How Children Succeed

into college and they coast, for the most part. Or they’re partying too hard. And in that moment, if our kids are working diligently and building relationships with professors and studying and using all of the skills that we’ve trained them to use, they can close the gap. We’ve seen it time and time again, that all of a sudden a kid who might have been three or four grade levels behind in high school has caught up in a really significant way to his peers by the beginning of sophomore year.”

Her first fall at Western Illinois, Kewauna took introductory courses—English 100, Math 100, Sociology 100. None of them was easy for her, but the course she found most challenging was Biology 170, Introduction to Health Careers. The professor was a popular lecturer, so the class was pretty full, and most of the students were upperclassmen. On the first day of class, Kewauna did what Michele Stefl had recommended: she politely introduced herself to the professor before class, and then she sat in the front row, which until Kewauna sat down was occupied entirely by white girls. The other African American students all tended to sit at the back, which disappointed Kewauna. (“That’s what they expect you to do,” she said when we talked by phone that fall. “Back in the civil rights movement, if they told you you had to sit in the back, you wouldn’t do it.”)

Her biology professor used a lot of scientific terms in his lectures that Kewauna wasn’t familiar with. So she came up with a strategy: every time he used a word she didn’t understand, she wrote it down and put a red star next to it. At the end of the class, she waited until all the other students who wanted to talk to the professor had taken their turns, and then she went through each red-starred word with him, one by one, asking him to explain them.

Kewauna spent a lot of time interacting with all her professors, in fact. She was a regular at office hours, and she e-mailed them whenever she wasn’t clear on assignments. She also tried to make one or two acquaintances among the students in each of her classes, so that if she needed help with homework and couldn’t reach the professor, she’d have someone to ask. Through her freshman-support program, she found a writing tutor—she had always had “grammar issues,” she told me, as well as trouble with spelling and punctuation—and she made a practice of going over with her tutor every paper she wrote before handing it in. Finally, in December, she felt she had internalized enough about comma splices and dependent clauses, and she handed in her final English paper without going over it with the writing tutor. She got an A.

Still, it was a difficult semester for Kewauna. She was always short of money and had to economize everywhere she could. At one point, she ran out of money on her meal card and just didn’t eat for two days. She was studying all the time, it felt like. Every paper was a challenge, and at the end of the semester, she stayed up practically all night, three nights in a row, studying for finals. But her hard work was reflected in her final grades that semester: two B pluses, one A, and, in biology, an A plus. When I spoke to her a few days before Christmas, she sounded a bit depleted, but proud too. “No matter how overwhelming it is, no matter how exhausting it is, I’m not going to give up,” she said. “I’m never the type to give up. Even when I played hide-and-go-seek when I was little, I would be outside till eight o’clock, until I found everyone. I don’t give up on nothing, no matter how hard.”

Kewauna’s grades actually improved in her second semester, and at the end of her freshman year, her cumulative GPA stood at 3.8. There were still three years to go, lots of time for things to go wrong, for setbacks and mistakes and crises. But Kewauna seemed certain of where she was heading and why—almost unnervingly so. What was most remarkable to me about Kewauna was that she was able to marshal her prodigious noncognitive capacity—call it grit, conscientiousness, resilience, or the ability to delay gratification—all for a distant prize that was, for her, almost entirely theoretical. She didn’t actually know any business ladies with briefcases downtown; she didn’t even know any college graduates except her teachers. It was as if Kewauna were taking part in an extended, high-stakes version of Walter Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, except in this case, the choice on offer was that she could have one marshmallow now or she could work really hard for four years, constantly scrimping and saving, staying up all night, struggling, sacrificing—and then get, not two marshmallows, but some kind of elegant French pastry she’d only vaguely heard of, like a Napoleon. And Kewauna, miraculously, opted for the Napoleon, even though she’d never tasted one before and didn’t know anyone who had. She just had faith that it was going to be delicious.

Not all of Kewauna’s fellow OneGoal students are going to take to the deal with the same conviction. And it won’t be clear for another couple of years whether the leadership skills Kewauna and her classmates were taught are powerful enough to get them through four years of college. But so far, OneGoal’s overall persistence numbers are quite good. Of the 129 students, including Kewauna, who started OneGoal as juniors at ten Chicago high schools in the fall of 2009, ninety-four were enrolled in four-year colleges as of May 2012. Another fourteen were enrolled in two-year colleges, for an overall college-persistence total of 84 percent. Which left only twenty-one students who had veered off the track to a college degree: twelve who left OneGoal before the end of high school, two who joined the military after high school, two who graduated from high school but didn’t enroll in college, and five who enrolled in college but dropped out in their freshman year. The numbers are less stellar but still impressive for the pilot-program cohort, students for whom OneGoal was a weekly afterschool class. Three years out of high school, 66 percent of the students who enrolled in the program as high-school juniors are still enrolled in college. Those numbers grow more significant when you recall that OneGoal teachers are deliberately selecting struggling students who seem especially unlikely to go to college.

Jeff Nelson would be the first to admit that what he has created is far from a perfect solution for the widespread dysfunction of the country’s human-capital pipeline. Ideally, we should have in place an education and social-support system that produces teenagers from the South Side who aren’t regularly two or three or four years behind grade level. For now, though, OneGoal and the theories that underlie it seem like a most valuable intervention, a program that, for about fourteen hundred dollars a year per student, regularly turns underperforming, undermotivated, low-income teenagers into successful college students.

5. A Better Path

1. Dropping Out

In the fall of 1985, when I was a freshman at Columbia University, at the same precarious stage of life as Kewauna Lerma in the fall of 2011, I did something Kewauna is determined never to do: I dropped out of college. It felt at the time like a weighty and fateful choice, and it still does. It is a decision, in fact, that I have revisited many times over the last twenty-five years, often with regret. I certainly thought about it a lot while reporting this book. When I was sitting in room 104 of ACE Tech Charter High School with Kewauna and the rest of Michele Stefl’s OneGoal class, I would sometimes feel a little ashamed, to be honest: graduating from college was such a consuming goal for those students, and I often wished that when I was their age, I had thought as hard and as responsibly as they were doing about what I wanted from my college experience.

It hasn’t escaped my attention that many of the researchers I’ve written about in this book—everyone from James Heckman to Angela Duckworth to Melissa Roderick to the authors of Crossing the Finish Line—have identified dropping out of high school or college as a symptom of substandard noncognitive ability: low grit, low perseverance, bad planning skills. And I think it’s true that I was lacking in some of those important skills when I made my decision to leave. But my reporting for this book has also provided me with a more generous way to interpret my choice. It came in my conversations with Dominic Randolph, the head of the Riverdale Country School, who made a persuasive case that failure—or at least the real risk of failure—could often be a crucial step on the road to success. Randolph was worried, you’ll recall, that his mostly affluent students, caught up in the modern American meritocratic machine of private schools, private tutors, Ivy League colleges, and safe careers, were being shortchanged by their families and their school and even their culture by not being given enough genuine opportunities to overcome adversity and thus develop their character. “The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph told me. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”