How Children Succeed

they did reading-comprehension drills, he didn’t recognize words like infant and communal and beneficial. By September, they were working together after school and on weekends for hours at a time, and she was starting to despair, trying to keep James’s spirits up while her own were sinking. When James would get downhearted and say that he just wasn’t any good at analogies or trigonometry, Spiegel would reply cheerfully that it was just like chess: a few years earlier, he had been no good at chess, and then he got specialized training and worked hard and mastered it. “I tell him, ‘We’re going to give you specialized training in this, too, and then you’ll be good at it,’” she said to me. “And then he gets happy, like, ‘Okay, no problem.’ But I’m not really telling him how hard that is.”

James represented, for me (and for Spiegel, I suspect), a challenging puzzle. Here was a young man clearly possessed of a keen intelligence. (Whatever intelligence means, you can’t beat Ukrainian grand masters without plenty of it.) And he seemed to be a case study in grit: he had a clear goal that he felt passionately about, and he worked hard and tirelessly and effectively toward that goal. (I have never met a twelve-year-old who worked harder at anything.) And yet he was, according to the standard predictors of academic success, below average, destined for a mediocre future at best. When you compare James’s prospects to those of Mush or the other young men of Roseland, he seems like an amazing success story. But it’s also possible to see in James a less inspiring story, a tale of unfulfilled potential. When Spiegel talked with me that fall about studying for the test with James, she sometimes sounded shocked at how little non-chess information he had been taught thus far in his life. “I feel angry on his behalf,” she told me. “He knows basic fractions, but he doesn’t know geometry, he doesn’t get the idea of writing an equation. He’s at the level I would have been at in second or third grade. It feels like he should have learned more.”

The specialized-school test is, by design, difficult to cram for. Like the SAT, it reflects the knowledge and skills that a student has accrued over the years, most of which is absorbed invisibly throughout childhood from one’s family and one’s culture. But what if James had started studying for the specialized-school exam in the third grade instead of the seventh grade? What if he had expended the same energy and received the same help learning math and reading and generalized knowledge as he did with chess? And what if he had worked in every subject with teachers as creative and engaged as Spiegel and Prilleltensky? I have no doubt that he would have conquered the specialized-school exam the same way he conquered the junior high nationals.

Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about James in the past tense; he is only twelve, after all. He didn’t get into Stuyvesant, in the end, but he still has four years of high school in front of him (four years during which he’ll no doubt crush every player on the Stuyvesant chess team). It might not have been possible to turn him into an elite student in six months, as Spiegel had hoped. But how about in four years? For a student with his prodigious gifts, anything seems possible—as long as there’s a teacher out there who can make succeeding in school as attractive a prospect as succeeding on the chessboard.

4. How to Succeed

1. The College Conundrum

For most of the twentieth century, the United States stood alone in the quality of its higher-education system and the percentage of its young people who successfully passed through that system. As recently as the mid-1990s, the American college-graduation rate was the highest in the world, more than twice as high as the average rate among developed countries. But the global education hierarchy is now changing rapidly. Many countries, both developed and developing, are in the middle of an unprecedented college-graduation boom, and just in the past decade or so, the United States has fallen from first to twelfth in the percentage of its twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds who are graduates of four-year colleges, trailing behind a diverse list of competitors that includes the United Kingdom, Australia, Poland, Norway, and South Korea.

It is not that the overall college-attainment rate in the United States has gone down—it has just been growing very slowly, while the rates of other nations have raced ahead. In 1976, 24 percent of Americans in their late twenties had earned a four-year college degree; thirty years later, in 2006, the figure had risen to only 28 percent. But that apparently static number conceals a growing class divide. Between 1990 and 2000, the rate of BA attainment among wealthy students with at least one parent who had graduated from college rose from 61 percent to 68 percent, while, according to one analysis, the rate among the most disadvantaged young Americans — students in the lowest-income quartile whose parents were not college graduates—actually fell, from 11.1 percent to 9.5 percent. In this era of rising inequality, that trend might seem unsurprising: just one more indicator of the way the classes are diverging in the United States. But it’s worth remembering that for most of the past century, things were very different.

As the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz chronicled in their influential 2008 book The Race Between Education and Technology, the story of American higher education in the twentieth century was essentially a story of democratization. Just 5 percent of American males born in 1900 graduated from college, and those 5 percent were the elite in every way: wealthy, white, well connected. But between about 1925 and 1945, the percentage of American men graduating from college doubled, from 5 percent to 10 percent, and then it doubled again between about 1945 and 1965, thanks in no small measure to the GI Bill, which helped put millions of returning American soldiers through college. (For American women, the increase in the college-graduation rate was fairly modest until the early 1960s, but after that, it far outpaced the increase among men.) As a result, American college campuses became less elite and more diverse; the children of factory workers found themselves sitting in lecture halls and science labs next to the children of factory owners. During those years, “upward mobility with regard to education characterized American society,” wrote Goldin and Katz. “Each generation of Americans achieved a level of education that greatly exceeded that of the previous one.” But now that progress has stopped, or at least stalled, and the nation’s higher-education system has ceased to be the instrument of social mobility and growing equality that it was for so much of the twentieth century.

Until recently, education-policy types who concerned themselves with the problems of American higher education were focused mostly on college access—how to increase the number of young people, and especially disadvantaged young people, who graduated from high school and enrolled in college. But over the past few years, it has become clear that the United States does not so much have a problem of limited and unequal college access; it has a problem of limited and unequal college completion. Among the thirty-four member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, or OECD, the United States still ranks a respectable eighth in its college-enrollment rate. But in college completion —the percentage of entering college freshmen who go on to graduate—the United States ranks second to last, ahead of only Italy. Not long ago, the United States led the world in producing college graduates; now it leads the world in producing college dropouts.

What is most puzzling about this phenomenon is that it has taken place at the same time as the value of an American college education has skyrocketed. An American with a BA can now expect to earn 83 percent more than an American with only a high-school diploma. This college-graduate wage premium, as economists call it, is among the highest in the developed world, and it has risen sharply since 1980, when American college graduates earned just 40 percent more than high-school graduates. As Goldin and Katz put it, a young American today who is able to complete college but does not do so “is leaving large amounts of money lying on the street.”

So we are left with a conundrum: Why are so many American students dropping out of college just as a college degree has become so valuable and just as young people in the rest of the world have begun to graduate in such remarkable numbers?

2. The Finish Line