Paul Tough

Writer & Speaker

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

Times Magazine article

My new article on poverty, Barack Obama, and the Chicago neighborhood of Roseland is now online on the New York Times’s website. It will be the cover story in the Times Magazine this weekend.


Friday, July 6th, 2012

Aspen Panel

Here’s some video of “Can Character Be Taught?,” a panel I was on last weekend at the Aspen Ideas Festival, along with Dominic Randolph and Russell Shaw. Andrea Mitchell moderated. It’s part of the Education Nation series of reports on NBC News.


Monday, June 4th, 2012

Bowdoin Speech Audio

Over at This Week in Education, Alexander Russo has turned up some audio from the speech I gave at Bowdoin College in April. I talked a lot about my forthcoming book, How Children Succeed, and also about lab rats, attachment, affluent teenagers, and my two-year-old son.


Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012

Avance in Santa Barbara

In the Santa Barbara Independent, the story of how Whatever It Takes helped bring AVANCE, a great program for parents, to town:

AVANCE is an early childhood and parenting program aimed at lower-income Hispanic communities that began in San Antonio, Texas. …

The principal of McKinley [Elementary School], Emilio Handall (who will become an assistant superintendent in July), first read about AVANCE inWhatever It Takes, a book about educational reformer Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. Handall raised the idea with Jon Clark, executive director of the James S. Bower Foundation, and before he knew it, the Santa Barbara school district had obtained grant money to send a contingency down to San Antonio to learn about the program.


Monday, April 9th, 2012

Geoffrey Canada’s Ancestors

Geoffrey Canada was the subject (along with Barbara Walters!) of Henry Louis Gates’s most recent “Finding Your Roots” program. Some amazing moments, including the will that valued Geoff’s great-great-grandfather, Thomas, a slave, at $250. Plus students at Promise Academy learning how much of their DNA ancestry traces to Africa.


Sunday, March 18th, 2012

Conference at Bowdoin

On Friday, April 6, I’ll be giving a talk at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, as part of a two-day conference on “The New Politics of Parenthood.” My talk, drawn from the reporting I did for my forthcoming book, “How Children Succeed” is titled “How Children Succeed: Schools, Parents, and the Cultivation of Character.”


Sunday, March 18th, 2012

Three Things

Three fairly random items from various sources, each, in its own way, heart-warming (for me, at least):

1. In 2010, James Shechter, a sophomore at the Haverford School, a private school near Philadelphia, came across the article I wrote in 2008 on schools in New Orleans in the New York Times Magazine. He was inspired by two of the educators I wrote about, Tiffany Hardrick and Keith Sanders, who were, at the time, starting a new charter school called Miller-McCoy Academy. According to a recent article in the Neighbors Main Line Blog, Shechter contacted Hardrick and Sanders, spent the summer in New Orleans tutoring Miller-McCoy students, and has since raised close to $10,000 for the school.

2. In December, the Education Writers Association’s Educated Reporter blog gave its “Water Cooler Award (for one of the most talked-about stories of the year)” to my article in the New York Times Magazine about character, “What If the Secret to Success Is Failure?” (The article will be included, in expanded and adapted form, in my book “How Children Succeed,” which will be published on September 4.)

3. In O: The Oprah Magazine, the writer and comedian Ali Wentworth selected “Whatever It Takes” as one of the “books that made a difference” in her life:

“This is a life-changing book,” Wentworth says of Tough’s look at the work of social activist and educator Geoffrey Canada, who created the Harlem Children’s Zone, a cradle-to-college, community-based organization. “My mantra is ‘The art is in the doing.’ A lot of people talk about polls and research, but I have a hard time with all the red tape. I just go, I get it, but can we rush a can of soup to the family right now?”


Monday, February 20th, 2012

SNL

Geoffrey Canada’s celebrity took a weird turn this weekend, when he was briefly impersonated by Jay Pharaoh during a “What Up With That” sketch on Saturday Night Live. No lines, but some smoking dance moves. Fast-forward to 5:10 or so.


Sunday, December 25th, 2011

Promise Neighborhood Grants

Last week, the Department of Education announced a new round of Promise Neighborhood funding, including some new planning grants as well as the first implementation grants. The New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch has all the background. The implementation grants went to organizations in Buffalo; Hayward, California; San Antonio, rural Kentucky, and Minneapolis. (Sondra Samuels, the C.E.O. of the Northside Achievement Zone, the Minneapolis group that was awarded an implementation grant, is pictured above.)


Sunday, December 25th, 2011

Post-Christmas Shopping

Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic kindly included “Whatever It Takes” on his list of suggested “Gifts for the Wonk in Your Life,” writing:

Winning the War on Poverty: I first encountered the writing of Paul Tough a few weeks ago, while working on an article about the long-term effects of adversity in the first two years of life. Tough had written a New Yorker article on the subject. But recently I discovered that he had, years ago, written a terrific book on a related subject. Whatever It Takes focuses on the Harlem Children’s Zone and Geoffrey Canada, the man who created it. The Zone is an effort to create a seamless system of social supports for low-income children within Harlem. The book is uplifting and depressing, hopeful and pessimistic. In short, it is complicated, just like public policy in the real world.