Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why
    Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why
    Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why
    Ebook163 pages3 hours

    Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why

    By Paul Tough

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to audiobook
    Read preview

    About this ebook

    “Research demonstrates that all children have the capacity for . . . success . . . Informative and effective methods to help children overcome issues and thrive.” —Kirkus Reviews

    A NOW READ THIS PBS NewsHour and New York Times Book Review selection

    In the New York Times–bestselling How Children Succeed, Paul Tough introduced us to research showing that personal qualities like perseverance, self-control, and conscientiousness play a critical role in children’s success.

    Now, in Helping Children Succeed, Tough takes on a new set of pressing questions: What does growing up with economic and other stresses do to children’s mental and physical development? How does adversity at home affect their success in the classroom, from preschool to high school? And what practical steps can the adults who are responsible for them take to improve their chances for a positive future?

    Tough once again encourages us to think in a new way about the challenges of childhood. Mining the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, he provides us with insights and strategies for a new approach to childhood adversity, one designed to help many more children succeed.

    “Attention is finally turning to the psychic and emotional qualities our children bring to the classroom. No one is better than chronicling this shift than Paul Tough.” —David Brooks, New York Times

    “Tough convincingly argues that classroom climate is what needs changed in order to shape students’ experiences. . . . For readers concerned with finding practical ways to engage with and improve education for those children with the most to lose.” —Library Journal
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 24, 2016
    ISBN9780544935310
    Author

    Paul Tough

    PAUL TOUGH is the author of Helping Children Succeed and How Children Succeed, which spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestseller lists and was translated into twenty-eight languages. He is also the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. He is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to the public radio program This American Life. You can learn more about his work at paultough.com and follow him on Twitter: @paultough.

    Read more from Paul Tough

    Related to Helping Children Succeed

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Helping Children Succeed

    4/5

    21 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      “Our usual intuition when children and adolescents misbehave is to assume they’re doing so because they have rationally considered the consequences of their actions and calculated that the benefits of misbehavior outweigh the costs. And so our response is usually to try and increase the cost of misbehavior by ratcheting up the punishment they receive. But this only makes sense if a child’s poor behavior is the product of a rational cost-benefit analysis. And, in fact, one of the chief insights that the neurobiological research provides is that the behavior of young people, especially young people who have experienced significant adversity, is often under the sway of emotional and psychological and hormonal forces that are far from rational.“This doesn’t mean, of course, that teachers should excuse or ignore bad behavior in the classroom, But it does explain why harsh punishments so often prove ineffective over the long term that school-discipline programs might be more effective if they were to focus less on imposing punishment and more on creating a classroom environment in which students who lack self-regulatory capacities can find the tools and context they need to develop them.” P54So, increasing consequences doesn’t cause better behavior.The flip side is also true: rewards also don’t seem to motivate, since, as soon as the rewards are withdrawn, performance often goes down.Instead, author Paul Tough argues that motivation must be intrinsic – spurred by autonomy, competance, and relatedness. These are the foundations that can produce the basics for true success which Tough believes rely on self-control and grit – the ability to care about the result and the courage to try again.Since this is a very different system that was encouraged for parents (like me!) to use in earlier decades which relied on good and bad consequences, he examines how one can produce these characteristic in children, especially those who have not learned these behaviors due to difficult home situations or conditions making such learning more difficult.
    • 4/5
      A very well thought out, presented, and informative look at educating the youth, especially those disadvantaged due to poverty, stereotype, location, and disability (namely ADHD/ADD/Autism). Pertinent information for teachers, educators, school officials, and parents all alike. Those from the start of the curriculum to the end of it. Those raising the child and those looking after the child. The onus is on everyone to better the life of every child, and the biggest way to do that is through education. Unfortunately, typically, the education in the poorer sections or the African-American/Latino sections tend to be subpar comparatively; and altogether as the later chapters show, the education in America itself is lacking in comparison to countries like Japan.

      This is something that needs work on, and studies need to be done, and information needs to be accessed, fact checked, read, studied, and plans created and put into practice. And the only way to do that, is to take the time, spend the money, and do the research, and books like this will help us get that research done, help us bridge these gaps, and help us better educate the children and youth, thus ensuring the future for them, as well as ourselves.
    • 4/5
      As a teacher, I found this book both interesting and useful. I've wondered if you can teach things like grit and perseverance - this author suggest that creating certain environments will help children to develop them. I plan on making the effort to make some of these changes in my classroom in the upcoming school year.

    Book preview

    Helping Children Succeed - Paul Tough

    First Mariner Books edition 2018

    Copyright © 2016 by Paul Tough

    All rights reserved

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

    hmhbooks.com

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

    ISBN 978-0-544-93528-0 (hardcover)

    ISBN 978-1-328-91542-9 (paperback)

    eISBN 978-0-544-93531-0

    v5.0719

    Infographics by Dylan Rosal Greif

    Cover design by Chelsea Cardinal

    Author photograph © Paul Terefenko

    For Charles, who is just getting started

    1. Adversity

    In 2013, the United States reached an educational milestone. For the first time, a majority of the country’s public school students—51 percent of them, to be precise—fell below the federal government’s threshold for being low income, meaning they were eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. This wasn’t an overnight development; according to data compiled by the Southern Education Foundation, the percentage of American public school students who are low income has been rising steadily since the foundation started tracking the number in 1989. (Back then fewer than a third of students met the definition.) Passing the 50 percent mark may be a symbolic distinction, but as symbols go it is an important one. It means that the challenge of teaching low-income children can no longer be considered a side issue in American education. Helping poor kids succeed is now, by definition, the central mission of American public schools and, by extension, a central responsibility of the American public.

    It is a responsibility we are failing to meet. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, the gap in eighth-grade reading and math test scores between low-income students and their wealthier peers hasn’t shrunk at all over the past 20 years. (The gap between poor and wealthier fourth-grade students narrowed during those two decades, but only by a tiny amount.) Meanwhile, the difference between the SAT scores of wealthy and poor high school seniors has actually increased over the past 30 years, from a 90-point gap (on an 800-point scale) in the 1980s to a 125-point gap today. The disparity in college-attainment rates between affluent and low-income students has also risen sharply. And these days, unless children from poor families get a college degree, their economic mobility is severely restricted: Young people who grow up in families in the lowest income quintile (with household income below about $21,500) and don’t obtain a B.A. now have just a one in two chance of escaping that bottom economic bracket as adults.

    These disparities are growing despite the fact that over the past two decades, closing the test-score gaps between affluent and poor children has been a central aim of national education policy, as embodied in President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law and President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program. These government efforts have been supported and supplemented by a constellation of nonprofit groups, often backed by philanthropists with deep pockets and an abiding commitment to addressing educational inequality. Along the way, certainly, those efforts have produced individual successes—schools and programs that make a genuine difference for some low-income students—but they have led to little or no improvement in the performance of low-income children as a whole.

    The ongoing national discussion over how to close those gaps, and whether they even can be closed at all, has not been confined to policy makers and philanthropists. Educators across the country are intimately familiar with the struggles of children experiencing adversity, as are social workers, mentors, pediatricians, and parents. If you work with kids who are growing up in poverty or other adverse circumstances, you know that they can be difficult for teachers and other professionals to reach, hard to motivate, hard to calm down, hard to connect with. Many educators have been able to overcome these barriers (with some of their students, at least). But I’ve spoken with hundreds more in recent years who feel burned out by, even desperate over, the frustrations of their work.

    Those of us who seek to overcome these educational disparities face many obstacles—some financial, some political, and some bureaucratic. But the first obstacle, I would argue, is conceptual: We don’t yet entirely understand the mechanisms behind childhood adversity. What is it about growing up in poverty that leads to so many troubling outcomes? Or to put the question another way: What is it that growing up in affluence provides to children that growing up in poverty does not?

    These are the questions that I have been trying to answer in my reporting for more than a decade. My first book, Whatever It Takes, took as its subject the work of Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and examined, among other topics, how neighborhoods affect children’s outcomes, and particularly how the experience of living in a neighborhood of concentrated poverty constrains children’s opportunities. My second book, How Children Succeed, considered the challenges of disadvantaged children through a different lens: the skills and capacities they develop (or don’t develop) as they make their way through childhood.

    The particular focus of How Children Succeed was the role that a group of factors often referred to as noncognitive or soft skills—qualities like perseverance, conscientiousness, self-control, and optimism—play in the challenges poor children face and the strategies that might help them succeed. These qualities, which are also sometimes called character strengths, have in recent years become a source of intensifying interest and growing optimism among those who study child development. Many people, myself included, now believe that they are critical tools for improving outcomes for low-income children.

    Part of the evidence supporting this belief comes from neuroscience and pediatrics, where recent research shows that harsh or unstable environments can create biological changes in the growing brains and bodies of infants and children. Those changes impair the development of an important set of mental capacities that help children regulate their thoughts and feelings, and that impairment makes it difficult later on for them to process information and manage emotions in ways that allow them to succeed at school.

    That neurobiological research is complemented by long-term psychological studies showing that children who exhibit certain noncognitive capacities (including self-control and conscientiousness) are more likely to experience a variety of improved outcomes in adulthood. The most thorough of these studies, which has tracked for decades 1,000 children born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in the early 1970s, showed that children with strong noncognitive capacities go on to complete more years of education and experience better health. They’re also less likely to be single parents, to run into problems with credit, or to wind up in jail.

    Since my book was published, in the fall of 2012, the notion that these qualities are an important and often overlooked aspect of young people’s development has continued to spread, especially within the education field. But for all the discussion of noncognitive factors in recent years, there has been little conclusive agreement on how best to help young people develop them. This has been understandably frustrating for many educators. After my book came out, I would sometimes speak before groups of teachers or child-development professionals. I’d talk about the latest research on the biology of adversity and describe the doctors and mentors and teachers and children I encountered in my reporting. And then, after telling my stories, I would often be met with the same question from the audience: OK, now that we know this, what do we do? The idea that noncognitive skills are an important element of educational success, especially among low-income students, resonated with the personal experience of many of the teachers I spoke to. But they hadn’t seen, in my book or anywhere else, a clear description of which practices and approaches were most effective in developing those skills in children and adolescents.

    And so, in the summer of 2014, I decided to embark on a new venture, revisiting the research that I wrote about in How Children Succeed and extending my reporting to new scientific discoveries, new school models, and new approaches to intervention with children, both inside and outside the classroom. This book is the culmination of that effort. It is intended to provide practitioners and policy makers with a practical guide to the research that makes up this nascent field. It is an attempt to answer the question: Now that we know this, what do we do?

    2. Strategies

    Before I begin, I want to briefly address a couple of strategies that I’ll try to adhere to in the pages that follow. First, let me acknowledge a technique that journalists who write about social issues, as I do, often employ in our work. We describe a particular intervention—a school or a pedagogy or an after-school program or a community organization—and try to use that program, either explicitly or implicitly, as a model for others to emulate. Philanthropists and foundations that have as their mission improving the lives of the poor often do something similar: They look for programs that work and try to replicate them, scale them up to reach as broad an audience as possible. There are solid reasons behind the replication strategy. It is the basic growth paradigm of the technology world, in fact: Try a bunch of new things, identify the one that is most successful, and ramp it up. Focusing on successful models is an attractive approach for a narrative journalist, too, because people generally prefer reading emotionally resonant stories about individuals in pursuit of a worthy goal to slogging through lots of dry research and statistics.

    But there are limitations to this kind of journalism—and this kind of philanthropy, too. Scaling up doesn’t work as well in social service and education as it does in the tech world. The social-science literature is rife with examples of small, high-quality programs that seem

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1