by Paul Tough
Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about James in the past tense; he is only twelve, after all. He didn’t get into Stuyvesant, in the end, but he still has four years of high school in front of him (four years during which he’ll no doubt crush every player on the Stuyvesant chess team). It might not have been possible to turn him into an elite student in six months, as Spiegel had hoped. But how about in four years? For a student with his prodigious gifts, anything seems possible—as long as there’s a teacher out there who can make succeeding in school as attractive a prospect as succeeding on the chessboard.
4. How to Succeed
1. The College Conundrum
For most of the twentieth century, the United States stood alone in the quality of its higher-education system and the percentage of its young people who successfully passed through that system. As recently as the mid-1990s, the American college-graduation rate was the highest in the world, more than twice as high as the average rate among developed countries. But the global education hierarchy is now changing rapidly. Many countries, both developed and developing, are in the middle of an unprecedented college-graduation boom, and just in the past decade or so, the United States has fallen from first to twelfth in the percentage of its twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds who are graduates of four-year colleges, trailing behind a diverse list of competitors that includes the United Kingdom, Australia, Poland, Norway, and South Korea.
It is not that the overall college-attainment rate in the United States has gone down—it has just been growing very slowly, while the rates of other nations have raced ahead. In 1976, 24 percent of Americans in their late twenties had earned a four-year college degree; thirty years later, in 2006, the figure had risen to only 28 percent. But that apparently static number conceals a growing class divide. Between 1990 and 2000, the rate of BA attainment among wealthy students with at least one parent who had graduated from college rose from 61 percent to 68 percent, while, according to one analysis, the rate among the most disadvantaged young Americans —students in the lowest-income quartile whose parents were not college graduates—actually fell, from 11.1 percent to 9.5 percent. In this era of rising inequality, that trend might seem unsurprising: just one more indicator of the way the classes are diverging in the United States. But it’s worth remembering that for most of the past century, things were very different.
As the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz chronicled in their influential 2008 book The Race Between Education and Technology, the story of American higher education in the twentieth century was essentially a story of democratization. Just 5 percent of American males born in 1900 graduated from college, and those 5 percent were the elite in every way: wealthy, white, well connected. But between about 1925 and 1945, the percentage of American men graduating from college doubled, from 5 percent to 10 percent, and then it doubled again between about 1945 and 1965, thanks in no small measure to the GI Bill, which helped put millions of returning American soldiers through college. (For American women, the increase in the college-graduation rate was fairly modest until the early 1960s, but after that, it far outpaced the increase among men.) As a result, American college campuses became less elite and more diverse; the children of factory workers found themselves sitting in lecture halls and science labs next to the children of factory owners. During those years, “upward mobility with regard to education characterized American society,” wrote Goldin and Katz. “Each generation of Americans achieved a level of education that greatly exceeded that of the previous one.” But now that progress has stopped, or at least stalled, and the nation’s higher-education system has ceased to be the instrument of social mobility and growing equality that it was for so much of the twentieth century.
Until recently, education-policy types who concerned themselves with the problems of American higher education were focused mostly on college access—how to increase the number of young people, and especially disadvantaged young people, who graduated from high school and enrolled in college. But over the past few years, it has become clear that the United States does not so much have a problem of limited and unequal college access; it has a problem of limited and unequal college completion. Among the thirty-four member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, or OECD, the United States still ranks a respectable eighth in its college-enrollment rate. But in college completion —the percentage of entering college freshmen who go on to graduate—the United States ranks second to last, ahead of only Italy. Not long ago, the United States led the world in producing college graduates; now it leads the world in producing college dropouts.
What is most puzzling about this phenomenon is that it has taken place at the same time as the value of an American college education has skyrocketed. An American with a BA can now expect to earn 83 percent more than an American with only a high-school diploma. This college-graduate wage premium, as economists call it, is among the highest in the developed world, and it has risen sharply since 1980, when American college graduates earned just 40 percent more than high-school graduates. As Goldin and Katz put it, a young American today who is able to complete college but does not do so “is leaving large amounts of money lying on the street.”
So we are left with a conundrum: Why are so many American students dropping out of college just as a college degree has become so valuable and just as young people in the rest of the world have begun to graduate in such remarkable numbers?
2. The Finish Line
The best answer to this question so far came in a 2009 book titled Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities, a collaboration between two former college presidents, both economists—William G. Bowen, the president of Princeton University from 1972 to 1988, and Michael S. McPherson, who served for almost a decade as the president of Macalester College in Minnesota. Because of their standing in the education establishment, Bowen and McPherson—along with a third coauthor, a researcher named Matthew Chingos—were able to persuade sixty-eight public colleges, as well as the College Board and ACT, to give them access to detailed academic data covering about two hundred thousand students. They found in the data some surprising facts about which students successfully complete college, which ones drop out, and why.
In certain quarters, the college-dropout phenomenon has been explained as a problem of excessive and unrealistic ambition on the part of many students, especially low-income students. The conservative author Charles Murray argued in his 2008 book Real Education that the true crisis in American higher education is not that too few young Americans are getting a college education; it is that too many are. Because of Americans’ natural tendency toward “educational romanticism,” Murray wrote, we push students to go to college who are simply not smart enough to be there. High-school guidance counselors and college-admissions officers, lost in “a fog of wishful thinking, euphemisms, and well-intentioned egalitarianism,” encourage low-IQ, low-income students to attend colleges that are too intellectually demanding; when those students discover that they don’t possess the intelligence necessary to do the work, they drop out. Murray, the coauthor of The Bell Curve, is perhaps the country’s best-known cognitive determinist, and his thesis in Real Education is a pure expression of the cognitive hypothesis: what matters in success is IQ, which is fixed quite early in life; education is not so much about providing skills as it is about sorting people and giving those with the highest IQs the opportunity to reach their full potential.
But when Bowen, McPherson, and Chingos took a close look at their data, they found that low-income students generally weren’t overreaching their abilities when they chose their colleges; many of them, in fact, were attending schools well below what their GPAs and standardized-test scores qualified them for. This phenomenon, which the authors labeled undermatching, didn’t happen much with well-off students; it was a problem that almost exclusively affected disadvantaged teenagers. In North Carolina, the state for which the researchers were
able to gather the most complete data, three out of four high-income students with the GPAs and test scores needed to gain admission to one of the state’s highly selective public colleges went on to attend a highly selective school. For them, the system worked. But among students who had those same lofty academic credentials but didn’t have parents who had attended college themselves, only a third chose to go to a highly selective school. And choosing a less challenging college didn’t make it more likely that those highly qualified students would graduate—it had the opposite effect. Undermatching, the authors found, was almost always a big mistake.
But the information on undermatching, important though it was, was not the most surprising or significant finding in Crossing the Finish Line. The authors also discovered that the most accurate predictor of whether a student would successfully complete college was not his or her score on the SAT or the ACT, the two standardized college-admissions tests. In fact, it turned out that, except at the most highly selective public universities, ACT scores revealed very little about whether or not a student would graduate from college. The far better predictor of college completion was a student’s high-school GPA.
To people involved in the college-admissions process, this finding came as something of a shock; it was essentially a repudiation of one of the founding tenets of the late-twentieth-century American meritocracy. In The Big Test, Nicholas Lemann’s history of standardized college-admissions testing, he explains that the SAT was invented, in the years after World War II, because of growing skepticism about the predictive power of high-school grades. How were college-admissions officials supposed to compare a 3.5 student at a suburban high school in California with a 3.5 student at a rural high school in the Pennsylvania countryside or at an urban school in the South Bronx? The SAT was designed to correct that problem, to provide an objective tool that would distill a student’s ability to thrive in college down to a single, indisputable number. But at the colleges that Bowen and Chingos and McPherson examined, high-school grades turned out to be excellent predictors of college graduation—no matter where the student attended high school. It was true that a student with a 3.5 GPA from a high-quality high school was somewhat more likely to graduate from college than a student with a 3.5 GPA from a low-quality high school, but the difference was surprisingly modest. As the authors put it, “Students with very good high school grades who attended not-very-strong high schools nonetheless graduated in large numbers from whatever university they attended.”
And when Angela Duckworth, the guru of self-control and grit at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed GPA and standardized-test scores among middle-school and high-school students, she found that standardized-test scores were predicted by scores on pure IQ tests and that GPA was predicted by scores on tests of self-control. Put Duckworth’s findings together with the discoveries in Crossing the Finish Line, and you reach a rather remarkable conclusion: whether or not a student is able to graduate from a decent American college doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with how smart he or she is. It has to do, instead, with that same list of character strengths that produce high GPAs in middle school and high school. “In our view,” Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson wrote, “high school grades reveal much more than mastery of content. They reveal qualities of motivation and perseverance—as well as the presence of good study habits and time management skills—that tell us a great deal about the chances that a student will complete a college program.”
It’s possible, of course, that once a student reaches adolescence, those skills and habits are no longer teachable. It may be that at that point, either you have them or you don’t, and if you have them, you’re likely to graduate from college, and if you don’t, you’re not. But consider Elizabeth Spiegel’s ability to reconstruct the thinking skills of her middle-school chess players. Think of the way Lanita Reed helped Keitha Jones change her whole outlook on life—essentially helping her rewire her personality—at the advanced age of seventeen. In each case, a teacher or mentor found a way to help a student achieve a rapid and unexpected transformation by using what James Heckman would call noncognitive skills and David Levin would call character strengths. What if we could do that for large numbers of teenagers—not to help them attain chess mastery or persuade them to quit fighting in school but to help them develop precisely those mental skills and character strengths they would need to graduate from college?
3. One in Thirty
Jeff Nelson, the CEO of OneGoal, doesn’t seem like a revolutionary when you first meet him. He’s fresh-faced and clean-cut and midwesternly polite, with a tuft of blond hair sticking up over his forehead that makes him look a little like the comic-book character Tintin. He wears button-down shirts and keeps to a button-down schedule; once, when I made arrangements to talk to him on the phone, he e-mailed me in advance with a point-by-point agenda for our call that included three “objectives” and allocated ten minutes for “wrap up.” He seems most at home when surrounded by the typical tools of the modern education reformer—PowerPoint presentations, management consultants, strategic plans, venti lattes—and yet his vision of education reform is a profoundly unorthodox one, a thorough challenge to the cognitive hypothesis.
Nelson grew up in Wilmette, an affluent bedroom community that is part of the comfortable, Caucasian suburban enclave north of Chicago where John Hughes set Home Alone and The Breakfast Club. It is a mostly Democratic town, a reliable haven for progressive causes and notions of social justice, though those notions are often expressed in an abstract, distant way, through donations to Amnesty International or Habitat for Humanity or petitions supporting the refugees of Darfur. From an early age, though, Nelson was drawn to an issue closer to home: the challenges faced by children growing up in the metropolis fifteen miles to his south. In eighth grade, Nelson read Alex Kotlowitz’s book There Are No Children Here, the harrowing story of two African American boys living in the Henry Horner Homes, a dismal and dangerous high-rise housing project on Chicago’s West Side. The book, Nelson told me, “crushed my view of the world a little bit. It sparked something in me.”
Nelson went on to attend New Trier Township High School, which is legendary in the Chicago area for its lush campus and lavish facilities, all underwritten by the property taxes assessed on the luxurious homes of Wilmette and the surrounding towns. The crusading journalist Jonathan Kozol, in his 1991 book Savage Inequalities, chose New Trier as his archetypal suburban high school of privilege, cataloging its dance studios and fencing rooms and Latin classes and contrasting the “superfluity of opportunity” its students enjoyed to the “denial of opportunity” experienced by students at Du Sable High, a South Side school that, Kozol wrote, would be “shunned—or, probably, shut down —if it were serving a white middle-class community.” Nelson read Kozol’s book in his freshman sociology class at the University of Michigan, and it only increased the sense of urgency he felt, his growing determination to find a way to reverse the patterns that Kozol described; to bring at least a small measure of the opportunity enjoyed by students at New Trier to students at schools like Du Sable.
After graduating, Nelson joined Teach for America and taught sixth grade at a struggling, high-poverty South Side public school called O’Keeffe Elementary, a mile or so from Du Sable. He was a gifted classroom instructor, raising his students’ reading and math ability by an average of two years’ worth of progress for each year he taught them and, in his second year, winning recognition as the best Teach for America teacher in the Chicago region. He was a coach of the school’s football team and helped start a student council, and he became close with many of his students, visiting them at home and getting to know their parents.
From his first day at O’Keeffe, Nelson talked to his students incessantly about college. All of them were African Americans from low-income families, and few of them had parents who were college graduates—but that didn’t matter, Nelson promised them; if they worked hard, they could and would go to college and graduate. Then
one morning in April of 2006, Nelson picked up the Chicago Tribune and read a front-page story, based on a report by the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, that challenged that promise. According to the consortium, just eight of every one hundred students who started high school in the Chicago public schools would go on to earn four-year-college degrees. For African American boys, the odds were even worse: fewer than one in thirty black male high-school freshmen in the city would graduate from a four-year college by the time they were twenty-five. For Nelson, the numbers were profoundly unsettling: even if he was able to create the most effective sixth-grade classroom in the city, could that possibly be enough to help his students overcome those terrible odds?
Nelson’s experience at O’Keeffe Elementary convinced him of two things: first, that he would spend the rest of his life working in the field of education reform. And second, that despite his success in the classroom, he wasn’t meant to be a teacher. As he was preparing to leave O’Keeffe, Teach for America’s national office offered him a job as the organization’s executive director for Chicago, a big responsibility for a twenty-four-year-old. It seemed like his dream job, but at the last minute, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand let alone put into words, he turned it down. It was an agonizing decision. Saying no to Teach for America “frustrated me beyond belief,” he told me. “I was so close to having found the right way to make a big impact, but for some reason it didn’t feel like the right role.”
The Tribune story had helped convince him that there was a missing piece in the education-reform landscape, a program or a system or a tool that could help kids like the ones he taught at O’Keeffe not only make it to college but also graduate. “I desperately wanted to find an organization, or start one, that closed the gap between high school and college,” he told me. “Every one of us in Teach for America was working so hard and creating results in our classrooms, but if our kids didn’t go on to graduate from college, who the hell cared?”
