Success comes from grit – and plenty of helping hands along the way
Emily Hanford
"Dust" is getting a lot of attending these days, due in large part to an splendid new volume by Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Ability of Character. Psychologists ascertain grit as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." Research suggests that when it comes to high achievement, dust may exist every bit essential every bit intelligence. That's an exciting finding considering while the intelligence that can be measured on an IQ exam is resistant to alter, grit appears to be a more malleable trait. People might be able to learn to exist gritty.
Many advocates for low-income students are peculiarly interested in the enquiry on grit. Years of schoolhouse reform focused on cognitive skills and standardized tests take not succeeded in closing the accomplishment gap. Perhaps pedagogy then-chosen "noncognitive" skills, such as grit, is a solution. Only it'south of import to recognize that people who are successful in school and in life have more only grit on their side.
I started reading the enquiry on grit equally part of a reporting project at the Yep Prep charter school network in Houston. Yep was founded in 1995 with the goal of getting poor and minority students to graduate from higher. Only 9 per centum of America'southward everyman-income kids go bachelor's degrees past the time they're 24. A big reason is poor training. Yep set up out to modify that. When it comes to test scores, AP placement, and college acceptance rates, Yes schools are amidst the best in the country. Ninety-nine percent of YES graduates go to college.
So far, only 40 percent of YES alums have completed degrees. Yeah was expecting amend. Now teachers and staff are trying to figure out what else their students need in order to succeed. They remember pedagogy kids to be grittier might be role of the reply.
They may exist correct, simply non all students need grit to get through college. I don't think I needed to exist gritty. My great-grandpa had a available'south degree. Every generation since has finished college. This doesn't hateful college was piece of cake for me. I worked hard. I borrowed coin. I had a office-time job. I even quit college. When I was ready to go back, though, it was a pretty simple process. I re-enrolled, my dad dealt with the financial stuff, and that was it. In that location was a current of air at my back that kept blowing me in the direction of college completion.
The YES Prep students don't have this current of air at their back. Many of them piece of work total time while going to school – and they withal have to take out loans. Some are helping support their families by paying bills or taking care of younger siblings or grandparents. If they hit a snag with fiscal aid or have difficulty getting through a class, they don't have a parent with higher experience to aid them figure out what to practice. Some students say their families are expecting them to fail.
Chiva Bermudez graduated from Aye Prep Southeast in 2022 and is now a student at Providence College in Rhode Island. Bermudez, the showtime person in his family unit to graduate from loftier schoolhouse, says graduating from college will alter his family's future. (Photo past Emily Hanford. Click to enlarge.)
The ones who overcome these challenges may have a lot of grit, but they tend to go a lot of help besides. Yes data shows that the students most likely to complete higher get to schools where at that place are good support services and often a concerted effort to encourage and retain poor and minority students. Yeah tries to get its students to become to these schools. Yep has besides stepped upwards its own support services past hiring ii people to piece of work total-fourth dimension on helping students stay in college. YES teachers and staff recognize that getting low-income, first-generation kids through school takes time and money. They are interested in grit as one of the many things their students demand to get in in a world where low-income kids have to work harder to get what more privileged people ofttimes take for granted.
I worry non anybody will see information technology this way. The idea that low-income kids need more grit fits neatly into a familiar narrative that poor people don't piece of work hard enough. When Mitt Romney fabricated his comments about the 47 percentage to a roomful of wealthy donors, he also noted that he and his wife had given abroad their inheritances and earned everything "the old-fashioned way, and that's by hard work." But someone similar Manus Romney, or me, has all kinds of advantages that help usa proceeds a level of security and success regardless of how gritty we are.
The research on grit and other noncognitive skills has the potential to change education for the better, abroad from a narrow focus on test results and toward a fuller understanding of what information technology takes for people to be successful. But grit tin't be an alibi for not investing in support that low-income students need to exist on a more level playing field with their higher-income peers. And grit shouldn't be used to blame poor kids if they do neglect. As one YES staff member said to me: "We don't want to downplay the significance of these kids being built-in into situations that are unjust then if they don't brand it, accuse them of not being gritty."
Emily Hanford is education correspondent for American RadioWorks, the documentary unit of measurement of American Public Media (APM). Her work has received dozens of national and regional awards including a duPont-Columbia Award, a Casey Medal, and a National Headliner Grand Award. Emily'southward recent documentary projects include: Grit, Luck and Money, The Ascent of Phoenix, Don't Lecture Me, and Testing Teachers, available online at world wide web.americanradioworks.org. She tin be reached at emily.hanford@gmail.com and on Twitter @ehanford.
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Source: https://edsource.org/2012/success-comes-from-grit-and-plenty-of-helping-hands-along-the-way/21768
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