How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (17 page)

Psychologists have demonstrated that group identity can have a powerful effect on achievement—both a positive and a negative one. In the early 1990s, Claude Steele, a psychologist who is now the dean of the school of education at Stanford University, identified a phenomenon that he called stereotype threat. If you give a person a subtle psychological cue having to do with his group identity before a test of intellectual or physical ability, Steele showed, you can have a major effect on how well he performs. Researchers have since demonstrated this effect in countless different settings. When white students at Princeton were told before trying a ten-hole mini golf course
that it was a test of natural ability in sports (which they feared they didn’t possess), they scored four strokes worse than a similar group of white students who were told it was a test of their ability to think strategically (which they were confident they did possess). For black students, the effect was the opposite: when they were told the mini golf course was a test of their strategic intelligence, their scores were four strokes worse. Steele’s theory is that when you are worried about confirming a stereotype about your group—that white people aren’t athletic; that black people aren’t smart—you get anxious, and as a result, you do worse.

Other researchers have found stereotype threat in pursuits much more serious than miniature golf. When people in their sixties
and seventies and eighties were instructed to read an article about how memory fades with age before they took a memory test, they remembered 44 percent of the words in the test; members of a similar group who weren’t told to read the article before the test remembered 58 percent of the words. Before a challenging math test, female college students need only be reminded that they are female for them to do worse on the test than female students who don’t receive that identity cue.

The good news about stereotype threat is that, just as it can be triggered by subtle cues, it can be defused by subtle interventions. One of the most effective techniques, which has now been tested in a variety of settings, is exposing students at risk of stereotype threat to a very specific message: that intelligence is malleable. If students internalize that idea, these studies show, they gain confidence, and their test scores and GPAs often rise too.

The most intriguing fact about these interventions is that the question of the malleability of intelligence is actually hotly debated by psychologists and neuroscientists. Although scores on achievement tests like the SAT can certainly be affected by training of different kinds, the purest kind of intelligence is not very malleable at all. But a psychologist at Stanford named Carol Dweck has discovered a remarkable thing: Regardless of the facts on the malleability of intelligence
, students do much better academically if they
believe
intelligence is malleable. Dweck divides people into two types
: those who have a fixed mindset, who believe that intelligence and other skills are essentially static and inborn, and those who have a growth mindset, who believe that intelligence can be improved. She has shown that students’ mindsets predict their academic trajectories
: those who believe that people can improve their intelligence actually do improve their grades.

And whether or not intelligence is malleable, mindset certainly is. Dweck and others have shown that with the right kind of intervention, students can be switched from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and their academic results tend to rise as a result. Joshua Aronson, a frequent collaborator with Claude Steele, and two colleagues conducted a study that compared the effectiveness of a few different mindset-changing interventions on a group of mostly low-income seventh-grade students in Texas. Over the school year, each student in the study worked with a mentor, a college student who met with him or her twice for ninety minutes each time and then communicated with him or her regularly by e-mail. Some students were randomly assigned to hear from their mentors a growth-mindset message
such as “Intelligence is not a finite endowment, but rather an expandable capacity that increases with mental work.” Students in a control group heard a more standard message about the way that drug use could interfere with academic achievement.

At the end of the year, Aronson and his colleagues compared the two groups’ scores on Texas’s standardized achievement test, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills, and the students who had heard a growth-mindset message did significantly better than the students who had heard the anti-drug message. The most impressive effect was seen in the math scores of the female students. The effect of stereotype threat has been well demonstrated in the math scores of girls and women, who seem to be especially anxious in testing situations when they think they might confirm the stereotype that girls are bad in math. In the Texas experiment, girls who received the standard anti-drug message averaged 74 on the test, about eight points below the male students who had heard the same message. The girls who heard a growth-mindset message averaged about 84, closing the gap with the male students completely.

16. Report Cards

Dweck’s notion that students do better when they think they can improve their intelligence applies to character as well. At least, that is the idea behind the character report card—that presenting character to students not as a set of fixed traits but as a series of constantly developing attributes will inspire them to improve those traits. I talked about this idea one morning at KIPP Infinity with Mike Witter, a thirty-one-year-old eighth-grade English teacher who seemed hard-wired to believe in the growth mindset. “If you’re going to be a good teacher, you
have
to believe in malleable intelligence,” he told me. “And character is equally malleable. If you teach kids to pay attention to character, then their character will transform.”

Perhaps more than any other teacher at the school, Witter had made a concerted effort to get his students to pay attention to character. I visited Witter’s class one morning that winter to observe something that David Levin called dual-purpose instruction, teachers deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson. Levin wanted math teachers to use the character strengths in word problems; he explained that history teachers could use them in classes about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. And when I arrived in Witter’s class, he was leading a discussion on Chinua Achebe’s novel
Things Fall Apart.
Above Witter’s head, at the front of the class, the seven character strengths, from optimism to social intelligence, were stenciled in four-inch-high letters, white on blue. He asked his students to rank Okonkwo, the protagonist, on his various character strengths. There was a lot of back-and-forth, but in the end, most students agreed that Okonkwo rated highest on grit and lowest on self-control. Then a student named Yantzee raised his hand. “Can’t a trait backfire at you?” he asked.

“Sure, a trait can backfire,” Witter said. “Too much grit, like Okonkwo, you start to lose your ability to have empathy for other people. If you’re so gritty that you don’t understand why everyone’s complaining about how hard things are, because nothing’s hard for you, because you’re Mr. Grit, then you’re going to have a hard time being kind. Even love—being too loving might make you the kind of person who can get played.” There was a ripple of knowing laughter from the students. “So, yes, character is something you have to be careful about. Character strengths can become character weaknesses.”

When I spoke to Witter after the class, he told me that some teachers at KIPP Infinity still weren’t convinced of the essential premise behind the report card: that character can change. “That has been part of the process, teachers getting comfortable with this idea. In order to really buy into the character report card, you have to believe in malleable character, and I don’t know if every teacher is there yet. I mean, how many times have you heard a grownup say, ‘That’s just how I am! That’s me. Get used to it!’? But if you don’t believe that it applies to you, then how can you believe that it applies to children?”

I saw Witter again on report-card night, which at KIPP Infinity middle school fell on a chilly Thursday at the beginning of February. Report-card night is always a big deal at KIPP schools—parents are strongly urged to attend, and at Infinity, almost all of them do—but this particular evening carried an extra level of anxiety for both the administrators and the parents because students would be receiving their very first character report cards, and no one knew quite what to expect.

Logistically, the character report card had been a challenge to pull off for Brunzell and his colleagues. Teachers at three of the four KIPP middle schools in New York City had to grade every one of their students on each of the twenty-four character indicators, and more than a few of them found the process a little daunting. And now that report-card night had arrived, they had an even bigger challenge: explaining to parents just how those precise figures, rounded to the second decimal place, summed up their children’s characters. I sat with Witter for a while on a bench down the hall from the band room, listening as he talked through the character report card with Faith Flemister, an African American woman wearing dark red lipstick and a black knit cap, and her son, Juaquin Bennett, a tall, hefty eighth-grader in a gray hooded sweatshirt.

“For the past few years we’ve been working on a project to create a clearer picture for parents about the character of your child,” Witter explained to Flemister. “The categories that we ended up putting together represent qualities that have been studied and determined to be indicators of success. They mean you’re more likely to go to college. More likely to find a good job. Even surprising things, like they mean you’re more likely to get married, or more likely to have a family. So we think these are really important.”

Flemister nodded, and Witter began to work his way down the scores on Juaquin’s character report card, starting with the good news: Every teacher had scored him as a perfect 5 on “Is polite to adults and peers,” and he did almost as well on “Keeps temper in check.” These were both indicators for interpersonal self-control.

“I can tell this is a real strength for you,” Witter said, turning to Juaquin. “This kind of self-control is something you’ve developed incredibly well. So that makes me think we need to start looking at, What’s something we can target? And the first thing that jumps out at me is this.” Witter pulled out a green felt-tip marker and circled one indicator on Juaquin’s report card. “‘Pays attention and resists distraction,’” Witter read aloud; this was an indicator for academic self-control. “That’s a little lower than some of the other numbers. Why do you think that is?”

“I talk too much in class,” Juaquin said a little sheepishly, looking down at his black sneakers. “I sometimes stare off into space and don’t pay attention.”

The three of them talked over a few strategies to help Juaquin focus more in class, and by the end of the fifteen-minute conversation, Flemister seemed convinced by the new approach. “The strong points are not a surprise,” she said to Witter as he got up to talk to another family. “That’s just the type of person Juaquin is. But it’s good how you pinpoint what he can do to make things easier on himself. Then maybe his grades will pick up.”

17. Climbing the Mountain

If each student’s first character report card represents the beginning of a conversation he’ll have with teachers and administrators at KIPP about his character and how to improve it, then a woman named Jane Martinez Dowling is responsible for the other end of that process. Dowling runs the New York office of KIPP Through College, KIPP’s alumni support program, overseeing twenty or so counselors working out of shared office space on the eighth floor of a tall stone building a block from Wall Street. In all, New York KIPP Through College is responsible for about seven hundred KIPP graduates, half still in high school and the other half making their way, with varying degrees of success, through college.

The official KIPP goal for college completion is to have 75 percent of all KIPP middle-school graduates complete a degree from a four-year college within six years of graduating from high school. If you recall that the actual six-year college-graduation rate for Tyrell Vance’s class was 21 percent, you get an idea of the challenge Dowling faces. When I visited her office on a cold morning in February of 2011, she handed me a detailed spreadsheet that showed college-attainment data for each KIPP cohort. The numbers were definitely moving in the right direction: the six-year graduation rate had gone up from 21 percent, for the Class of 2003, Tyrell Vance’s class, to 46 percent, for the Class of 2005. On the day I visited, Dowling was focused especially on the Class of 2007, which was just about to reach the four-year mark—four years out of high school—the point when the first students could, in theory, be graduating with BAs. Only 26 percent of the students were on track to graduate in four years, according to the spreadsheet, but another 18 percent were still enrolled in college, meaning that they still had the potential to graduate in five or six years.

The Class of 2007, Dowling told me, was academically more talented than the ones that had come before. Many of the students had gone to exclusive boarding schools for high school, and the list of colleges they were attending included Vanderbilt and Columbia. “What we have found is that it’s the character piece that has held some of them back,” Dowling explained. “There are students who have incredible intellect but don’t necessarily channel it in the right direction. There are lots of kids who struggle with procrastination issues, even though they have the ability to get their work done. There are students who are dealing with real social and emotional issues.” Seven of the fifty-seven kids in that graduating class, Dowling told me, had experienced serious depression in college. “It’s especially pronounced in that class,” she said. “They’re dealing with family issues, or they have issues just dealing with their peer groups, and that has really held some of them back.” Dowling emphasized that most if not all of the kids she was talking about were still on track to graduate. “They’re good kids,” she said. “But the impact of poverty catches up even with children who are resilient.”