How Children Succeed

tactics from innovative educators they met, especially a woman named Harriett Ball, a veteran teacher down the hall from Levin’s classroom whose chants, songs, and drills made it easier to teach every academic subject, from multiplication tables to Shakespeare. But when it came to teaching character, Levin told me, he and Feinberg found no equivalent mentor. The absence of any established structure for teaching character, or even talking about it, meant that each year, the discussions at KIPP schools would start from scratch, with teachers and administrators debating anew which values and behaviors they were trying to nurture in their students, and why, and how.

In the winter of 2002, as the first KIPP Academy graduates were making their way through high school, Levin’s brother, a money manager, gave him Learned Optimism, a book by Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman is one of the main scholars behind the school of thought known as positive psychology, and the book, originally published in 1991, is the movement’s founding text, teaching that optimism is a learnable skill, not an inborn trait. Pessimistic adults and children can train themselves to be more hopeful, Seligman says, and if they do, they will likely become happier, healthier, and more successful. In Learned Optimism, Seligman wrote that for most people, depression was not an illness, as most psychologists believed, but simply a “severe low mood” that occurred “when we harbor pessimistic beliefs about the causes of our setbacks.” If you want to avoid depression and improve your life, Seligman counseled, you need to refashion your “explanatory style,” to create for yourself a better story about why good and bad things happen to you.

Pessimists, Seligman wrote, tend to react to negative events by explaining them as permanent, personal, and pervasive. (Seligman calls these “the three P’s.”) Failed a test? It’s not because you didn’t prepare well; it’s because you’re stupid. If you get turned down for a date, there’s no point in asking someone else; you’re simply unlovable. Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they’re more likely to pick themselves up and try again.

As he read the book, Levin recognized many of Seligman’s three-P explanatory patterns in himself, in his teachers, and in his students. Levin was famous among students and staff in those days for the long, loud lectures he regularly delivered to misbehaving or underperforming students. (“The man yelled a lot,” Vance recalled with a laugh.) Now Levin found himself wondering what those diatribes might sound like to a student who tended to hear critical remarks personally, pervasively, and permanently. “Why didn’t you do your homework?” could easily be interpreted as meaning “What’s wrong with you? You can’t do anything right!” Levin bought a copy of Learned Optimism for everyone on the staff of the KIPP Academy, and he drew up a list of Questions for Reflection and Concern inspired by the book. On a professional-development day in the summer of 2002, he handed out the list to his teachers for discussion. It included some uncomfortable questions for Levin and his staff, like Why do some of our students feel not-liked/not-valued/not-believed-in? and Why do some of our parents feel belittled/disrespected/spoken down to? and How do we continue to develop the spirit and character of the KIPPsters without breaking them? For Levin, it was the beginning of a long process of reevaluation. He had spent almost a decade trying to develop the character of his students. What if the techniques he was using just weren’t working?

3. Riverdale

David Levin attended school in the Bronx, like his students, but in a very different part of the Bronx and at a very different kind of school. If you drive west from KIPP Academy, go past Yankee Stadium, then turn north and head a few miles up the Major Deegan Expressway, you soon arrive in Riverdale, a lush, green neighborhood of steep hills and winding streets that for more than a century has been home to some of New York City’s wealthiest families. Among the historic mansions stand three of the city’s most prestigious private schools: the Horace Mann school, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and, at the top of a tall hill, looking down grandly on Van Cortlandt Park and the city below, the Riverdale Country School. Levin, who grew up on Park Avenue, transferred to Riverdale in eighth grade, and he excelled there, becoming not only a standout student in math and science but also the captain of the basketball team.

When you visit the school today, what impresses you first is its campus, the largest of any school in the city, twenty-seven rolling acres adorned with stone buildings and carefully tended lacrosse fields. There are no uniforms, technically, but the middle- and high-school students share a studiously casual wardrobe of Abercrombie and Fitch jackets and North Face backpacks. (One wet late-winter day when I visited a tenth-grade English class, every girl but one was wearing identical $125 knee-high Hunter rain boots.) John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy went to Riverdale briefly as boys, and today’s student body draws heavily from the Upper East Side and the tonier precincts of Westchester County; it is the kind of place members of the establishment send their kids so they can learn to be members of the establishment. Tuition starts at $38,500 a year, and that’s for prekindergarten.

When you first meet him, Dominic Randolph, Riverdale’s headmaster, seems like an unusual choice to lead an institution so steeped in status and tradition. He comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric. He dresses for work every day in a black suit with a narrow tie, and the outfit, plus his cool demeanor and flowing, graying hair, makes you wonder if he might have played sax in a ska band in the 1980s. (The English accent helps.) Randolph is a big thinker, always chasing new ideas, and a conversation with him can feel like a one-man TED conference; it is dotted with references to the latest work by behavioral psychologists and management gurus and design theorists. When he became headmaster, in 2007, he swapped offices with his secretary: she got the reclusive inner sanctum where previous headmasters had sat, and he remodeled the small outer reception area into his own open-concept workspace, its walls lined with whiteboards on which he sketches ideas and slogans. One day when I visited, one wall was bare except for a lone sheet of white paper. On it was printed a single black question mark.

For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is in his early fifties, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by IQ. “This push on tests,” he told me when I visited his office one fall day, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained, is character. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was always this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get eight hundreds on their SATs, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long- term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”

Like Levin, Randolph has pondered throughout his career as an educator the question of whether and how schools should impart good character. It has often felt like a lonely quest. At the British boarding school Randolph attended as a boy, educators took it for granted that they were teaching character as much as they were teaching math or history. When Randolph moved to the United States, though, he found that American educators were more reluctant to talk about character than their British counterparts. For many years, he followed the national discourse on character, or what passed for it, but it always seemed to him out of step with the needs of a school. In the 1980s, William Bennett made the case for teaching virtue, but that effort quickly became too political for Randolph’s taste, co-opted, he says, by neoconservatives. He was intrigued by Daniel Goleman’s writing on emotional intelligence in the 1990s, but it seemed too mushy, too touchy-feely, to serve as the basis for a practical system of instruction. “I was looking for something that was going to be serious, that wasn’t going to be a fad, that would let you actually shift a school’s culture,” he told me.

In the winter of 2005, Randolph read Learned Optimism, and he became intrigued by the field of positive psychology. He began to read up on the work of not only Seligman but also two of Seligman’s frequent collaborators: Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan and Angela Duckworth, one of Seligman’s star protegees at Penn. At the time, Randolph was the assistant head of the Lawrenceville School, a private