How Children Succeed

The person who pioneered both iterations of the OneGoal program at ACE Tech was Michele Stefl, an English teacher now in her early thirties who grew up in Chicago’s southwestern suburbs and started teaching at ACE Tech in 2005. Nelson hired her as one of OneGoal’s first contract teachers soon after he took the position as executive director. I followed a class of Stefl’s OneGoal students throughout their senior year, observing as she guided them through the college-admissions process. There were, inevitably, plenty of low moments for her students—suspensions, unplanned pregnancies, college rejections—but in the Sahara of failure that surrounded ACE Tech, Stefl’s classroom felt, on most days, like an oasis of hope and possibility.

Stefl was not an educational romantic; she was plainspoken and pragmatic, blunt about the school’s inadequacies and the reality of how far behind her students were. One morning toward the end of her students’ junior year, she talked to them about their personal essays, which, she said, were going to be essential parts of successful college applications. “Remember who you are competing against,” she said. “You are competing against people who have ACT scores of thirty-plus. You are competing with kids who, in all honesty, have received a better education than many of you. We’re trying to make up for that now, but the level still isn’t where it should be. And that’s unfair, unfortunately, okay?” She held up a sample essay. “So this is where it has to come from. What life experiences have you had to get where you are today?”

When selecting this class of students for the OneGoal program, back in the spring of 2009, when they were sophomores, Stefl had taken pains not to pick the highest-scoring students or the ones from the most competent families; in fact, she did the opposite of creaming: during the process, if a student revealed that there was a college graduate anywhere in her immediate family, Stefl would gently tell the student that the program was meant not for her but for her peers with fewer resources and greater need. As a result, one of Stefl’s biggest challenges was simply to convince her OneGoal students that they each had the potential for a successful life, despite all the evidence to the contrary they saw in their neighborhood and, often, in their families.

When I sat in Stefl’s class, I frequently found myself thinking about the research that the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck had done on the growth mindset. To recap briefly: Dweck found that students who believed intelligence was malleable did much better than students who believed intelligence was fixed. David Levin’s project at KIPP in New York City essentially expanded Dweck’s mindset idea into the message that character is malleable too. It seemed that what Stefl was attempting to do was convince her students that not just their intelligence and their character but their very destinies were malleable; that their past performance was not an indication of their future results. She was not preaching a gospel of empty self-esteem or wishful thinking. Her message to her students was that they could grow and improve and achieve at a much higher level than they had before but that it would take a lot of hard work, a lot of perseverance, and a lot of character— or, as they put it in class, leadership skills.

When I spoke with Angela Duckworth about the OneGoal program, she pointed out something I hadn’t thought of: that the ACT-prep component of the OneGoal curriculum might actually be serving two purposes. First, on a practical level, improving their scores by a few points would give students access to more and higher-quality colleges. But second, and perhaps more important, the experience of improving one’s outcome on a test that ostensibly measures intelligence serves as an unforgettable reinforcement of the growth-mindset message: You can get smarter. You can do better.

Some of Stefl’s students took this message to heart more than others did. Even in their senior year, many still didn’t quite seem to believe that they belonged in college, and their families were not always helpful in underscoring Stefl’s message. One boy who got into Purdue University was convinced by his mother to attend the two-year community college down the street instead so that he wouldn’t be so far from home. At the opposite end of the spectrum—the confident, optimistic end—was Kewauna Lerma.

6. Test Scores

As I described in the introduction to this book, when I met Kewauna halfway through her junior year, I was struck by the remarkable turnaround she had made in her life: from a troubled childhood marred by multiple risk factors and plenty of adverse experiences, through a difficult and delinquent period in middle school, to a successful high-school career and an intense determination to succeed at college and beyond. During the two years that she and I kept in touch, her home life was never easy, and her family’s finances were always perilous—her mother received about five hundred dollars a month in disability benefits, and that, plus food stamps, was the family’s only income. But somehow Kewauna seemed able to ignore the day-to-day indignities of life in poverty on the South Side and instead stay focused on her vision of a more successful future. “Nobody wants a dumb girl,” she told me in one of our first conversations. “Nobody wants a failure. I always wanted to be one of those business ladies walking downtown with my briefcase, everybody saying, ‘Hi, Miss Lerma!’” To get her hands on that briefcase, Kewauna knew, she needed at least a bachelor’s degree, and despite the fact that no one in her family had ever been to college, she was certain that she could and would obtain one.

By the fall of her senior year, Kewauna was consumed with the process of applying to college. But she was starting from scratch in learning about the system—Was there really both a DePaul University and a DePauw University?—and at the beginning of the year, she had a tendency to go a little overboard. In September, she told me she was planning to apply to twenty-three colleges, including some highly competitive ones like Duke and the University of Chicago. By some measures, Duke was not an entirely unreasonable goal for Kewauna. She had finished her junior year as an almost-straight-A student—there were a few A minuses on her final transcript, but not a single B—despite a demanding course load that included honors algebra II, honors American literature, sociology, and biology. But there was a problem: she had not done at all well on the ACT.

On the first practice ACT test, at the beginning of her junior year, Kewauna got an 11, which is a very low score: it placed her at the first percentile nationally, behind 99 percent of all American high-school juniors. She worked hard on ACT training throughout her junior year, studying many hours each week with an online service called PrepMe that OneGoal had contracted with, and walking into the official ACT test in April, she felt much better prepared than she’d felt for her practice test. But it turned out to be a frustrating day for her nonetheless. There was still so much on the test that she didn’t know, and even in sections where she was familiar with the material, she wasn’t able to get through the questions as quickly as she wanted. “When I got out of the test, I was crying,” she told me. “I told Miss Stefl I thought I wasn’t going to get into college at all. I was really mad at myself.” When she got her results back a month or so later, she had scored a 15. That meant she had improved by an impressive four points since her diagnostic test, but it also meant she was only at the fifteenth percentile nationally. The Chicago public schools’ average is 17. ACT’s official standard for college-readiness is 20. Incoming students at Duke usually score above 30. (The maximum possible score is 36.)

Charles Murray would almost certainly have found Kewauna’s college ambitions distressing. In Real Education, he argued that only students who score in the top 20 percent of the population on tests of cognitive ability should attend college; in his ideal world, only the top 10 percent would go. The idea that someone who scored in the bottom half of a standardized achievement test’s distribution, let alone in the bottom fifth, like Kewauna did, might seriously aspire to college would strike him, one imagines, as pure lunacy. “As long as it remains taboo to acknowledge that college is intellectually too demanding for most young people, we will continue to create crazily unrealistic expectations among the next generation,” Murray wrote. Students who score in the bottom third on cognitive tests like the ACT are unsuited for college, he wrote; they are also “just not smart enough to become literate or numerate in more than a rudimentary sense.”

Jeff Nelson looks at the ACT quite differently than Charles Murray does. “I think the ACT is a very good measure of how effective your education has been,” he told me. “But I don’t think it’s a good measure of intelligence. The average incoming score of our students is hovering around a fourteen, or the tenth percentile. And I adamantly do not believe that ninety percent of students at that age are actually more intelligent than the students we’re working with. What I do believe is that ninety percent of the population is receiving a better education than our students have received.”

For Nelson, the distinction is in some ways a semantic one. You can call the quality that the ACT measures intelligence if you want, but regardless of what you call it, he believes, the ability to get a high score on the test is not essential to college success and college persistence. Nelson bases that belief on his reading of Melissa Roderick’s work and on the book Crossing the Finish Line but also on the real-life