mysteries of childhood, to trace, through experiment and analysis, how the experiences of our early years connect to outcomes in adulthood. That is changing, with the efforts of this new generation of researchers. The premise behind the work is simple, if radical: We haven’t managed to solve these problems because we’ve been looking for solutions in the wrong places. If we want to improve the odds for children in general, and for poor children in particular, we need to approach childhood anew, to start over with some fundamental questions about how parents affect their children; how human skills develop; how character is formed.
At its core, this book is about an ambitious and far-reaching campaign to solve some of the most pervasive mysteries of life: Who succeeds and who fails? Why do some children thrive while others lose their way? And what can any of us do to steer an individual child—or a whole generation of children—away from failure and toward success?
1. How to Fail (and How Not To)
1. Fenger High School
Nadine Burke Harris grew up surrounded by privilege in Palo Alto, California, the daughter of educated, professional Jamaican immigrants who had moved the family from Kingston to Silicon Valley when Burke Harris was four. As a girl, she often felt like an outsider, one of the only black students at her Palo Alto high school, where the kids were mostly white and well-off, and where the girls cried in the cafeteria if they didn’t get the right kind of car for their sixteenth birthdays.
Elizabeth Dozier grew up just outside Chicago in far more modest circumstances, the product of an unlikely and illicit romance between her father, an inmate at the state prison in Joliet, Illinois, and her mother, a nun who was assigned to visit prisoners as part of her religious duty and who wound up falling in love. After Dozier was born, her mother raised her alone, teaching at the local Catholic school and working summers as a motel maid to supplement her meager income.
Burke Harris and Dozier emerged from these very different childhoods with the same goal: to help young people succeed, especially young people in trouble. Burke Harris went to medical school, became a pediatrician, and opened a clinic in the poorest part of San Francisco. Dozier became a teacher, and then a principal, in schools in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. When I met them both, separately, a couple of years ago, what drew me to them was not just their similar sense of mission but a deeper frustration they seemed to share. Both women had recently come to the conclusion that the best tools available to them in their chosen professions were simply not up to the challenges they faced. And so they were both at turning points in their careers and their lives. They were looking for new strategies: in fact, they were looking for a whole new playbook.
In August of 2009, when Dozier was named the principal of Christian Fenger High School, the school was in a moment of crisis—though if you looked back at its history over the previous twenty years, it was hard to find a moment when Fenger was
When you hear stories about schools like Fenger, they are often told in the language of neglect: a school on the margins, students who have been forgotten and ignored by the bureaucrats downtown and in Washington. But the strange thing about Fenger High School is that it
Fenger’s contemporary history begins in 1995, when Chicago’s mayor, Richard M. Daley, was granted control of the city’s schools by the Illinois state legislature. To reflect the businesslike approach he favored, Daley decided that the top official in the school system would no longer be called the superintendent; instead, he would be the CEO. For his first CEO, Daley selected his hard-charging budget director, Paul Vallas, who turned his attention immediately to improving Fenger and other underperforming city high schools. Vallas created a citywide evaluation system that ranked schools by how much help they needed, and he placed Fenger in the most dire category : probation. Vallas had been a student at Fenger for two years as a teenager, and perhaps that was why he focused his efforts so intently on the school. He introduced a restructuring plan for Fenger that included hiring an outside contractor to coach the school’s teachers in reading and writing instruction. He created a freshman academy at the school, a separate, dedicated floor where incoming students would get special attention for their entire freshman year. In 1999, he created a math-and-science academy at the school, complete with a $525,000 NASA-sponsored science lab. Two years later, he made Fenger a magnet school, specializing in technology.
Each of Vallas’s reform initiatives came and went, but things never seemed to improve much for the students at Fenger. And the same was true under Vallas’s successor, Arne Duncan. In 2006, Duncan chose Fenger as one of the pilot schools for a large-scale collaboration between the Chicago school system and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an undertaking called High School Transformation, which the foundation initially financed with a twenty-one-million-dollar grant. (After three years, the total bill for the citywide project had grown to eighty million.) When the initiative was announced, Duncan said it was “a truly historic day, not just for the Chicago Public Schools and the city, but for the country.” But a little more than two years later, with evidence mounting that High School Transformation wasn’t producing results, Fenger was switched over to Duncan’s latest reform initiative: High School Turnaround. Under Turnaround, a school’s principal and at least half its teachers were removed, and a whole new team was brought in. And when Turnaround arrived at Fenger, in 2009, the brand-new principal was Elizabeth Dozier.
Vallas and Duncan, it’s important to note, are not garden-variety school-system bureaucrats; they are two of the most celebrated educational leaders in the country. After Vallas left Chicago, he ran the schools in Philadelphia, and then he gained national fame as the man responsible for rebuilding and transforming the New Orleans school system after it was washed away by Hurricane Katrina. Duncan’s post-Chicago career is even more illustrious: President Obama chose him as his education secretary in 2009. But throughout all of the two men’s well-intentioned and often quite expensive reforms in Chicago, the grim statistics from Fenger High School stayed more or less where they had been in 1995: Between half and two-thirds of each incoming freshman class dropped out before the end of senior year. The minority of students who did make it to graduation were only rarely academically successful: in 2008, Duncan’s final year in Chicago, fewer than 4 percent of Fenger students met or exceeded standards on the statewide college-readiness tests given to juniors and seniors. During Duncan’s tenure, the school never once made “adequate yearly progress” under the federal No Child Left Behind law. And Vallas’s probation designation, originally intended to indicate a temporary state of emergency, became a fact of life at Fenger; in 2011, the school was placed on probation for the sixteenth year in a row.
When Dozier first arrived at Fenger, an ambitious and determined thirty-one-year-old, she believed that the basic tool kit of the modern education reformer contained everything she needed to turn things around for the school’s students. She had spent a year in a highly competitive principal-training program called New Leaders for New Schools, which emphasized to trainees that a dynamic leader could raise students’ achievement to high levels, no matter what their socioeconomic circumstances, as long as she had a committed staff. Dozier cleaned house at Fenger, replacing several administrators and most of the teachers; when I first sat down with her in her office at Fenger, a little more than a year after she took the job, her seventy-member staff included only three teachers from the school’s pre-Turnaround days. Most of the new teachers were young, ambitious, and non-tenured, which meant
