How Children Succeed

OneGoal programs. The teachers remain regular full-time employees of the public-school system, though they get stipends on top of their salaries for the extra work they do. Once a teacher is signed up with OneGoal, he or she will recruit and select a class of twenty-five students in their sophomore year—not the highest-scoring kids, not the ones who can already see the path to college, but underperforming students who show at least some spark of ambition. (The average GPA of incoming students is 2.8.) And then the teacher sticks with that same class of students for three years. In junior and senior year, OneGoal is a full-time academic course, with a curriculum designed by Nelson and his team. The class usually meets once a day through the end of senior year. And when the students are freshmen in college, the teacher keeps in close touch with them, by phone and e-mail and Facebook, answering questions, holding regular online conferences, providing support and advice.

There are three main elements to the OneGoal curriculum. The first and most straightforward is an intensive unit of ACT prep in junior year, designed to give students the essential content knowledge and test-taking strategies to raise their scores from terrible to not bad. These days, OneGoal teachers are regularly able to match Matt King’s accomplishment, helping their students improve by about three points on the ACT over the course of their junior year, moving them from about the fifteenth percentile to the thirty-fifth percentile.

The second element is what Jeff Nelson calls a “road map to college.” When Nelson was planning the curriculum that first summer, he often found himself thinking of the process at New Trier: the school’s college- counseling office employs eight full-time counselors, who begin working on college planning with students and their parents early in the sophomore year. “It’s a machine,” Nelson told me with a laugh. “They give you an incredibly clear and structured path from the middle of high school through the day you step onto a college campus.” He recognized that he couldn’t afford to transplant New Trier’s entire college-prep machine to the South Side. “But there were pieces of what was happening at New Trier,” he said, “that I thought could be translated to low-income schools and could make a massive difference.” So OneGoal students get help not just with applications but also with their entire college-admission strategy: choosing match schools rather than undermatch schools; deciding whether to apply to schools close to home or far away; writing appealing application essays; finding scholarships. (One morning in a OneGoal class at a Chicago high school I watched as the school’s college counselor ran through a list of increasingly obscure scholarships. “Is anyone here Greek?” she asked. Twenty-five black and Latino faces looked back at her skeptically. “Do we have any multiracial students?” she asked hopefully. “Yeah,” replied one impeccably dressed African American boy, deadpan. “South Side black and West Side black.”)

But still, Nelson said, “it was obvious to us that the road map was not going to be enough. We could give our students a very clear idea of how to get to college, but we also needed to train them to succeed once they got there. We needed to teach students to be highly effective people.”

For this third part of the equation, Nelson was influenced by the high-school research done by the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, and particularly the work of an analyst there named Melissa Roderick. In a 2006 paper, Roderick identified as a critical component of college success “noncognitive academic skills,” including “study skills, work habits, time management, help-seeking behavior, and social/academic problem-solving skills.” Roderick, who borrowed the term noncognitive from James Heckman’s work, wrote that these skills were at the center of an increasingly dire mismatch between American high schools and American colleges and universities. When the current high-school system was developed, she wrote, the primary goal was to train students not for college but for the workplace, where at the time “critical thinking and problem- solving abilities were not highly valued.” (This was the era that Bowles and Gintis, the anti-conscientiousness Marxist economists, were writing about.) And so the traditional American high school was never intended to be a place where students would learn how to think deeply or develop internal motivation or persevere when faced with difficulty—all the skills needed to persist in college. Instead, it was a place where, for the most part, students were rewarded for just showing up and staying awake.

For a while, Roderick wrote, this formula worked well. “High school teachers could have very high workloads and manage them effectively because they expected most of their students to do little work,” she recounted. “Most students could get what they and their parents wanted, the high school credential, with little effort.” There was, she wrote, “an unwritten contract between students and teachers that said, ‘Put up with high school, do your seat time, and behave properly, and you will be rewarded.’”

But then the world changed, and the American high school didn’t. As the wage premium paid to college graduates increased, high-school students voiced an increasing desire to graduate from college—between 1980 and 2002, the percentage of American tenth-graders who said they wanted to obtain at least a BA doubled, from 40 percent to 80 percent. But most of those students didn’t have the nonacademic skills—the character strengths, as Martin Seligman would put it—they needed to survive in college, and the traditional American high school didn’t have a mechanism to help them acquire those skills. This is what Nelson is trying to change, and he believes this third element of the OneGoal strategy is at the heart of the program’s nascent success.

Nelson knew when he started that he couldn’t remake the entire high-school experience for his students. But he thought that perhaps he didn’t need to. By helping students develop the specific nonacademic skills that would lead most directly to college success, he believed he could compensate, relatively quickly, for the serious gap in academic ability that separated the average senior at a Chicago public high school from the average American college freshman. Nelson, using instinct more than research, identified five skills, which he called leadership principles, that he wanted OneGoal teachers to emphasize: resourcefulness, resilience, ambition, professionalism, and integrity. Those words now permeate the program—they’re even more ubiquitous than Seligman and Peterson’s seven character strengths are at KIPP Infinity.

“We know that most of our kids are going to arrive in college academically behind their peers,” Nelson explained to me one morning. “We can help them improve their ACT scores significantly, but it is unlikely that we’ll be able to close the gap on those tests entirely, simply because of the K-through-twelve system that our students grew up in. But what we also know, and what we tell our students, is that there is a way for them to offset that disparity. And the key is those five leadership abilities.”

5. ACE Tech

For four decades, the Robert Taylor Homes loomed over the South Side, the largest of Chicago’s postwar housing projects: twenty-eight high-rise concrete monoliths extending for almost two miles down a narrow strip of land between State Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway. Almost as soon as construction on the projects was completed, in the early 1960s, the buildings began to descend into disrepair, violence, and chaos, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the Robert Taylor Homes were considered, according to the Chicago Housing Authority, “the worst slum area in the United States” ; in 1980, one in nine murders in Chicago took place in those ninety-two acres. At the projects’ high point, which is to say their low point, more than twenty-five thousand people lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, at least two-thirds of them children, the large majority of whom were living with single mothers on welfare. The projects are gone now, torn down in Chicago’s latest attempt at urban renewal, but nothing has been built in their place. And when you drive down State Street today, there is just an eerie emptiness where the towers once stood, a weird inner-city pastoral of grass, weeds, and concrete punctuated by a few old, lonely churches that managed to escape the wrecking ball.

At the south end of that long stretch of nothingness, down by Fifty-Fourth Street, there is a small outcropping of intact structures—a few houses, mostly boarded up; a liquor store; a pizza place; a pawnshop; and a storefront Baptist church, now closed. And then, in a two-story blue-brick building just north of the old church, there is, of all things, a school: ACE Tech Charter High School. Given the pervasive bleakness of the surroundings, it is hard to imagine anything very positive coming out of that building, and in fact, ACE Tech is not at all a high- achieving school: in 2009, just 12 percent of the school’s juniors met or exceeded the standards on the statewide achievement test, and since its founding in 2004, the school has never made “adequate yearly progress,” the benchmark set by the federal No Child Left Behind law. But it was at ACE Tech, soon after Jeff Nelson took over in 2007, that OneGoal introduced its new methods. First, there was an afterschool program much like Matt King’s, held two hours a week for a class of juniors and seniors; then, in 2009, Nelson brought in the full-time, in-class, three-year, teacher-led model that is now the OneGoal standard. (It is a coincidence, but perhaps an apt one, that ACE Tech is only a few blocks away from Du Sable High, the school that Jonathan Kozol presented in Savage Inequalities as the tragic counterpoint to Nelson’s alma mater of New Trier.)