What Really Helps Children Succeed?

We know that children living in poverty generally tend to do worse academically than middle class kids. We also know that even some kids from wealthy backgrounds fail or breakdown. We’ve come to learn, in part through the writing of my guest Paul Tough, that it’s more than IQ or temperament. There is something else. Something that has to do with innate character, perseverance or just plain old fashioned grit.

But are these traits preordained? Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why.
Are children merely geographically and genetically predisposed to succeed or fail, or are these attributes of success something that can be multiplied, embedded and programmed into children in ways that increase the likelihood of success in school and in life? This is part of what Paul Tough now writes about in

My conversation with Paul Tough:

How Children Succeed

Why is it that poor children seem to do consistently worse academically than middle class kids? On the other hand, why do some wealthy children fail or breakdown while occasionally kids from the mean streets of urban neighborhood, can reach monumental heights of success?

Is it just IQ or temperament, or is there something else? Something that has to do with the innate character and perseverance of the child? Paul Tough, who introduced many to the work of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone and who is a contributing editor the NY Times Magazine, has spent a year reporting on what makes kids succeed and fail in school and in life. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, is the result of that effort.

My conversation with Paul Tough:

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Goeffrey Canada does "Whatever it takes"

As you might have seen on 60 minutes, this past Sunday night, educational visionary Geoffrey Canada asked what it would take to change the lives of poor children--not one by one, through heroic interventions and occasional miracles, but in big numbers, and in a way that could be replicated nationwide? The question led him to create the Harlem Children's Zone, a ninety-seven-block laboratory in central Harlem where he is testing new and sometimes controversial ideas about poverty in America. His conclusion: if you want poor kids to be able to compete with their middle-class peers, you need to change everything in their lives--their schools, their neighborhoods, even the child-rearing practices of their parents.  In his book Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America, New York Times Magazine contributing editor Paul Tough gives us an inspired portrait not only of Geoffrey Canada but also of the parents and children in Harlem who are struggling to better their lives, often against great odds to create one of the most daring and potentially transformative social experiment of our time.


My conversation with Paul Tough:

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