, Nelson said, “it was obvious to us that the road map was not going to be enough. We could give our students a very clear idea of how to get to college, but we also needed to train them to succeed once they got there. We needed to teach students to be highly effective people.”

For this third part of the equation, Nelson was influenced by the high-school research done by the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, and particularly the work of an analyst there named Melissa Roderick. In a 2006 paper, Roderick identified as a critical component of college success “noncognitive academic skills,” including “study skills, work habits, time management,
help-seeking behavior, and social/academic problem-solving skills.” Roderick, who borrowed the term
noncognitive
from James Heckman’s work, wrote that these skills were at the center of an increasingly dire mismatch between American high schools and American colleges and universities. When the current high-school system was developed, she wrote, the primary goal was to train students not for college but for the workplace, where at the time “critical thinking and problem-solving abilities
were not highly valued.” (This was the era that Bowles and Gintis, the anti-conscientiousness Marxist economists, were writing about.) And so the traditional American high school was never intended to be a place where students would learn how to think deeply or develop internal motivation or persevere when faced with difficulty—all the skills needed to persist in college. Instead, it was a place where, for the most part, students were rewarded for just showing up and staying awake.

For a while, Roderick wrote, this formula worked well. “High school teachers could have very high workloads
and manage them effectively because they expected most of their students to do little work,” she recounted. “Most students could get what they and their parents wanted, the high school credential, with little effort.” There was, she wrote, “an unwritten contract between students and teachers that said, ‘Put up with high school, do your seat time, and behave properly, and you will be rewarded.’”

But then the world changed, and the American high school didn’t. As the wage premium paid to college graduates increased, high-school students voiced an increasing desire to graduate from college—between 1980 and 2002, the percentage of American tenth-graders
who said they wanted to obtain at least a BA doubled, from 40 percent to 80 percent. But most of those students didn’t have the nonacademic skills—the character strengths, as Martin Seligman would put it—they needed to survive in college, and the traditional American high school didn’t have a mechanism to help them acquire those skills. This is what Nelson is trying to change, and he believes this third element of the OneGoal strategy is at the heart of the program’s nascent success.

Nelson knew when he started that he couldn’t remake the entire high-school experience for his students. But he thought that perhaps he didn’t need to. By helping students develop the specific nonacademic skills that would lead most directly to college success, he believed he could compensate, relatively quickly, for the serious gap in academic ability that separated the average senior at a Chicago public high school from the average American college freshman. Nelson, using instinct more than research, identified five skills, which he called leadership principles, that he wanted OneGoal teachers to emphasize: resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, professionalism, and integrity. Those words now permeate the program—they’re even more ubiquitous than Seligman and Peterson’s seven character strengths are at KIPP Infinity.

“We know that most of our kids are going to arrive in college academically behind their peers,” Nelson explained to me one morning. “We can help them improve their ACT scores significantly, but it is unlikely that we’ll be able to close the gap on those tests entirely, simply because of the K-through-twelve system that our students grew up in. But what we also know, and what we tell our students, is that there is a way for them to offset that disparity. And the key is those five leadership abilities.”

5. ACE Tech

For four decades, the Robert Taylor Homes loomed over the South Side, the largest of Chicago’s postwar housing projects: twenty-eight high-rise concrete monoliths extending for almost two miles down a narrow strip of land between State Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Almost as soon as construction on the projects was completed, in the early 1960s, the buildings began to descend into disrepair, violence, and chaos, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the Robert Taylor Homes were considered, according to the Chicago Housing Authority, “the worst slum area in the United States”
; in 1980, one in nine murders in Chicago
took place in those ninety-two acres. At the projects’ high point, which is to say their low point, more than twenty-five thousand people lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, at least two-thirds of them children, the large majority of whom were living with single mothers on welfare.
The projects are gone now, torn down in Chicago’s latest attempt at urban renewal, but nothing has been built in their place. And when you drive down State Street today, there is just an eerie emptiness where the towers once stood, a weird inner-city pastoral of grass, weeds, and concrete punctuated by a few old, lonely churches that managed to escape the wrecking ball.

At the south end of that long stretch of nothingness, down by Fifty-Fourth Street, there is a small outcropping of intact structures—a few houses, mostly boarded up; a liquor store; a pizza place; a pawnshop; and a storefront Baptist church, now closed. And then, in a two-story blue-brick building just north of the old church, there is, of all things, a school: ACE Tech Charter High School. Given the pervasive bleakness of the surroundings, it is hard to imagine anything very positive coming out of that building, and in fact, ACE Tech is not at all a high-achieving school: in 2009, just 12 percent of the school’s juniors met or exceeded the standards on the statewide achievement test, and since its founding in 2004, the school has never made “adequate yearly progress,” the benchmark set by the federal No Child Left Behind law. But it was at ACE Tech, soon after Jeff Nelson took over in 2007, that OneGoal introduced its new methods. First, there was an afterschool program much like Matt King’s, held two hours a week for a class of juniors and seniors; then, in 2009, Nelson brought in the full-time, in-class, three-year, teacher-led model that is now the OneGoal standard. (It is a coincidence, but perhaps an apt one, that ACE Tech is only a few blocks away from Du Sable High, the school that Jonathan Kozol presented in
Savage Inequalities
as the tragic counterpoint to Nelson’s alma mater of New Trier.)

The person who pioneered both iterations of the OneGoal program at ACE Tech was Michele Stefl, an English teacher now in her early thirties who grew up in Chicago’s southwestern suburbs and started teaching at ACE Tech in 2005. Nelson hired her as one of OneGoal’s first contract teachers soon after he took the position as executive director. I followed a class of Stefl’s OneGoal students throughout their senior year, observing as she guided them through the college-admissions process. There were, inevitably, plenty of low moments for her students—suspensions, unplanned pregnancies, college rejections—but in the Sahara of failure that surrounded ACE Tech, Stefl’s classroom felt, on most days, like an oasis of hope and possibility.

Stefl was not an educational romantic; she was plainspoken and pragmatic, blunt about the school’s inadequacies and the reality of how far behind her students were. One morning toward the end of her students’ junior year, she talked to them about their personal essays, which, she said, were going to be essential parts of successful college applications. “Remember who you are competing against,” she said. “You are competing against people who have ACT scores of thirty-plus. You are competing with kids who, in all honesty, have received a better education than many of you. We’re trying to make up for that now, but the level still isn’t where it should be. And that’s unfair, unfortunately, okay?” She held up a sample essay. “So this is where it has to come from. What life experiences have you had to get where you are today?”

When selecting this class of students for the OneGoal program, back in the spring of 2009, when they were sophomores, Stefl had taken pains not to pick the highest-scoring students or the ones from the most competent families; in fact, she did the opposite of creaming: during the process, if a student revealed that there was a college graduate anywhere in her immediate family, Stefl would gently tell the student that the program was meant not for her but for her peers with fewer resources and greater need. As a result, one of Stefl’s biggest challenges was simply to convince her OneGoal students that they each had the potential for a successful life, despite all the evidence to the contrary they saw in their neighborhood and, often, in their families.

When I sat in Stefl’s class, I frequently found myself thinking about the research that the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck had done on the growth mindset. To recap briefly: Dweck found that students who believed intelligence was malleable did much better than students who believed intelligence was fixed. David Levin’s project at KIPP in New York City essentially expanded Dweck’s mindset idea into the message that character is malleable too. It seemed that what Stefl was attempting to do was convince her students that not just their intelligence and their character but their very
destinies
were malleable; that their past performance was not an indication of their future results. She was not preaching a gospel of empty self-esteem or wishful thinking. Her message to her students was that they could grow and improve and achieve at a much higher level than they had before but that it would take a lot of hard work, a lot of perseverance, and a lot of character—or, as they put it in class, leadership skills.

When I spoke with Angela Duckworth about the OneGoal program, she pointed out something I hadn’t thought of: that the ACT-prep component of the OneGoal curriculum might actually be serving two purposes. First, on a practical level, improving their scores by a few points would give students access to more and higher-quality colleges. But second, and perhaps more important, the experience of improving one’s outcome on a test that ostensibly measures intelligence serves as an unforgettable reinforcement of the growth-mindset message:
You can get smarter. You can do better.

Some of Stefl’s students took this message to heart more than others did. Even in their senior year, many still didn’t quite seem to believe that they belonged in college, and their families were not always helpful in underscoring Stefl’s message. One boy who got into Purdue University was convinced by his mother to attend the two-year community college down the street instead so that he wouldn’t be so far from home. At the opposite end of the spectrum—the confident, optimistic end—was Kewauna Lerma.

6. Test Scores

As I described in the introduction to this book, when I met Kewauna halfway through her junior year, I was struck by the remarkable turnaround she had made in her life: from a troubled childhood marred by multiple risk factors and plenty of adverse experiences, through a difficult and delinquent period in middle school, to a successful high-school career and an intense determination to succeed at college and beyond. During the two years that she and I kept in touch, her home life was never easy, and her family’s finances were always perilous—her mother received about five hundred dollars a month in disability benefits, and that, plus food stamps, was the family’s only income. But somehow Kewauna seemed able to ignore the day-to-day indignities of life in poverty on the South Side and instead stay focused on her vision of a more successful future. “Nobody wants a dumb girl,” she told me in one of our first conversations. “Nobody wants a failure. I always wanted to be one of those business ladies walking downtown with my briefcase, everybody saying, ‘Hi, Miss Lerma!’” To get her hands on that briefcase, Kewauna knew, she needed at least a bachelor’s degree, and despite the fact that no one in her family had ever been to college, she was certain that she could and would obtain one.