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.

Bill Moyers on Times Magazine Article

Bill Moyers comments on my Times Magazine article on Roseland, poverty, and Barack Obama. More here.

Obama/Poverty Reaction

Some reactions to my article in the Times Magazine on President Obama, Roseland, and poverty:

1. Whet Moser at Chicagomag.com makes the point that Obama’s healthcare reforms are arguably themselves an anti-poverty program (and one I didn’t give much space to in the piece).

2. Amanda Erickson at the Atlantic’s Cities blog reflects on why the Harlem Children’s Zone hasn’t been replicated more successfully. (I agree with her that Geoffrey Canada is a rare leader, but I think there are lots of other great leaders out there.)

3. Jared Bernstein weighs in on jobs, schools, and the Furman Effect.

4. And the folks at Longreads chose the article as one of the week’s best.

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.

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.

Talking about Character

Two recent broadcast/podcast interviews about my article in the New York Times Magazine on character education at KIPP and Riverdale. On the American RadioWorks weekly podcast about education, I talked about the article with Stephen Smith, the host of the podcast. Audio here.

And on Minnesota Public Radio’s morning show, David Levin of KIPP and author David Shenk discussed the article and KIPP’s approach to character. Audio here.

Character response

Some response from around the web to my article in the New York Times Magazine on character education at KIPP and Riverdale Country School. The magazine published a few letters to the editor here. On this blog, part of the Times’s Learning Network, 536 high-school students weighed in with their comments. And on the Classroom as Microcosm blog, a writing teacher in Montreal known, pseudonymously, as Siobhan Curious writes that the article gave her some ideas about how to better instruct failure-averse students in her class:

According to Tough and some of his subjects, the key ingredient is grit, the ability to persist in the face of obstacles and even failure.

GRIT! I thought.  This is what I’ve been saying all along!  If I can face down my limitations, if I can labour to be, not perfect, but better – I will be … happy?  Is grit something we can learn?  If so, how can we teach it? …

Teaching them how to write a commentary is all very well, but what is it for?  Maybe the main thing is for is to help them practice grit: Yes, it’s hard.  Just keep going.  If you fail, fail as well as you can, and then try again.

We need to spend less time talking about literary techniques and more time talking about grit.

Curious’s blog post has so far collected 219 comments.

More character reaction

Some more blog reaction to my article on character education in the New York Times Magazine, from Mothering 21 (a blog for parents of adult children who aren’t quite sure if they’re adults or children), Early Ed Watch, and the Evil HR Lady, who writes:

Lots of people live charmed lives as long as their parents are pulling the strings or they put themselves in places where success is almost guaranteed. Except that anyone in the working world today knows that failure is not only a possibility it’s a high probability. Businesses fail. Entire divisions get laid off, regardless of how brilliant any individual employee was.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of trying to figure out what the problem in the darn code is.  If you’re a one try and you’re finished type of person, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you won’t succeed.

Character reaction

There’s been a lot of interesting commentary, from a variety of sources, on my article for the New York Times Magazine on character education, which draws on some of the reporting that I’ve been doing for my next book, “The Success Equation.” On the Times’s Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin published a guest commentary on the article from a mother named Melissa Sher, who writes,

Life can be more than messy: bad things happen. But our job as parents isn’t to stop them all from happening. Because we can’t. Instead, we can try to make our kids feel loved, valued and secure.  So, if we’re lucky, when our children do fall or if things fall apart around them, they’ll get back up.

Evan Osnos, on his “Letter from China” blog on the New Yorker’s site, wrote about how an article like mine might go over in China today:

It will be years before any Chinese magazine sells a story like that on its cover, but achievement, classically defined, has lost some luster.

On the Atlantic’s site, Edward Tenner, an historian, relates the character push by KIPP and Riverdale to similiar discussions of character in the 19th and 20th centuries. He concludes,

It may be that today’s successful city people — the parents of day school students — are likely to have parents or grandparents who did defy adversity, overcoming failure. Many of them sacrificed precisely so that their grandchildren wouldn’t have to. Private school costs may be stratospheric, but if you have to ask the price of some forms of resilience, you can’t afford them.

In the Financial Times, Luke Johnson took a business approach, asserting that the values that KIPP and Riverdale are trying to instill “could equally be the defining criteria for entrepreneurs.”

And on the National Review’s domestic-policy blog, Reihan Salam wrote about the passage in my article when KIPP teacher Sayuri Stabrowski turns a gum-chewing dispute with a student into a deeper discussion about character. Salam writes:

For some reason I found this very moving. It is easy for any of us to feel powerless in the face of trying circumstances, and this is particularly true of adolescents. Yet this student is being taught, in a fairly unsentimental, straightforward way, that she has the capacity for self-control, and that she has an obligation, to her fellow students, her teacher, and to herself, to exercise it.

Times Magazine article on character

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine includes an article I wrote about character education. It focuses on a collaborative project between the KIPP schools in New York City and Riverdale Country School — a project that I’m also writing about in my book “The Success Equation,” which is due out in the fall of 2012. On the Times’s new SchoolBook blog, as an adjunct to the article, they’re soliciting reader questions for David Levin, the superintendent of KIPP NYC, and Dominic Randolph, the head of Riverdale.