According to Tough and some of his subjects, the key ingredient is grit, the ability to persist in the face of obstacles and even failure.

GRIT! I thought.  This is what I’ve been saying all along!  If I can face down my limitations, if I can labour to be, not perfect, but better – I will be … happy?  Is grit something we can learn?  If so, how can we teach it? …

Teaching them how to write a commentary is all very well, but what is it for?  Maybe the main thing is for is to help them practice grit: Yes, it’s hard.  Just keep going.  If you fail, fail as well as you can, and then try again.

We need to spend less time talking about literary techniques and more time talking about grit.

Curious’s blog post has so far collected 219 comments.

Some more blog reaction to my article on character education in the New York Times Magazine, from Mothering 21 (a blog for parents of adult children who aren’t quite sure if they’re adults or children), Early Ed Watch, and the Evil HR Lady, who writes:

Lots of people live charmed lives as long as their parents are pulling the strings or they put themselves in places where success is almost guaranteed. Except that anyone in the working world today knows that failure is not only a possibility it’s a high probability. Businesses fail. Entire divisions get laid off, regardless of how brilliant any individual employee was.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of trying to figure out what the problem in the darn code is.  If you’re a one try and you’re finished type of person, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you won’t succeed.

There’s been a lot of interesting commentary, from a variety of sources, on my article for the New York Times Magazine on character education, which draws on some of the reporting that I’ve been doing for my next book, “The Success Equation.” On the Times’s Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin published a guest commentary on the article from a mother named Melissa Sher, who writes,

Life can be more than messy: bad things happen. But our job as parents isn’t to stop them all from happening. Because we can’t. Instead, we can try to make our kids feel loved, valued and secure.  So, if we’re lucky, when our children do fall or if things fall apart around them, they’ll get back up.

Evan Osnos, on his “Letter from China” blog on the New Yorker’s site, wrote about how an article like mine might go over in China today:

It will be years before any Chinese magazine sells a story like that on its cover, but achievement, classically defined, has lost some luster.

On the Atlantic’s site, Edward Tenner, an historian, relates the character push by KIPP and Riverdale to similiar discussions of character in the 19th and 20th centuries. He concludes,

It may be that today’s successful city people — the parents of day school students — are likely to have parents or grandparents who did defy adversity, overcoming failure. Many of them sacrificed precisely so that their grandchildren wouldn’t have to. Private school costs may be stratospheric, but if you have to ask the price of some forms of resilience, you can’t afford them.

In the Financial Times, Luke Johnson took a business approach, asserting that the values that KIPP and Riverdale are trying to instill “could equally be the defining criteria for entrepreneurs.”

And on the National Review’s domestic-policy blog, Reihan Salam wrote about the passage in my article when KIPP teacher Sayuri Stabrowski turns a gum-chewing dispute with a student into a deeper discussion about character. Salam writes:

For some reason I found this very moving. It is easy for any of us to feel powerless in the face of trying circumstances, and this is particularly true of adolescents. Yet this student is being taught, in a fairly unsentimental, straightforward way, that she has the capacity for self-control, and that she has an obligation, to her fellow students, her teacher, and to herself, to exercise it.

Online, there is some new commentary on “The Poverty Clinic,” my article on Nadine Burke and the Adverse Childhood Experiences study that the New Yorker published in March.

Here’s a column by Richard Gilliam, a current prison inmate, published on KALW radio’s criminal-justice blog. On Chicago Magazine’s blog, Whet Moser reflected on how the ACE research connects to Alex Kotlowitz’s reporting on Ceasefire, an anti-violence group in Chicago. (Alex is second from the right, above.) And on the Huffington Post, John Thompson wrote that my article articulated “a theory of everything that starts with the neurochemical imbalances created by childhood trauma.”

I’m hard at work on “The Success Equation,” my second book, which will be published next year. So I’m behind on my blog updates (and everything else). Some belated news from July: I published an essay in the New York Times Magazine about the current state of the education reform movement titled “No, Seriously: No Excuses.” I also wrote this post for the magazine’s blog.

The essay provoked some commentary online, including a column in the Kalamazoo Gazette, a post on the Mother Jones website, and this post by Dana Goldstein, who wrote:

Education reform shouldn’t be an “either/or” debate, but more about “and.” Kids–especially poor kids–need far more academic, vocational, social, and psychological interventions, provided by well-trained adults and institutions.

Whitney Tilson, the reform advocate, wrote that I misrepresented reformers, and published some email messages that he sent me. (He also published my response.)

I also did an hour-long interview with Kathleen Dunn (and several callers) on Wisconsin Public Radio. Audio is here.

Whatever It Takes is that rarest of phenomena—an education book that can be described as a page-turner.

2. Glen Pinder and Chris Finn, the stars of chapter 7 of “Whatever It Takes,” have left the Promise Academy middle school, where they were principal and dean, respectively, and are now working together again at Lady Liberty Academy Charter School in Newark, N.J.  According to this article in Local Talk News, “Pinder was recruited by the Newark Charter School Fund and Newark Mayor Cory Booker to help turn around the struggling school.”

3. A recent post on Search Marketing Daily’s SearchBlog profiled Frank Lee, a search engine optimization pro who just took a job as head of sales and marketing at an SEO firm called DataPop. The post included this unexpected tidbit:

When asked which book he is reading to prepare for his new role, Lee responded: “Whatever It Takes” by Paul Tough, a tale about driving change.

On WellCommons, a community health website in Lawrence, Kansas, the article was discussed as part of an intriguing and ambitious effort to infuse the local healthcare and social-service systems with a new awareness of the potential impact of adverse childhood experiences.

In San Francisco, Marnie Webb, the co-CEO of an organization called TechSoup Global that helps non-profits use technology better, wrote about the article on her blog, concluding:

Sometimes, I think that we, in the helping sectors, focus too much on the symptoms in our particular scope. Not enough on the community around us. I think there’s a lot we can learn from the way Nadine Burke is approaching her practice. I’m just not entirely sure what it is yet.

On the National Resources Defense Council staff blog, Marissa Ramirez writes about the connections between molecular biology and sustainable communities discussed in my article, and about her own transition from biology researcher to environmental advocate:

You may wonder what a former lab-coat wearing molecular biologist is doing advocating for sustainable communities at a leading environmental organization. It turns out she is fostering healthy neuromuscular junctions and optimal epigenetics — one sustainable neighborhood at a time.

And on Crosscut, a Seattle news website, a former teacher and school leader named Judy Lightfoot uses the article to argue against cuts to mental-health services for adolescents in and around Seattle:

Improving the behavior of the parent or caregiver of children in high-risk situations actually changes their physical chemistry, according to the studies Tough cites, leading to fewer behavior problems and greater success in school, as well as measurably better health outcomes as years pass. So it’s distressing to lose [mental health] programs that would have steered children of drug users away from drugs and helped chemically dependent adults be better parents

I am hoping that Paul Tough will be the education writer who frees us to engage in frank discussions of the effects of intense concentrations of generational poverty on schools. In his “Whatever It Takes,” Tough told the story of Geoffrey Canada who “believed that he could find the ideal intervention for each age of a child’s life, and then connect those interventions into an unbroken chain of support.” … Tough has done it again in “The Poverty Clinic,” articulating a theory of everything that starts with the neurochemical imbalances created by childhood trauma.

And on his New Republic blog, Jonathan Chait writes,

“Whatever It Takes” explores the Harlem Children’s Zone, which is an ambitious attempt to remake social services by tying together all the social services — education, medicine, parental training, prenatal care. The thesis, in other words, is that all these social ailments are related to each other, and the correct approach of social policy is to address them in tandem. His New Yorker story essentially traces this thesis back to bio-chemical roots, but Tough is really capturing some cutting-edge concepts in social science. The story is also a gripping read, so don’t miss it.

The New Yorker story got me booked on “RadioWest,” an hourlong public-affairs show on KUER in Salt Lake City. The host, Doug Fabrizio, asked some great questions, as did the many callers, from Utah and around the country (the show is also broadcast nationwide on Sirius XM). There’s now audio of the whole hour available here.

The article also played a part in this fascinating blog post from Whet Moser, on Chicagomag.com, which manages to tie together my reporting on Dr. Burke with Alex Kotlowitz’s great reporting in the New York Times Magazine on the Ceasefire initiative in Chicago, as well as a handful of other news reports and scientific studies. It’s well worth reading to get some broader context on the question of childhood trauma.

Promise Neighborhoods awarded $10 million in planning grants to 21 projects around the country in the 2010 fiscal year. Mr. Obama proposed upping the budget to $210-million in fiscal year 2011, with most of the money paying for grants to help nonprofit groups put their projects into effect. However, Congress has not yet adopted a 2011 budget, so spending has been frozen at 2010 levels. Congress did not fully back his 2011 request: a House subcommittee proposed spending only $60-million and a Senate committee only $20-million.

The request leaves many questions unanswered, including these, from the New America Foundation’s Ed Money Watch blog:

The Department of Education awarded $10 million in planning grants late last year. What is the status of those planning grants? Will the recipients of the planning grants receive this new money as well or will there be a new grant competition? If it will be the same grant recipients, will those grant recipients be ready to start implementing their plans in fiscal year 2012?