Alexander, in fact, has done a very simple calculation to demonstrate what would happen if the children of Baltimore went to school year-round. The answer is that poor kids and wealthy kids would, by the end of elementary school, be doing math and reading at almost the same level.
Suddenly the causes of Asian math superiority become even more obvious. Students in Asian schools don’t have long summer vacations. Why would they? Cultures that believe that the route to success lies in rising before dawn 360 days a year are scarcely going to give their children three straight months off in the summer. The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long.
One of the questions asked of test takers on a recent math test given to students around the world was how many of the algebra, calculus, and geometry questions covered subject matter that they had previously learned in class. For Japanese twelfth graders, the answer was 92 percent. That’s the value of going to school 243 days a year. You have the time to learn everything that needs to be learned—and you have less time to unlearn it. For American twelfth graders, the comparable figure was 54 percent. For its poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that’s the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve. They decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city.
4.
“They start school at seven twenty-five,” says David Levin of the students at the Bronx KIPP Academy. “They all do a course called thinking skills until seven fifty-five. They do ninety minutes of English, ninety minutes of math every day, except in fifth grade, where they do two hours of math a day. An hour of science, an hour of social science, an hour of music at least twice a week, and then you have an hour and fifteen minutes of orchestra on top of that. Everyone does orchestra. The day goes from seven twenty-five until five p.m. After five, there are homework clubs, detention, sports teams. There are kids here from seven twenty-five until seven p.m. If you take an average day, and you take out lunch and recess, our kids are spending fifty to sixty percent more time learning than the traditional public school student.”
Levin was standing in the school’s main hallway. It was lunchtime and the students were trooping by quietly in orderly lines, all of them in their KIPP Academy shirts. Levin stopped a girl whose shirttail was out. “Do me a favor, when you get a chance,” he called out, miming a tucking-in movement. He continued: “Saturdays they come in nine to one. In the summer, it’s eight to two.” By summer, Levin was referring to the fact that KIPP students do three extra weeks of school, in July. These are, after all, precisely the kind of lower-income kids who Alexander identified as losing ground over the long summer vacation, so KIPP’s response is simply to not have a long summer vacation.
“The beginning is hard,” he went on. “By the end of the day they’re restless. Part of it is endurance, part of it is motivation. Part of it is incentives and rewards and fun stuff. Part of it is good old-fashioned discipline. You throw all of that into the stew. We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean.”
Levin walked down the hall to an eighth-grade math class and stood quietly in the back. A student named Aaron was at the front of the class, working his way through a problem from the page of thinking-skills exercises that all KIPP students are required to do each morning. The teacher, a pony-tailed man in his thirties named Frank Corcoran, sat in a chair to the side, only occasionally jumping in to guide the discussion. It was the kind of scene repeated every day in American classrooms—with one difference. Aaron was up at the front, working on that single problem, for twenty minutes—methodically, carefully, with the participation of the class, working his way through not just the answer but also the question of whether there was more than one way to get the answer. It was Renee painstakingly figuring out the concept of undefined slope all over again.
“What that extra time does is allow for a more relaxed atmosphere,” Corcoran said, after the class was over. “I find that the problem with math education is the sink-or-swim approach. Everything is rapid fire, and the kids who get it first are the ones who are rewarded. So there comes to be a feeling that there are people who can do math and there are people who aren’t math people. I think that extended amount of time gives you the chance as a teacher to explain things, and more time for the kids to sit and digest everything that’s going on—to review, to do things at a much slower pace. It seems counterintuitive but we do things at a slower pace and as a result we get through a lot more. There’s a lot more retention, better understanding of the material. It lets me be a little bit more relaxed. We have time to have games. Kids can ask any questions they want, and if I’m explaining something, I don’t feel pressed for time. I can go back over material and not feel time pressure.” The extra time gave Corcoran the chance to make mathematics meaningful: to let his students see the clear relationship between effort and reward.
On the walls of the classroom were dozens of certificates from the New York State Regents exam, testifying to first-class honors for Corcoran’s students. “We had a girl in this class,” Corcoran said. “She was a horrible math student in fifth grade. She cried every Saturday when we did remedial stuff. Huge tears and tears.” At the memory, Corcoran got a little emotional himself. He looked down. “She just e-mailed us a couple weeks ago. She’s in college now. She’s an accounting major.”
5.
The story of the miracle school that transforms losers into winners is, of course, all too familiar. It’s the stuff of inspirational books and sentimental Hollywood movies. But the reality of places like KIPP is a good deal less glamorous than that. To get a sense of what 50 to 60 percent more learning time means, listen to the typical day in the life of a KIPP student.
The student’s name is Marita. She’s an only child who lives in a single-parent home. Her mother never went to college. The two of them share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Marita used to go to a parochial school down the street from her home, until her mother heard of KIPP. “When I was in fourth grade, me and one of my other friends, Tanya, we both applied to KIPP,” Marita said. “I remember Miss Owens. She interviewed me, and the way she was saying made it sound so hard I thought I was going to prison. I almost started crying. And she was like, If you don’t want to sign this, you don’t have to sign this. But then my mom was right there, so I signed it.”
With that, her life changed. (Keep in mind, while reading what follows, that Marita is twelve years old.)
“I wake up at five-forty-five a.m. to get a head start,” she says. “I brush my teeth, shower. I get some breakfast at school, if I am running late. Usually get yelled at because I am taking too long. I meet my friends Diana and Steven at the bus stop, and we get the number one bus.”
A 5:45 wakeup is fairly typical of KIPP students, especially given the long bus and subway commutes that many have to get to school. Levin, at one point, went into a seventh-grade music class with seventy kids in it and asked for a show of hands on when the students woke up. A handful said they woke up after six. Three quarters said they woke up before six. And almost half said they woke up before 5:30. One classmate of Marita’s, a boy named José, said he sometimes wakes up at three or four a.m., finishes his homework from the night before, and then “goes back to sleep for a bit.”
Marita went on:
I leave school at five p.m., and if I don’t lollygag around, then I will get home around five-thirty. Then I say hi to my mom really quickly and start my homework. And if it’s not a lot of homework that day, it will take me two to three hours, and I’ll be done around nine p.m. Or if we have essays, then I will be done like ten p.m., or ten-thirty p.m.
Sometimes my mom makes me break for dinner. I tell her I want to go straight through, but she says I have to eat. So around eight, she makes me break for dinner for, like, a half hour, and then I get back to work. Then, usually after that, my mom wa
nts to hear about school, but I have to make it quick because I have to get in bed by eleven p.m. So I get all my stuff ready, and then I get into bed. I tell her all about the day and what happened, and by the time we are finished, she is on the brink of sleeping, so that’s probably around eleven-fifteen. Then I go to sleep, and the next morning we do it all over again. We are in the same room. But it’s a huge bedroom and you can split it into two, and we have beds on other sides. Me and my mom are very close.
She spoke in the matter-of-fact way of children who have no way of knowing how unusual their situation is. She had the hours of a lawyer trying to make partner, or of a medical resident. All that was missing were the dark circles under her eyes and a steaming cup of coffee, except that she was too young for either.
“Sometimes I don’t go to sleep when I’m supposed to,” Marita continued. “I go to sleep at, like, twelve o’clock, and the next afternoon, it will hit me. And I will doze off in class. But then I have to wake up because I have to get the information. I remember I was in one class, and I was dozing off and the teacher saw me and said, ‘Can I talk to you after class?’ And he asked me, ‘Why were you dozing off?’ And I told him I went to sleep late. And he was, like, ‘You need to go to sleep earlier.’”
6.
Marita’s life is not the life of a typical twelve-year-old. Nor is it what we would necessarily wish for a twelve-year-old. Children, we like to believe, should have time to play and dream and sleep. Marita has responsibilities. What is being asked of her is the same thing that was asked of the Korean pilots. To become a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity, because the deep respect for authority that runs throughout Korean culture simply does not work in the cockpit. Marita has had to do the same because the cultural legacy she had been given does not match her circumstances either—not when middle- and upper-middle-class families are using weekends and summer vacation to push their children ahead. Her community does not give her what she needs. So what does she have to do? Give up her evenings and weekends and friends—all the elements of her old world—and replace then with KIPP.
Here is Marita again, in a passage that is little short of heartbreaking:
Well, when we first started fifth grade, I used to have contact with one of the girls from my old school, and whenever I left school on Friday, I would go to her house and stay there until my mom would get home from work. So I would be at her house and I would be doing my homework. She would never have any homework. And she would say, “Oh, my God, you stay there late.” Then she said she wanted to go to KIPP, but then she would say that KIPP is too hard and she didn’t want to do it. And I would say, “Everyone says that KIPP is hard, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not really that hard.” She told me, “It’s because you are smart.” And I said, “No, every one of us is smart.” And she was so discouraged because we stayed until five and we had a lot of homework, and I told her that us having a lot of homework helps us do better in class. And she told me she didn’t want to hear the whole speech. All my friends now are from KIPP.
Is this a lot to ask of a child? It is. But think of things from Marita’s perspective. She has made a bargain with her school. She will get up at five-forty-five in the morning, go in on Saturdays, and do homework until eleven at night. In return, KIPP promises that it will take kids like her who are stuck in poverty and give them a chance to get out. It will get 84 percent of them up to or above their grade level in mathematics. On the strength of that performance, 90 percent of KIPP students get scholarships to private or parochial high schools instead of having to attend their own desultory high schools in the Bronx. And on the strength of that high school experience, more than 80 percent of KIPP graduates will go on to college, in many cases being the first in their family to do so.
How could that be a bad bargain? Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it’s a better shot at making the all-star team. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg. For Bill Gates, the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high. Joe Flom and the founders of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz got multiple breaks. They were born at the right time with the right parents and the right ethnicity, which allowed them to practice takeover law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught on. And what Korean Air did, when it finally turned its operations around, was give its pilots the opportunity to escape the constraints of their cultural legacy.
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunities for all. If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars. Now multiply that sudden flowering of talent by every field and profession. The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for.
Marita doesn’t need a brand-new school with acres of playing fields and gleaming facilities. She doesn’t need a laptop, a smaller class, a teacher with a PhD, or a bigger apartment. She doesn’t need a higher IQ or a mind as quick as Chris Langan’s. All those things would be nice, of course. But they miss the point. Marita just needed a chance. And look at the chance she was given! Someone brought a little bit of the rice paddy to the South Bronx and explained to her the miracle of meaningful work.
EPILOGUE
A Jamaican Story
“IF A PROGENY OF YOUNG COLORED CHILDREN IS BROUGHT FORTH, THESE ARE EMANCIPATED.”
1.
On September 9, 1931, a young woman named Daisy Nation gave birth to twin girls. She and her husband, Donald, were schoolteachers in a tiny village called Harewood, in the central Jamaican parish of Saint Catherine’s. They named their daughters Faith and Joyce. When Donald was told that he had fathered twins, he sank down on his knees and surrendered responsibility for their lives over to God.
The Nations lived in a small cottage on the grounds of Harewood’s Anglican church. The schoolhouse was next door, a long, single-room barn of a building raised on concrete stilts. On some days, there might be as many as three hundred children in the room, and on others, less than two dozen. The children would read out loud or recite their times tables. Writing was done on slates. Whenever possible, the classes would move outside, under the mango trees. If the children were out of control, Donald Nation would walk from one end of the room to the other, waving a strap from left to right as the children scrambled back to their places.
He was an imposing man, quiet and dignified, and a great lover of books. In his small library were works of poetry and philosophy and novels by such writers as Somerset Maugham. Every day he would read the newspaper closely, following the course of the events around the word. In the evening, his best friend, Archdeacon Hay, the Anglican pastor who lived on the other side of the hill, would come over and sit on Donald’s veranda, and together they would expound on the problems of Jamaica. Donald’s wife, Daisy, was from the parish of Saint Elizabeth. Her maiden name was Ford, and her father had owned a sm
all grocery store. She was one of three sisters, and she was renowned for her beauty.
At the age of eleven, the twins won scholarships to a boarding school called Saint Hilda’s near the north coast. It was an old Anglican private school, established for the daughters of English clergy, property owners, and overseers. From Saint Hilda’s they applied and were accepted to University College, in London. Not long afterward, Joyce went to a twenty-first-birthday party for a young English mathematician named Graham. He stood up to recite a poem and forgot his lines, and Joyce became embarrassed for him—even though it made no sense for her to feel embarrassed, because she did not know him at all. Joyce and Graham fell in love and got married. They moved to Canada. Graham was a math professor. Joyce became a successful writer and a family therapist. They had three sons and built a beautiful house on a hill, off in the countryside. Graham’s last name is Gladwell. He is my father, and Joyce Gladwell is my mother.
2.
That is the story of my mother’s path to success—and it isn’t true. It’s not a lie in the sense that the facts were made up. But it is false in the way that telling the story of Bill Gates without mentioning the computer at Lakeside is false, or accounting for Asian math prowess without going back to the rice paddies is false. It leaves out my mother’s many opportunities and the importance of her cultural legacy.
In 1935, for example, when my mother and her sister were four, a historian named William M. MacMillan visited Jamaica. He was a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. MacMillan was a man before his time: he was deeply concerned with the social problems of South Africa’s black population, and he came to the Caribbean to make the same argument he had made back home in South Africa.
Chief among MacMillan’s concerns was Jamaica’s educational system. Formal schooling—if you could call what happened in the wooden barn next door to my grandparents’ house “formal schooling”—went only to fourteen years of age. Jamaica had no public high schools or universities. Those with academic inclinations took extra classes with the head teacher in their teenage years and with luck made it into teachers’ college. Those with broader ambitions had to somehow find their way into a private school, and from there to a university in the United States or England.
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