This American Life on “How Children Succeed”

This weekend the public-radio program “This American Life” devoted its full hour to “How Children Succeed.” The episode is now available for download here.

Maclean’s Article

There’s an article by Brian Bethune on “How Children Succeed” in the new issue of Maclean’s, the Canadian weekly, featuring a photo of me in a classroom of the Montauk public school.

Pub Day!

“How Children Succeed” comes out today! Please stop by your local independent bookstore or online bookseller and pick up a copy. As well, please check out the interview I did this morning on NPR’s “Morning Edition.”

Finally: If you’re in New York City, please come to the bookstore event I’m doing with Ira Glass of “This American Life” tonight at 7 pm at the Barnes & Noble at 82nd and Broadway. See you there!

Globe and Mail Article

In today’s Globe and Mail, there’s an article on the front page of the Focus section by Margaret Wente about my new book, “How Children Succeed,” including a long Q&A between me and Ms. Wente.

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.

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.

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.”

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?”