How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (3 page)

That February, her English teacher encouraged her to apply for an intensive three-year college-prep program that had recently been introduced at the school. Kewauna applied, and she was accepted, and the support the program gave her made her work even harder. When I met her, she was in the middle of her junior year. Her GPA was 4.2, and she was preoccupied with the question of which colleges to apply to.

So what happened? If you had met Kewauna on the first day of her sophomore year, you could have been forgiven for thinking that she had virtually no chance to succeed. Her destiny seemed sealed. But something in her changed. Was it really just one stern talk with her mom? Was that all it took? Was it her great-grandmother’s positive influence? The intervention of her English teacher? Or was there something deep within her own character that inclined her toward the idea of hard work and success, despite all the obstacles she had faced and the mistakes she had made?

How do our experiences in childhood make us the adults we become? It is one of the great human questions, the theme of countless novels, biographies, and memoirs; the subject of several centuries’ worth of philosophical and psychological treatises. This process—the experience of growing up—can appear at times to be predictable, even mechanical, and at other times to be arbitrary and capricious; we’ve all encountered grown men and women who seem trapped in a destiny preordained by their childhoods, and we’ve all met people who seem to have almost miraculously transcended harsh beginnings.

Until recently, though, there has never been a serious attempt to use the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of childhood, to trace, through experiment and analysis, how the experiences of our early years connect to outcomes in adulthood. That is changing, with the efforts of this new generation of researchers. The premise behind the work is simple, if radical: We haven’t managed to solve these problems because we’ve been looking for solutions in the wrong places. If we want to improve the odds for children in general, and for poor children in particular, we need to approach childhood anew, to start over with some fundamental questions about how parents affect their children; how human skills develop; how character is formed.

At its core, this book is about an ambitious and far-reaching campaign to solve some of the most pervasive mysteries of life: Who succeeds and who fails? Why do some children thrive while others lose their way? And what can any of us do to steer an individual child—or a whole generation of children—away from failure and toward success?

1. How to Fail (and How Not To)

1. Fenger High School

Nadine Burke Harris grew up surrounded by privilege in Palo Alto, California, the daughter of educated, professional Jamaican immigrants who had moved the family from Kingston to Silicon Valley when Burke Harris was four. As a girl, she often felt like an outsider, one of the only black students at her Palo Alto high school, where the kids were mostly white and well-off, and where the girls cried in the cafeteria if they didn’t get the right kind of car for their sixteenth birthdays.

Elizabeth Dozier grew up just outside Chicago in far more modest circumstances, the product of an unlikely and illicit romance between her father, an inmate at the state prison in Joliet, Illinois, and her mother, a nun who was assigned to visit prisoners as part of her religious duty and who wound up falling in love. After Dozier was born, her mother raised her alone, teaching at the local Catholic school and working summers as a motel maid to supplement her meager income.

Burke Harris and Dozier emerged from these very different childhoods with the same goal: to help young people succeed, especially young people in trouble. Burke Harris went to medical school, became a pediatrician, and opened a clinic in the poorest part of San Francisco. Dozier became a teacher, and then a principal, in schools in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. When I met them both, separately, a couple of years ago, what drew me to them was not just their similar sense of mission but a deeper frustration they seemed to share. Both women had recently come to the conclusion that the best tools available to them in their chosen professions were simply not up to the challenges they faced. And so they were both at turning points in their careers and their lives. They were looking for new strategies: in fact, they were looking for a whole new playbook.

In August of 2009, when Dozier was named the principal of Christian Fenger High School, the school was in a moment of crisis—though if you looked back at its history over the previous twenty years, it was hard to find a moment when Fenger was
not
in crisis. The school had stood for more than eighty years in the heart of Roseland, on Chicago’s South Side, a once-prosperous area that is now one of the worst-off neighborhoods in the city by just about every measure you can find—poverty rate, unemployment rate, crime rate, or even just the barren, empty feel of the streets. Where thriving businesses and homes once stood there are now vacant lots, overrun with weeds. Roseland is geographically isolated (close to Chicago’s southern border, way down past the last stop on the El) and racially segregated: in a city where the total population is roughly evenly divided among whites, African Americans, and Latinos, Roseland is 98 percent black. And like most big public high schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, Fenger High School has always had a dismal record: consistently low test scores, poor attendance, chronic discipline problems, and a high dropout rate.

When you hear stories about schools like Fenger, they are often told in the language of neglect: a school on the margins, students who have been forgotten and ignored by the bureaucrats downtown and in Washington. But the strange thing about Fenger High School is that it
hasn’t
been ignored. Not at all. Instead, over the course of the past two decades, it has been the focus of repeated ambitious and well-financed reforms by some of the most respected education officials and philanthropists in the country. Just about every strategy anyone has come up with for improving failing public high schools has been tried, in some form or another, at Fenger.

Fenger’s contemporary history begins in 1995, when Chicago’s mayor, Richard M. Daley, was granted control of the city’s schools by the Illinois state legislature. To reflect the businesslike approach he favored, Daley decided that the top official in the school system would no longer be called the superintendent; instead, he would be the CEO. For his first CEO, Daley selected his hard-charging budget director, Paul Vallas, who turned his attention immediately to improving Fenger and other underperforming city high schools. Vallas created a citywide evaluation system that ranked schools by how much help they needed, and he placed Fenger in the most dire category
: probation. Vallas had been a student at Fenger for two years as a teenager, and perhaps that was why he focused his efforts so intently on the school. He introduced a restructuring plan for Fenger that included hiring an outside contractor
to coach the school’s teachers in reading and writing instruction. He created a freshman academy
at the school, a separate, dedicated floor where incoming students would get special attention for their entire freshman year. In 1999, he created a math-and-science academy
at the school, complete with a $525,000 NASA-sponsored science lab. Two years later, he made Fenger a magnet school,
specializing in technology.

Each of Vallas’s reform initiatives came and went, but things never seemed to improve much for the students at Fenger. And the same was true under Vallas’s successor, Arne Duncan. In 2006, Duncan chose Fenger as one of the pilot schools
for a large-scale collaboration between the Chicago school system and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an undertaking called High School Transformation, which the foundation initially financed with a twenty-one-million-dollar grant. (After three years, the total bill for the citywide project had grown to
eighty million.) When the initiative was announced, Duncan said it was “a truly historic day,
not just for the Chicago Public Schools and the city, but for the country.” But a little more than two years later, with evidence mounting that High School Transformation wasn’t producing results, Fenger was switched over
to Duncan’s latest reform initiative: High School Turnaround. Under Turnaround, a school’s principal and at least half its teachers were removed, and a whole new team was brought in. And when Turnaround arrived at Fenger, in 2009, the brand-new principal was Elizabeth Dozier.

Vallas and Duncan, it’s important to note, are not garden-variety school-system bureaucrats; they are two of the most celebrated educational leaders in the country. After Vallas left Chicago, he ran the schools in Philadelphia, and then he gained national fame as the man responsible for rebuilding and transforming the New Orleans school system after it was washed away by Hurricane Katrina. Duncan’s post-Chicago career is even more illustrious: President Obama chose him as his education secretary in 2009. But throughout all of the two men’s well-intentioned and often quite expensive reforms in Chicago, the grim statistics from Fenger High School stayed more or less where they had been in 1995: Between half and two-thirds of each incoming freshman class dropped out before the end of senior year. The minority of students who did make it to graduation were only rarely academically successful: in 2008, Duncan’s final year in Chicago, fewer than 4 percent of Fenger students met or exceeded standards on the statewide college-readiness tests given to juniors and seniors. During Duncan’s tenure, the school never once made “adequate yearly progress” under the federal No Child Left Behind law. And Vallas’s probation designation, originally intended to indicate a temporary state of emergency, became a fact of life at Fenger; in 2011, the school was placed on probation for the sixteenth year in a row.

When Dozier first arrived at Fenger, an ambitious and determined thirty-one-year-old, she believed that the basic tool kit of the modern education reformer contained everything she needed to turn things around for the school’s students. She had spent a year in a highly competitive principal-training program called New Leaders for New Schools, which emphasized to trainees that a dynamic leader could raise students’ achievement to high levels, no matter what their socioeconomic circumstances, as long as she had a committed staff. Dozier cleaned house at Fenger, replacing several administrators and most of the teachers; when I first sat down with her in her office at Fenger, a little more than a year after she took the job, her seventy-member staff included only three teachers from the school’s pre-Turnaround days. Most of the new teachers were young, ambitious, and non-tenured, which meant they would be relatively easy for Dozier to replace if they didn’t measure up to her standards.

When we spoke, though, Dozier said that her thinking about schools had been changed by her time at Fenger. “I used to always think that if a school wasn’t performing, that it was strictly because there was a bad principal, or there were bad teachers,” she explained. “But the reality is that at Fenger, we’re a neighborhood school, so we’re just a reflection of the community. And you can’t expect to solve the problems of a school without taking into account what’s happening in the community.”

As Dozier got to know the students at Fenger, she found herself repeatedly taken aback by the severity of the problems they faced at home. “The majority of our students are living in poverty, from check to check,” she told me. “A lot of them live in neighborhoods with gang problems. I can’t think of a single kid at the school who doesn’t face some kind of serious adversity.” A quarter of the female students were either pregnant or already teenage mothers, she said. And when I asked her to estimate how many of her students lived with both biological parents, a quizzical look came over her face. “I can’t think of one,” she replied. “But I know we have them.”

The threat of violence seemed always to be looming over Fenger’s students as well. Chicago’s murder rate is twice as high as the rate in Los Angeles and more than double the rate in New York City. Gangs have a bigger and more lethal presence in Chicago than in any other major American city, and when Dozier came to Fenger, there had been a recent spike in gun violence among young people: in 2008, eighty-three school-age teenagers were murdered
in the city, and more than six hundred were shot but survived.

Though Dozier had been expecting the turnaround of Fenger to be a challenge, nothing prepared her for what happened on her sixteenth day on the job. A major fight broke out a few blocks from the school, involving maybe fifty teenagers, mostly Fenger students. There were no guns or knives, but some kids picked up railroad ties and started using them as clubs. A sixteen-year-old Fenger student named Derrion Albert who had waded into the fight was hit on the head with a railroad tie and then punched in the face and knocked unconscious. While he was on the ground, a few other young men kicked him in the head, and the combined blunt-force trauma killed him.

In its most basic elements, Derrion Albert’s death in September of 2009 was not all that different from any of the dozens of other violent deaths of Chicago high-school students that year. But the fight and Albert’s killing were captured on video by a bystander, and that fall the video became first a YouTube sensation and then a cable-news fixture. Local and national media descended on Fenger. For weeks, the streets around the school were lined with TV satellite trucks, and prayer vigils and protests were held in front of the school. The U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, came to meet with students. Then in October, Fenger made news again when three vicious gang fights broke out simultaneously on three separate floors of the school. Dozens of police cars arrived, five students were arrested, and the whole building was put on lockdown for three hours.

After the schoolwide brawl, Dozier instituted what she called a zero-tolerance policy for violent behavior and behavior that might lead to violence: If students threw up gang signs or exchanged gang handshakes in the hallway, Dozier gave them automatic ten-day suspensions. If they fought, she called the police and had them arrested, and then she did her best to expel them from Fenger permanently. When I started spending time at Fenger, more than a year after Albert’s death, the halls were generally quite orderly, though they certainly didn’t seem normal. There were always thick-armed security guards patrolling the hall; students couldn’t go anywhere without their IDs on Fenger lanyards around their necks, and when a student needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of class, she had to carry a giant hall pass, two feet long and bright yellow. Between classes, the synthesizer-laden theme from
Beverly Hills Cop
played on speakers in the hallways; students knew they had to make it to the next class before the last note sounded. Despite the firm rules, there were still disruptions; the first time I came to Fenger to interview Dozier, we were interrupted twice by shouts in the hallway, arguments that she had to rush off to help adjudicate.