How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (33 page)

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After just ten home visits:
Kristin Bernard et al., “Enhancing Attachment Organization Among Maltreated Children: Results of a Randomized Clinical Trial,”
Child Development
83, no. 2 (March 2012).

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Heather Mac Donald, an Olin fellow:
Heather Mac Donald, “Chicago’s Real Crime Story,”
City Journal,
Winter 2010.

2. How to Build Character

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who won them (and their parents) over:
Jay Mathews,
Work Hard. Be Nice.:
How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America
(Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2009), 160.
the highest scores of any school in the Bronx:
Abby Goodnough, “Structure and Basics Bring South Bronx School Acclaim,”
New York Times,
October 20, 1999.

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a front-page story on KIPP in the
New York Times: Jodi Wilgoren, “Seeking to Clone Schools of Success for the Poor,”
New York Times,
August 16, 2000.
completed a four-year college degree:
KIPP pays particular attention to the six-year graduation figure because it is the generally accepted benchmark for college-graduation statistics. As of the spring of 2012, nine years after the students in KIPP Academy’s Class of 2003 were scheduled to graduate from high school, two members of the cohort are still enrolled in a BA program and on track to graduate this year, which will put the class’s total graduation rate at 26 percent. Three other students have earned two-year degrees. The remaining twenty-five students have no postsecondary degree.

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Learned Optimism,
a book by Martin Seligman:
Martin E. P. Seligman,
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
(New York: A. A. Knopf, 1991).
a “severe low mood”:
Ibid., 13.

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permanent, personal, and pervasive:
Ibid., 44.

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a “manual of the sanities”:
Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman,
Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4.
a “science of good character”:
Ibid., 9.
works from Aristotle to Confucius:
Ibid., 15.

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“Virtues,” they wrote, “are much more interesting”:
Ibid., 10.
“the good life”:
Ibid., 4.
a big national push for character education:
See, e.g., Roger Rosenblatt, “Teaching Johnny to Be Good,”
New York Times Magazine,
April 30, 1995; and Charles Helwig, Elliot Turiel, and Larry Nucci, “Character Education After the Bandwagon Has Gone,” paper presented in L. Nucci (chair), “Developmental Perspectives and Approaches to Character Education,” symposium conducted at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, March 1997.

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A national evaluation of character-education programs:
Social and Character Development Research Consortium,
Efficacy of Schoolwide Programs to Promote Social and Character Development and Reduce Problem Behavior in Elementary School Children
(Washington, DC: National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2010); Sarah D. Spark, “Character Education Found to Fall Short in Federal Study,”
Education Week,
October 21, 2010.
In his 2008 book:
David Whitman,
Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism
(Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2008).
“not just how to think but how to act”:
Ibid., 3.

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“The problem, I think, is not only the schools”:
Martin E. P. Seligman,
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being
(New York: Free Press, 2011), 103.
For her first-year thesis:
Angela Lee Duckworth and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents,”
Psychological Science
16, no. 12 (2005).

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an ingenious experiment to test the willpower:
Walter Mischel, “From Good Intentions to Willpower,” in
The Psychology of Action: Linking Cognition and Motivation to Behavior,
eds. Peter M. Gollwitzer and John A. Burgh (New York: Guilford Press, 1996); Jonah Lehrer, “Don’t!,”
New Yorker,
May 18, 2009.
Children who had been able to wait for fifteen minutes:
Lehrer, “Don’t!”

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think of the marshmallow as a puffy round cloud:
Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Monica L. Rodriguez, “Delay of Gratification in Children,”
Science
244, no. 4907 (May 26, 1989).

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a researcher named Calvin Edlund:
Calvin V. Edlund, “The Effect on the Behavior of Children, as Reflected in the IQ Scores, When Reinforced After Each Correct Response,”
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
5, no. 3 (Fall 1972).

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two researchers from the University of South Florida:
Joy Clingman and Robert L. Fowler, “The Effects of Primary Reward on the I.Q. Performance of Grade-School Children as a Function of Initial I.Q. Level,”
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
9, no. 1 (Spring 1976).

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giving blood donors a small financial stipend:
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner,
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
(New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
He tested several different incentive programs:
Roland G. Fryer Jr., “Financial Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from Randomized Trials,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
126 (2011); Roland G. Fryer, “Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools,” NBER Working Paper 16850 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2011); Roland G. Fryer Jr., “Aligning Student, Parent, and Teacher Incentives: Evidence from Houston Public Schools,” NBER Working Paper 17752 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2012); Amanda Ripley, “Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?,”
Time
(April 8, 2010); Elizabeth Green, “Study: $75M Teacher Pay Initiative Did Not Improve Achievement,”
Gotham Schools
(March 7, 2011).

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Segal wanted to test how personality:
Carmit Segal, “Working When No One Is Watching: Motivation, Test Scores, and Economic Success,”
Management Science
(in press).

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Big Five conscientiousness was embraced:
See, e.g., “Introduction: Personality and Industrial and Organizational Psychology,” in
Personality Psychology in the Workplace,
eds. Brent W. Roberts and Robert Hogan (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001); and Robert Hogan,
Personality and the Fate of Organizations
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007).
it predicts so many outcomes:
Brent W. Roberts et al., “The Power of Personality: The Comparative Validity of Personality Traits, Socioeconomic Status, and Cognitive Ability for Predicting Important Life Outcomes,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
2 (2007); Angela Lee Duckworth and Kelly M. Allred, “Temperament in the Classroom,” in
Handbook of Temperament,
eds. R. L. Shiner and M. Zentner (New York: Guilford Press, in press).
In their 1976 book:
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis,
Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1976).

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“to be properly subordinate”:
Ibid., 130.
“conscientious, responsible, insistently orderly”:
Ibid., 135.
They gave low ratings to employees:
Ibid., 137–38.

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“there is no true disadvantage”:
Peterson and Seligman,
Character Strengths and Virtues,
515.
Overcontrolled people are “excessively constrained”:
Tera D. Letzring, Jack Block, and David C. Funder, “Ego-Control and Ego-Resiliency: Generalization of Self-Report Scales Based on Personality Descriptions from Acquaintances, Clinicians, and the Self,”
Journal of Research in Personality
39, no. 4 (August 2005).
In 2011, that pool of evidence grew further:
Terrie E. Moffitt et al., “A Gradient of Childhood Self-Control Predicts Health, Wealth, and Public Safety,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
108, no. 7 (February 2011). See also Paul Solman, “Self-Controlled Kids Prosper as Adults: ‘Fatalistically Depressing’?,”
PBS NewsHour,
June 13, 2011.

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Duckworth developed a test to measure grit:
Angela Lee Duckworth and Patrick D. Quinn, “Development and Validation of the Short Grit Scale (Grit-S),”
Journal of Personality Assessment
91, no. 2 (2009); and Angela L. Duckworth, Christopher Peterson, Michael D. Matthews, and Dennis R. Kelly, “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
92, no. 6 (2007).

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a national organization called the Character Education Partnership:
Character Education Partnership,
Performance Values: Why They Matter and What Schools Can Do to Foster Their Development
(Washington, DC: Character Education Partnership, April 2008).

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“unexpectedly high rates of emotional problems”:
Madeline Levine,
The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 21.
“intense feelings of shame and hopelessness”:
Ibid., 30.

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To Luthar’s surprise, she found the affluent teenagers:
Suniya S. Luthar and Chris C. Sexton, “The High Price of Affluence,” in
Advances in Child Development,
vol. 32, ed. R. V. Kail (San Diego: Academic Press, 2004), 143; Suniya S. Luthar and Karen D’Avanzo, “Contextual Factors in Substance Use: A Study of Suburban and Inner-City Adolescents,”
Development and Psychopathology
11, no. 4 (1999).
in an even more affluent town:
Luthar and Sexton, “High Price of Affluence,” 134.
multiple persistent problems:
Suniya S. Luthar and Shawn J. Latendresse, “Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being,”
Current Directions in Psychological Science
14, no. 1 (February 2005): 51.
“excessive achievement pressures and isolation from parents”:
Luthar and Sexton, “High Price of Affluence,” 135.
Kindlon discovered disproportionately high levels of anxiety:
Dan Kindlon,
Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age
(New York: Hyperion, 2001), 10.

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parents making more than one million dollars a year:
Ibid., 18, 246.

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“tell students exactly how they are expected to behave”:
Whitman,
Sweating the Small Stuff,
3.
some of Levin’s harsher moments of discipline:
Mathews,
Work Hard
, 214.

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“models an atmosphere of punitive dependence”:
Tom Brunzell, “Kaboom! Confronting Student Resistance at the Moment of Impact: A Case Study of KIPP Infinity Charter School,” unpublished thesis (December 2006), 1.
Only 24 percent of the incoming students:
Ibid., 20.

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“before puberty, but late enough in childhood”:
Seligman,
Learned Optimism
(second edition), ix.

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“creates a strong association between future and reality”:
Angela Lee Duckworth, Teri Kirby, Gabriele Oettingen, and Anton Gollwitzer, “Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions Improves Academic Performance among Economically Disadvantaged Children,”
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
(in press).
Oettingen has demonstrated the effectiveness:
Ibid., 7.

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“provide structure, preparing us for encounters”:
David A. Kessler,
The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite
(New York: Rodale, 2009), 190.

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before trying a ten-hole mini golf course:
Jeff Stone, Christian I. Lynch, Mike Sjomeling, and John M. Darley, “Stereotype Threat Effects on Black and White Athletic Performance,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
77, no. 6 (December 1999).
When people in their sixties:
Claude Steele,
Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 99.

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the
malleability of intelligence:
See, e.g., Joshua Aronson, Carrie B. Fried, and Catherine Good, “Reducing the Effects of Stereotype Threat on African American College Students by Shaping Theories of Intelligence,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
38, no. 2 (March 2002).
Dweck divides people into two types:
Carol S. Dweck,
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2008).
students’ mindsets predict their academic trajectories:
Lisa S. Blackwell, Kali H. Trzesniewski, and Carol S. Dweck, “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention,”
Child Development
78, no. 1 (January/February 2007): 251.
a growth-mindset message: Catherine Good, Joshua Aronson, and Michael Inzlicht, “Improving Adolescents’ Standardized Test Performance: An Intervention to Reduce the Effects of Stereotype Threat,” Applied Developmental Psychology 24, no. 6 (December 2003).
Catherine Good, Joshua Aronson, and Michael Inzlicht, “Improving Adolescents’ Standardized Test Performance: An Intervention to Reduce the Effects of Stereotype Threat,” Applied Developmental Psychology 24, no. 6 (December 2003).