Two recent broadcast/podcast interviews about my article in the New York Times Magazine on character education at KIPP and Riverdale. On the American RadioWorks weekly podcast about education, I talked about the article with Stephen Smith, the host of the podcast. Audio here.
And on Minnesota Public Radio’s morning show, David Levin of KIPP and author David Shenk discussed the article and KIPP’s approach to character. Audio here.
Some response from around the web to my article in the New York Times Magazine on character education at KIPP and Riverdale Country School. The magazine published a few letters to the editor here. On this blog, part of the Times’s Learning Network, 536 high-school students weighed in with their comments. And on the Classroom as Microcosm blog, a writing teacher in Montreal known, pseudonymously, as Siobhan Curious writes that the article gave her some ideas about how to better instruct failure-averse students in her class:
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.
This weekend’s New York Times Magazine includes an article I wrote about character education. It focuses on a collaborative project between the KIPP schools in New York City and Riverdale Country School — a project that I’m also writing about in my book “The Success Equation,” which is due out in the fall of 2012. On the Times’s new SchoolBook blog, as an adjunct to the article, they’re soliciting reader questions for David Levin, the superintendent of KIPP NYC, and Dominic Randolph, the head of Riverdale.
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.
“Over the coming weeks and months, we will work with Geoffrey and the Harlem Children’s Zone to put in place a program in Paterson that will emulate the success of Harlem Children’s Zone and give the children of Paterson a renewed sense of hope and opportunity.”
In a blog post on the Wall Street Journal’s web site, one expert was quoted sounding a skeptical note about the Paterson replication:
“We have an absolutely brutal track record of trying to replicate these things,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Hess said Canada’s personal ties allowed him to take advantage of existing social programs, tie them together and raise money. … “There’s no harm in trying, but I think much more skepticism is necessary than has been the case,” he said of New Jersey’s new effort in Paterson.
More cause for concern about the future of Promise Neighborhoods came in this article in the Washington Post, in which Jim Shelton, the education department official (and former Gates Foundation executive) overseeing the Promise Neighborhood program, commented on the administration’s request to Congress for $210 million for this coming fiscal year, which had been reduced last year to $60 million by a House subcommittee and then to $20 million by a Senate subcommittee. (I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times last summer about the proposed cuts.) At the time, administration officials I spoke to sounded optimistic that much if not all of the funding would be restored, but in the Post article, Shelton
said that this year the administration probably will have only an additional $10 million for the Promise Neighborhood program and will request more money for the program again in 2012. “At a minimum, we could have a small-scale implementation, not nearly what we had anticipated,” Shelton said.
As I mentioned last month, I was in Oregon this week, giving talks to various audiences in Portland and Eugene. While I was there, I also appeared on two radio shows. On Tuesday, I was the guest on a weekly Internet radio show called “Parenting Unplugged.” I was interviewed by the hosts, Todd Mansfield and Laura Mansfield. Audio of our half-hour conversation is here.
On Wednesday, I talked about Promise Neighborhoods on “Think Out Loud,” the Oregon Public Broadcasting morning show hosted by Emily Harris. My fellow guests were Russ Whitehurst, a Brookings Institution analyst who wrote a report critical of Promise Neighborhood funding (I referred to his report in my New York Times op-ed last month), as well as two local leaders who had applied unsuccessfully for Promise Neighborhood funding.
You can listen to the program and read listener comments here, or you can just download the audio here.
Geoffrey Canada is one of the central characters in the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” which opens today in selected theaters. Earlier this week, the Daily News published a long profile of Canada tied to the movie. In the review in the New York Times today, Stephen Holden writes:
If Mr. Canada, who was born in the South Bronx and grew up to be one of the country’s most charismatic and inspiring educators, is not Superman, he must be a close relative. Those who have read Paul Tough’s book, “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America,” will know that the 97-block Harlem Children’s Zone, which he founded and runs, is no miracle. The zone is astoundingly successful at getting children through high school and into college. But that success, largely dependent on private money, is a costly product of laborious trial and error.
This week, the education department announced the 21 recipients of Promise Neighborhood planning grants, from the Abyssinian Development Corporation in Harlem to Proyecto Pastoral at Dolores Mission in Los Angeles. The department’s press release lists the other 19 winners, and more details are here. There was a good AP overview, and a story on the New York angle in the Times.
One of the winners was the Whatever It Takes initiative from Athens, Georgia, which I blogged about back in July. This story from the Athens Banner-Herald explains the organization’s future plans:
If the group doesn’t receive federal funds to implement the plan, Whatever it Takes volunteers will continue to seek donations of time or cash from foundations, individuals and other service agencies both near and far, according to Lewis Earnest, chairman of the board for Family Connection/Communities in Schools of Athens.
“We’ve got some investment capital and we believe that we can show other people, other foundations and individuals and state and local government that we’ve got a good plan,” Earnest said.