Paul Tough on grit

Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed is an interesting book about “grit” and other non-cognitive issues in childhood, well-written for the most part. ((Disclosure: I read an ebook version of the uncorrected proofs; I think the ebook expires for me in late fall.)) It is not without some significant weaknesses–primarily an exaggeration of the coherence of the relevant basic research and the capacity of existing programs and interventions based on those constructs. But if you want to learn about some of the ways “non-cognitive contributions” may play out and take the grandiose statements with a few grains of salt, How Children Succeed is worth your time.

Tough asserts that there is a relatively coherent set of research projects under the umbrella of non-cognitive development, research documenting something in children’s lives that has an outsized contribution to life outcomes for children. While Tough roots the research part of his story in James Heckman’s work over the past few decades, ((Listen to the 2011 Planet Money podcast on Heckman for an accessible introduction.)) the various pieces he describes are older in many cases, such as Carol Dweck’s mindset research. But that’s a relatively minor bobble in the book; Tough intersperses discussion of grit in various guises with descriptions of schools and other programs trying to address non-cognitive development in children and youth.

Tough’s larger thesis is that we need to pay attention to more than academics–children need to develop persistence and resilience in the face of failure. To him, promoting grit and toughness is in addition to the academic skills and knowledge that most education policy obsesses about these days. Tough follows the efforts to address the “new character” in a New York City KIPP charter school as well as a tony New York prep school. He follows the amazing story of middle-school chess players at New York’s I.S. 318, led by their teacher Elizabeth Spiegel, who is unafraid to confront them with their own mistakes in post-mortem discussions. Without shirking the inadequacies of these efforts–for all her students’ success in chess, Spiegel is unable to help one of her stars win entrance to one of New York’s highly-selective high schools–Tough weaves a tale of a diverse set of people who fiercely love children and want them to grow up with enough internal discipline and resilience to be successful adults.

As in his previous book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone, Tough’s writing in How Children Succeed is specific, descriptive, and makes it easy to empathize with the people in the book. Then again, Tough chooses his subjects well: who isn’t going to cheer for I.S. 318’s chess players to win a national championship against teams from selective public and private schools? By the diverse selection of settings in which he describes grit-development programs, Tough is supporting his claim that grit is a general construct and that we can help children by addressing it in multiple places. In many ways, this is an easy argument when you have Tough’s journalistic skills: no one believes that intellectual development is everything, even if many obsess or make policy arguments that focus on only one aspect of children’s development. And despite a few others who have written about Tough, I do not see him as obsessing about grit in the same way others obsess about reading and math.

Nevertheless, there are a few flaws in the broader argument. One is a matter of practicality: so what if we know that determination and resilience matter? There is no tested program to send out in the field, though the end of the book implies all we need to do is find effective programs and bang! kids will become tough. The existence of solid research on a concept does not translate easily into actionable interventions. An example of Tough’s credulity in this area is his pointing to the preschool Tools of the Mind curriculum as an exemplar program, implying that it is ready for scaling up. But developing and evaluating something like Tools of the Mind is hard work that takes a number of years and considerable resources. For want of a better term, there is no giant field of “translational grit research” that is already turning the various related basic psychology findings into something teachers can do tomorrow; Tools of the Mind is a lonely example. The diversity of approaches Tough describes is a strength when making the assertion of grit as a useful concept, but it becomes a significant weakness when claiming we’re just a few steps away from helping children in the greatest need.

The second flaw I see is something that may only make sense to those who have a cautious temperament when reading research: Tough exaggerates the coherence of grit as a single construct. In particular, he attempts to tie the psychological constructs to neuroscience, based on conversations with one of his informants, a San Francisco medical clinic director:

When I talked with Mush and other young residents of Roseland, I often found myself thinking about the research in neuroscience and stress physiology that had so changed Nadine Burke Harris’s perspective. She and I drove one afternoon through the housing projects in Bayview-Hunters Point, exchanging looks with the young men on the corners, and Burke Harris talked as if she could see the cortisol and oxytocin and norepinephrine ebbing and flowing through their bodies and brains. “When we look at these kids and their behavior, it can all seem so mysterious,” she said. “But at some point, what you’re seeing is just a complex series of chemical reactions. It’s the folding of a protein or the activation of a neuron. And what’s exciting about that is that those things are treatable. When you get down to the molecules, you realize, that’s where the healing lies. That’s where you’re discovering a solution.” (p. 26; emphasis added)

As an historian, I winced at the passage. I know Tough did not mean to evoke for me the memory of early 20th century psychologists who were sure they could pinpoint an immigrant’s IQ just by looking at her or him, but he did. Note: the key words here were not Burke Harris’s but Tough’s. He sees a far too solid and easy connection between the existing state of neuroscience and the existing state of “grit” research. Are mindset, resilience, and related concepts legitimate subjects of research? Of course. But they are currently hypotheses with good evidence at most, not strongly-tested theory. With additional, careful research, many psychological constructs have a nasty habit of turning into sand that slips between your fingers, and the enthusiastic science and education writer better beware.

I understand Tough’s optimism; in both How Children Succeed and Whatever it Takes, he is seeking wisps of clues to children’s success, especially clues that may point to better ways of helping children who face long odds. If Tough riffed for a chapter on the sociological and anthropological culture-of-poverty debates in Whatever It Takes before following Canada, he wanders now between psychology, neuroscience, and the chess-loving middle-schoolers in I.S. 318. It is always tempting to see the courageous and sometimes-successful as landmarks pointing in the right direction. But we are also vulnerable to confirmation bias, the tendency to slant evidence to support what we already believe. I wish there were a magic formula for helping children and youth develop grit; as a father of two adolescents, I am several years closer than Tough to the day when I can no longer support them. But I also know the road of good research and development is winding and long.

Having observed these caveats, I should end by repeating my basic recommendation: Tough’s book is readable, enjoyable, and provocative. My primary wish is that it had been treated better by Houghton Mifflin at the editing stage. I had previously mentioned the false sense of a single research chronology mentioned, which a good editor should have caught. But there are other problems, including some missing words in a few places and the casual sprinkling of terms in the text such as cognitive-behavior therapy and metacognition without clear explanations of the terms or their relationship to the research Tough describes in detail. Only the latter is more than a minor irritant, but the book deserved better.