Articles by Paul Tough
In the New York Times Magazine
"What If the Secret to Success Is Failure?" September 18, 2011
"What is good character? Is it something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience?"
"Education Reform's Two-Month Warning" July 8, 2011
"Do we really want to accept that the best that the United States can do for those 1 million 5-year-olds, with 13 years and vast resources at our disposal, is to get 90,000 of them to proficiency in math, while we let the other 910,000 fail?"
"No, Seriously: No Excuses" July 7, 2011
"Why are some reformers resorting to excuses? Most likely for the same reason that urban educators from an earlier generation made excuses: successfully educating large numbers of low-income kids is very, very hard."
In the New Yorker
"The Poverty Clinic,"[PDF] March 21, 2011
"In the view of Burke and the researchers she has been following, many of the problems that we think of as social issues — and therefore the province of economists and sociologists — might better be addressed on the molecular level."
On the New York Times Op-ed Page
"Don't Drop Out of School Innovation," August 19, 2010
"At this moment of uncertainty and experimentation, should the federal government wait, as critics of Promise Neighborhoods suggest, until ironclad evidence for one big solution exists? Or should it create a competitive research-and-development marketplace to make bets on innovations?"
In the New York Times Magazine
"Can Play Teach Self-Control?" September 25, 2009
"Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among scholars and scientists who study early-childhood development, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the boardroom than the classroom: executive function."
"24/7 School Reform," September 7, 2008
"In an election season when Democrats find themselves unusually unified on everything from tax policy to foreign affairs, one issue still divides them: education."
"A Teachable Moment," August 17, 2008
"While it is true that for decades the children of New Orleans toiled in a substandard school system, they have also continually faced countless other obstacles to success — inadequate health care, poorly educated parents, exposure to high rates of violent crime and a popular culture that often denigrates mainstream achievement."
"The Class-Consciousness Raiser," June 10, 2007
"It may be that the only people with abiding faith in the power of class divisions in America are the country’s few remaining Marxists and Ruby Payne."
"What It Takes to Make a Student," November 26, 2006
"The evidence is now overwhelming that if you take an average low-income child and put him into an average American public school, he will almost certainly come out poorly educated. What the small but growing number of successful schools demonstrate is that the public-school system accomplishes that result because we have built it that way."
"The Harlem Project," June 20, 2004
"Geoffrey Canada knew there were success stories out there. There were always reports in the newspapers about 'special' kids who 'overcame the odds.' Some brilliant teacher or charity or millionaire went into the ghetto and found 100 kids and educated them and turned their lives around. But those stories seemed counterproductive to Canada. Instead of helping some kids beat the odds, he thought, why don't we just change the odds?"