Outliers

by Malcolm Gladwell

  We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have “it” or you don’t. But to Schoenfeld, it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds. Put a bunch of Renees in a classroom, and give them the space and time to explore mathematics for themselves, and you could go a long way. Or imagine a country where Renee’s doggedness is not the exception, but a cultural trait, embedded as deeply as the culture of honor in the Cumberland Plateau. Now that would be a country good at math.

  7.

  Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world. It’s the TIMSS (the same test you read about earlier, in the discussion of differences between fourth graders born near the beginning of a school cutoff date and those born near the end of the date), and the point of the TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s.

  When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like. It’s not a trivial exercise. It’s about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.

  Now, here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

  The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled across it by accident. “It came out of the blue,” he says. Boe hasn’t even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal, because, he says, it’s just a bit too weird. Remember, he’s not saying that the ability to finish the questionnaire and the ability to excel on the math test are related. He’s saying that they are the same: if you compare the two rankings, they are identical.

  Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn’t even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.

  So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn’t surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work.* They are the kinds of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year, said things to one another like “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”†

  CHAPTER NINE

  Marita’s Bargain

  “ALL MY FRIENDS NOW ARE FROM KIPP.”

  1.

  In the mid-1990s, an experimental public school called the KIPP Academy opened on the fourth floor of Lou Gehrig Junior High School in New York City.* Lou Gehrig is in the seventh school district, otherwise known as the South Bronx, one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. It is a squat, gray 1960-s-era building across the street from a bleak-looking group of high-rises. A few blocks over is Grand Concourse, the borough’s main thoroughfare. These are not streets that you’d happily walk down, alone, after dark.

  KIPP is a middle school. Classes are large: the fifth grade has two sections of thirty-five students each. There are no entrance exams or admissions requirements. Students are chosen by lottery, with any fourth grader living in the Bronx eligible to apply. Roughly half of the students are African American; the rest are Hispanic. Three-quarters of the children come from single-parent homes. Ninety percent qualify for “free or reduced lunch,” which is to say that their families earn so little that the federal government chips in so the children can eat properly at lunchtime.

  KIPP Academy seems like the kind of school in the kind of neighborhood with the kind of student that would make educators despair—except that the minute you enter the building, it’s clear that something is different. The students walk quietly down the hallways in single file. In the classroom, they are taught to turn and address anyone talking to them in a protocol known as “SSLANT”: smile, sit up, listen, ask questions, nod when being spoken to, and track with your eyes. On the walls of the school’s corridors are hundreds of pennants from the colleges that KIPP graduates have gone on to attend. Last year, hundreds of families from across the Bronx entered the lottery for KIPP’s two fifth-grade classes. It is no exaggeration to say that just over ten years into its existence, KIPP has become one of the most desirable public schools in New York City.

  What KIPP is most famous for is mathematics. In the South Bronx, only about 16 percent of all middle school students are performing at or above their grade level in math. But at KIPP, by the end of fifth grade, many of the students call math their favorite subject. In seventh grade, KIPP students start high school algebra. By the end of eighth grade, 84 percent of the students are performing at or above their grade level, which is to say that this motley group of randomly chosen lower-income kids from dingy apartments in one of the country’s worst neighborhoods—whose parents, in an overwhelming number of cases, never set foot in a college—do as well in mathematics as the privileged eighth graders of American’s wealthy suburbs. “Our kids’ reading is on point,” said David Levin, who founded KIPP with a fellow teacher, Michael Feinberg, in 1994. “They struggle a little bit with writing skills. But when they leave here, they rock in math.”

  There are now more than fifty KIPP schools across the United States, with more on the way. The KIPP program represents one of the most promising new educational philosophies in the United States. But its success is best understood not in terms of its curriculum, its teachers, its resources, or some kind of institutional innovation. KIPP is, rather, an organization that has succeeded by taking the idea of cultural legacies seriously.

  2.

  In the early nineteenth century, a group of reformers set out to establish a system of public education in the United States. What passed for public school at the time was a haphazard assortment of locally run one-room schoolhouses and overcrowded urban classrooms scattered around the country. In rural areas, schools closed in the spring and fall and ran all summer long, so that children could help out in the busy planting and harvesting seasons. In the city, many schools mirrored the long and chaotic schedules of the children’s working-class parents. The reformers wanted to make sure that all children went to school and that public school was comprehensive, meaning that all children got enough schooling to learn how to read and write and do basic arithmetic and function as productive citizens.

  But as the historian Kenneth Gold has pointed out, the early educational reformers were also tremendously concerned that children not get too much schooling. In 1871, for example, the US commissioner of edu
cation published a report by Edward Jarvis on the “Relation of Education to Insanity.” Jarvis had studied 1,741 cases of insanity and concluded that “over-study” was responsible for 205 of them. “Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder,” Jarvis wrote. Similarly, the pioneer of public education in Massachusetts, Horace Mann, believed that working students too hard would create a “most pernicious influence upon character and habits....Not infrequently is health itself destroyed by over-stimulating the mind.” In the education journals of the day, there were constant worries about overtaxing students or blunting their natural abilities through too much schoolwork.

  The reformers, Gold writes:

  strove for ways to reduce time spent studying, because long periods of respite could save the mind from injury. Hence the elimination of Saturday classes, the shortening of the school day, and the lengthening of vacation—all of which occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. Teachers were cautioned that “when [students] are required to study, their bodies should not be exhausted by long confinement, nor their minds bewildered by prolonged application.” Rest also presented particular opportunities for strengthening cognitive and analytical skills. As one contributor to the Massachusetts Teacher suggested, “it is when thus relieved from the state of tension belonging to actual study that boys and girls, as well as men and women, acquire the habit of thought and reflection, and of forming their own conclusions, independently of what they are taught and the authority of others.”

  This idea—that effort must be balanced by rest— could not be more different from Asian notions about study and work, of course. But then again, the Asian worldview was shaped by the rice paddy. In the Pearl River Delta, the rice farmer planted two and sometimes three crops a year. The land was fallow only briefly. In fact, one of the singular features of rice cultivation is that because of the nutrients carried by the water used in irrigation, the more a plot of land is cultivated, the more fertile it gets.

  But in Western agriculture, the opposite is true. Unless a wheat- or cornfield is left fallow every few years, the soil becomes exhausted. Every winter, fields are empty. The hard labor of spring planting and fall harvesting is followed, like clockwork, by the slower pace of summer and winter. This is the logic the reformers applied to the cultivation of young minds. We formulate new ideas by analogy, working from what we know toward what we don’t know, and what the reformers knew were the rhythms of the agricultural seasons. A mind must be cultivated. But not too much, lest it be exhausted. And what was the remedy for the dangers of exhaustion? The long summer vacation—a peculiar and distinctive American legacy that has had profound consequences for the learning patterns of the students of the present day.

  3.

  Summer vacation is a topic seldom mentioned in American educational debates. It is considered a permanent and inviolate feature of school life, like high school football or the senior prom. But take a look at the following sets of elementary school test-score results, and see if your faith in the value of long summer holidays isn’t profoundly shaken.

  These numbers come from research led by the Johns Hopkins University sociologist Karl Alexander. Alexander tracked the progress of 650 first graders from the Baltimore public school system, looking at how they scored on a widely used math- and reading-skills exam called the California Achievement Test. These are reading scores for the first five years of elementary school, broken down by socioeconomic class—low, middle, and high.

  Class1st Grade 2nd Grade 3rd Grade 4th Grade 5th Grade

  Low 329 375 397 433 461

  Middle 348 388 425 467 497

  High 361 418 460 506 534

  Look at the first column. The students start in first grade with meaningful, but not overwhelming, differences in their knowledge and ability. The first graders from the wealthiest homes have a 32-point advantage over the first graders from the poorest homes—and by the way, first graders from poor homes in Baltimore are really poor. Now look at the fifth-grade column. By that point, four years later, the initially modest gap between rich and poor has more than doubled.

  This “achievement gap” is a phenomenon that has been observed over and over again, and it typically provokes one of two responses. The first response is that disadvantaged kids simply don’t have the same inherent ability to learn as children from more privileged backgrounds. They’re not as smart. The second, slightly more optimistic conclusion is that, in some way, our schools are failing poor children: we simply aren’t doing a good enough job of teaching them the skills they need. But here’s where Alexander’s study gets interesting, because it turns out that neither of those explanations rings true.

  The city of Baltimore didn’t give its kids the California Achievement Test just at the end of every school year, in June. It gave them the test in September too, just after summer vacation ended. What Alexander realized is that the second set of test results allowed him to do a slightly different analysis. If he looked at the difference between the score a student got at the beginning of the school year, in September, and the score he or she got the following June, he could measure—precisely—how much that student learned over the school year. And if he looked at the difference between a student’s score in June and then in the following September, he could see how much that student learned over the course of the summer. In other words, he could figure out—at least in part—how much of the achievement gap is the result of things that happen during the school year, and how much it has to do with what happens during summer vacation.

  Let’s start with the school-year gains. This table shows how many points students’ test scores rose from the time they started classes in September to the time they stopped in June. The “Total” column represents their cumulative classroom learning from all five years of elementary school.

  Class 1st Grade 2nd Grade 3rd Grade 4th Grade 5th GradeTotal

  Low 55 46 30 33 25 189

  Middle 69 43 34 41 27 214

  High 60 39 34 28 23 184

  Here is a completely different story from the one suggested by the first table. The first set of test results made it look like lower-income kids were somehow failing in the classroom. But here we see plainly that isn’t true. Look at the “Total” column. Over the course of five years of elementary school, poor kids “out-learn” the wealthiest kids 189 points to 184 points. They lag behind the middle-class kids by only a modest amount, and, in fact, in one year, second grade, they learn more than the middle- or upper-class kids.

  Next, let’s see what happens if we look just at how reading scores change during summer vacation.

  ClassAfter 1st After 2nd After 3rd After 4thTotal

  Low –3.67 –1.70 2.74 2.89 0.26

  Middle –3.11 4.18 3.68 2.34 7.09

  High 15.38 9.22 14.51 13.38 52.49

  Do you see the difference? Look at the first column, which measures what happens over the summer after first grade. The wealthiest kids come back in September and their reading scores have jumped more than 15 points. The poorest kids come back from the holidays and their reading scores have dropped almost 4 points. Poor kids may out-learn rich kids during the school year. But during the summer, they fall far behind.

  Now take a look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school.

  What are we seeing here? One very real possibility is that these are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting styles that we talked about in the Chris Langan chapter. Think back to Alex Williams, the nine-year-old whom Annette Lareau studied. His parents believe in concerted cultivation. He gets taken to museums an
d gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp, where he takes classes. When he’s bored at home, there are plenty of books to read, and his parents see it as their responsibility to keep him actively engaged in the world around him. It’s not hard to see how Alex would get better at reading and math over the summer.

  But not Katie Brindle, the little girl from the other side of the tracks. There’s no money to send her to summer camp. She’s not getting driven by her mom to special classes, and there aren’t books lying around her house that she can read if she gets bored. There’s probably just a television. She may still have a wonderful vacation, making new friends, playing outside, going to the movies, having the kind of carefree summer days that we all dream about. None of those things, though, will improve her math and reading skills, and every carefree summer day she spends puts her further and further behind Alex. Alex isn’t necessarily smarter than Katie. He’s just out-learning her: he’s putting in a few solid months of learning during the summer while she watches television and plays outside.

  What Alexander’s work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding—all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But look back at the second table, which shows what happens between September and June. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it.