How Kids Learn Resilience

In recent years, the idea that educators should be teaching kids qualities like grit and self-
control has caught on. Successful strategies, though, are hard to come by.

n 2013, for the first time, a majority of public-school students in this country—51 percent, to
be precise—fell below the federal government’s low-income cutoff, meaning they were
eligible for a free or subsidized school lunch. It was a powerful symbolic moment—an
inescapable reminder that the challenge of teaching low-income children has become the
central issue in American education.

The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be
harder to educate than children from more-comfortable backgrounds. Educators often struggle
to motivate them, to calm them down, to connect with them. This doesn’t mean they’re
impossible to teach, of course; plenty of kids who grow up in poverty are thriving in the
classroom. But two decades of national attention have done little or nothing to close the
achievement gap between poor students and their better-off peers.

From Our June 2016 Issue

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In recent years, in response to this growing crisis, a new idea (or perhaps a very old one) has
arisen in the education world: Character matters. Researchers concerned with academic-
achievement gaps have begun to study, with increasing interest and enthusiasm, a set of
personal qualities—often referred to as noncognitive skills, or character strengths—that
include resilience, conscientiousness, optimism, self-control, and grit. These capacities
generally aren’t captured by our ubiquitous standardized tests, but they seem to make a big
difference in the academic success of children, especially low-income children.
My last book, How Children Succeed, explored this research and profiled educators who were
attempting to put it into practice in their classrooms. Since the book’s publication, in 2012,
the idea that educators should be teaching grit and self-control along with addition and
subtraction has caught on across the country. Some school systems are embracing this notion
institutionally. In California this spring, for example, a coalition of nine major school districts
has been trying out a new school-assessment system that relies in part on measurements of
students’ noncognitive abilities, such as self-management and social awareness.

But here’s the problem: For all our talk about noncognitive skills, nobody has yet found a
reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same
time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students
often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or
reading—indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom.
This paradox has raised a pressing question for a new generation of researchers: Is the
teaching paradigm the right one to use when it comes to helping young people develop
noncognitive capacities?

Students at Middle School 45, in the Bronx, discuss their work with their teacher Susan Mula.
(Gillian Laub / Getty)

What is emerging is a new idea: that qualities like grit and resilience are not formed through
the traditional mechanics of “teaching”; instead, a growing number of researchers now
believe, they are shaped by several specific environmental forces, both in the classroom and
in the home, sometimes in subtle and intricate ways.

The process begins in early childhood, when the most important force shaping the
development of these skills turns out to be a surprising one: stress. Over the past decade,
neuroscientists have demonstrated with increasing clarity how severe and chronic stress in
childhood—what doctors sometimes call toxic stress—leads to physiological and neurological
adaptations in children that affect the way their minds and bodies develop and, significantly,
the way they function in school.

Each of us has within us an intricate stress-response network that links together the brain, the
immune system, and the endocrine system (the glands that produce and release stress
hormones). In childhood, and especially in early childhood, this network is highly sensitive to
environmental cues; it is constantly looking for signals from a child’s surroundings that might
tell it what to expect in the days and years ahead. When those signals suggest that life is going
to be hard, the network reacts by preparing for trouble: raising blood pressure, increasing the
production of adrenaline, heightening vigilance. Neuroscientists have shown that children
living in poverty experience more toxic stress than middle-class children, and that additional
stress expresses itself in higher blood pressure and higher levels of certain stress hormones.

In the short term, these adaptations may have benefits, especially in a dangerous environment.
When your threat-detection system—sometimes referred to as your fight-or-flight response—
is on high alert, you can react quickly to trouble. But in the longer term, they can cause an
array of physiological problems and impede development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of
the brain that controls our most complex intellectual functions, as well as our ability to
regulate ourselves both emotionally and cognitively.
On an emotional level, toxic stress can make it difficult for children to moderate their
responses to disappointments and provocations. A highly sensitive stress-response system
constantly on the lookout for threats can produce patterns of behavior that are self-defeating
in school: fighting, talking back, acting up, and, more subtly, going through each day
perpetually wary of connection with peers or teachers.

On a cognitive level, chronically elevated stress can disrupt the development of what are
known as executive functions: higher-order mental abilities that some researchers compare to
a team of air-traffic controllers overseeing the workings of the brain. Executive functions,
which include working memory, attentional control, and cognitive flexibility, are
exceptionally helpful in navigating unfamiliar situations and processing new information,
which is exactly what we ask children to do at school every day. When a child’s executive
functions aren’t fully developed, school days, with their complicated directions and constant
distractions, can become a never-ending exercise in frustration.

Executive functions also serve as the developmental building blocks—the neurological

infrastructure—underpinning the noncognitive capacities that educators are now so focused
on. What this suggests is that if we want to help children demonstrate these qualities in
school, there are two places where we need to change our approach. One is the classroom,
where right now many fundamental practices of modern American pedagogy ignore this
science of adversity. The second is where children’s neurobiological identity begins to be
formed, long before they ever set foot in kindergarten: the home.

The most important environmental factor in children’s early lives, researchers have shown, is
the way their parents and other adults interact with them. Beginning in infancy, children rely
on responses from their parents to help them make sense of the world. Researchers at
Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child have labeled these “serve and return” interactions.
An infant makes a sound or looks at an object—that’s the serve—and her parents return the
serve by responding to her babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech.
More than any other experiences in infancy, these rudimentary interactions trigger the
development and strengthening of connections among the regions of the brain that control
emotion, cognition, language, and memory.

Gnamakoran Koulibaly holds up a painting she made at MS 45. (Gillian Laub / Getty)

A second crucial role that parents play early on is as external regulators of their children’s
stress. When parents behave harshly or unpredictably—especially at moments when their
children are upset—the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage
strong emotions and respond effectively to stressful situations. By contrast, when a child’s
parents respond to her jangled emotions in a sensitive and measured way, she is more likely to
learn that she herself has the capacity to cope with her feelings, even intense and unpleasant
ones.

But if a home environment can have a positive impact on a child’s development, it can also do
the opposite. One of the most influential studies of the long-term effect of a stressful early
home life is the ongoing Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which was launched in the
1990s by Robert F. Anda, a physician at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and
Vincent J. Felitti, the founder of the preventive-medicine department at Kaiser Permanente.
Anda and Felitti identified 10 categories of childhood trauma: three categories of abuse, two
of neglect, and five related to growing up in a “seriously dysfunctional household.” They
found that the number of these traumas a person experiences in childhood (a number that has
come to be known as a person’s ace score) correlates in adulthood with health problems
ranging from heart disease to cancer.

More recently, researchers using variations on Anda and Felitti’s ace scale have found that an
elevated ace score also has a negative effect on the development of a child’s executive
functions and on her ability to learn effectively in school. A study conducted by Nadine Burke
Harris, a pediatrician and trauma researcher in San Francisco, found that just 3 percent of
children in her clinic with an ace score of zero displayed learning or behavioral problems. But
among children who had an ace score of four or more, 51 percent had learning or behavioral
problems. A separate national study published in 2014 found that children with two or more
aces were eight times as likely as children with none to demonstrate behavioral problems and
more than twice as likely to repeat a grade in school. According to this study, slightly more
than half of all children have never experienced a serious adverse event—but the other half,
the ones with at least one ace, account for 85 percent of the behavioral problems that children
exhibit.

For children who grow up without significant experiences of adversity, the skill-development
process leading up to kindergarten generally works the way it’s supposed to: Calm, consistent,
responsive interactions in infancy with parents and other caregivers create neural connections
that lay the foundation for a healthy array of attention and concentration skills. Just as early
stress sends signals to the nervous system to maintain constant vigilance and prepare for a
lifetime of trouble, early warmth and responsiveness send the opposite signals: You’re safe;
life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and
provide for you. Be curious about the world; it’s full of fascinating surprises. These messages
trigger adaptations in children’s brains that allow them to slow down and consider problems
and decisions more carefully, to focus their attention for longer periods, and to more willingly
trade immediate gratification for promises of long-term benefits.

We don’t always think of these abilities as academic in nature, but in fact they are enormously
beneficial in helping kids achieve academic success in kindergarten and beyond. Without
them, the transition from home or day care to kindergarten is likely to be fraught, and the
challenge of learning the many things we ask kindergarten students to master can be
overwhelming. In the classroom, neurocognitive difficulties can quickly turn into academic
difficulties. Students don’t learn to read on time, because it is harder for them to concentrate
on the words on the page. They don’t learn the basics of number sense, because they are too
distracted by the emotions and anxieties overloading their nervous systems. As academic
material becomes more complicated, they fall further behind. The more they fall behind, the
worse they feel about themselves and about school. That creates more stress, which tends to
feed into behavioral problems, which lead to stigmatization and punishment in the classroom,
which keep their stress levels elevated, which makes it still harder to concentrate—and so on,
throughout elementary school.

MS 45 eighth-graders doing science with William Alicea (Gillian Laub / Getty)

Fast-forward a few years, to the moment when those students arrive in middle or high school,
and these executive-function challenges are now typically perceived to be problems of
attitude or motivation. When teachers and administrators are confronted with students who
find it hard to concentrate, manage their emotions, or deal calmly with provocation, the first
instinct often is not to look at them as children who, because of a lifetime of stress, haven’t
yet developed a healthy set of self-regulation mechanisms. Instead, the adults see them as kids
with behavioral problems who need, more than anything, to be disciplined.

When children and adolescents misbehave, we usually assume that they’re doing so because
they have considered the consequences of their actions and calculated that the benefits of
misbehavior outweigh the costs. So our natural response is to increase the cost of
misbehavior, by ratcheting up punishment. One of the chief insights that recent
neurobiological research has provided, however, is that young people, especially those who
have experienced significant adversity, are often guided by emotional and psychological and
hormonal forces that are far from rational. This doesn’t mean that teachers should excuse or
ignore bad behavior. But it does explain why harsh punishments so often prove ineffective in
motivating troubled young people to succeed.

Most American schools today operate according to a philosophy of discipline that has its roots
in the 1980s and ’90s, when a belief that schools would be safer and more effective if they
had “zero tolerance” for violence, drug use, and other types of misbehavior led to a sharp rise
in suspensions. In 2010, more than a tenth of all public-high-school students nationwide were
suspended at least once. And suspension rates are substantially higher among certain
demographic groups. African American students, for example, are suspended three times as
often as white students. In Chicago public high schools (which have particularly good and
well-analyzed data on suspensions), 27 percent of students who live in the city’s poorest
neighborhoods received an out-of-school suspension during the 2013–14 school year, as did
30 percent of students with a reported personal history of abuse or neglect.

Sixty percent of Chicago’s out-of-school suspensions in public high schools are for
infractions that don’t involve violence or even a threat of violence: They are for talking back
to teachers, violating school rules, and disruptive behavior. With the neurobiological research
in mind, it’s easy to see that kind of behavior—refusing to do what adults tell you to do,
basically—as an expression not of a bad attitude or a defiant personality but of a poorly
regulated stress-response system. Talking back and acting up in class are, at least in part,
symptoms of a child’s inability to control impulses, de-escalate confrontations, and manage
anger and other strong feelings—the whole stew of self-regulation issues that can usually be
traced to impaired executive-function development in early childhood.

The guiding theory behind much of the school discipline practiced in the United States today
—and certainly behind the zero-tolerance, suspension-heavy approach that has dominated
since the 1990s—is behaviorism, which is grounded in the idea that humans respond to
incentives and reinforcement. If we get positive reinforcement for a certain behavior, we’re
likely to do it more; if we get negative reinforcement, we’re likely to do it less.

Clearly, on some level, behaviorism works. People, including children, respond well to
behavioral cues, at least in the short term. But researchers are coming to understand that there
are limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in education, and that for young
people whose neurological and psychological development has been shaped by intense stress,
straightforward reward systems are often especially ineffective.

Roland G. Fryer Jr., a celebrated economics professor at Harvard, has spent the past decade
testing out a variety of incentive schemes with public-school students in Houston, New York,
Chicago, and other American cities that have school systems with high poverty rates. Fryer
has paid parents for attending parent-teacher conferences, students for reading books, and
teachers for raising test scores. He has given kids cellphones to inspire them to study harder.
Altogether, he has handed out millions of dollars in rewards and prizes. As a body of work,
Fryer’s incentive studies have marked one of the biggest and most thorough educational
experiments in American history.

Carlos Rodriguez, an 11th-grader at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School

(WHEELS) (Gillian Laub / Getty)

And yet in almost every case, Fryer’s incentive programs have had no effect. From 2007 to
2009, Fryer distributed a total of $9.4 million in cash incentives to 27,000 students, to
promote book reading in Dallas, to raise test scores in New York, and to improve course
grades in Chicago —all with no effect. “The impact of financial incentives on student
achievement,” Fryer reported, “is statistically 0 in each city.” In the 2010–11 school year, he
gave cash incentives to fifth-grade students in 25 low-performing public schools in Houston,
and to their parents and teachers, with the intent of increasing the time they spent on math
homework and improving their scores on standardized math tests. The students performed the
tasks necessary to get paid, but their average math scores at the end of eight months hadn’t
changed at all. When Fryer looked at their reading scores, he found that they actually went
down.

The stark fact that complicates incentive studies like Fryer’s is that children who grow up in
difficult circumstances already have a powerful set of material incentives to get a good
education. Adults with a high-school degree fare far better in life than adults without one.
They not only earn more, on average, but they also have more-stable families, better health,
and less chance of being arrested or incarcerated. Those with college degrees similarly do
much better, on average, than those without. Young people know this. And yet when it comes
time to make any of the many crucial decisions that affect their likelihood of reaching those
educational milestones, kids growing up in adversity often make choices that seem in flagrant
opposition to their self-interest, rendering those goals more distant and difficult to attain.

Within the field of psychology, one important body of thought that helps explain this apparent
paradox is self-determination theory, which is the life’s work of Edward L. Deci and Richard
M. Ryan, two professors at the University of Rochester. Deci and Ryan came up with the
beginnings of their theory in the 1970s, when the field was mostly dominated by behaviorists,
who believed that people’s actions are governed solely by their motivation to fulfill basic
biological needs and thus are highly responsive to straightforward rewards and punishments.

In early childhood, the most important force shaping the development of qualities such as grit and
resilience turns out to be a surprising one: stress.

Deci and Ryan, by contrast, argued that we are mostly motivated not by the material
consequences of our actions but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning that those actions
bring us, a phenomenon called intrinsic motivation. They identified three key human needs—
our need for competence, our need for autonomy, and our need for relatedness, meaning
personal connection—and they posited that intrinsic motivation can be sustained only when
we feel that those needs are being satisfied.
In their writing on education, Deci and Ryan acknowledge that many of the tasks that teachers
ask students to complete each day are not inherently fun or satisfying; learning anything, be it
painting or computer programming or algebra, involves a lot of repetitive practice. It is at
these moments, they write, that extrinsic motivation becomes important: when tasks must be
performed not for the inherent satisfaction of completing them, but for some separate
outcome. When teachers are able to create an environment that fosters competence,
autonomy, and relatedness, Deci and Ryan say, students are much more likely to feel
motivated to do that hard work.

The problem is that when disadvantaged children run into trouble in school, either
academically or behaviorally, most schools respond by imposing more control on them, not
less. This diminishes their fragile sense of autonomy. As these students fall behind their peers
academically, they feel less and less competent. And if their relationships with their teachers
are wary or even contentious, they are less likely to experience the kind of relatedness that
Deci and Ryan describe as being so powerfully motivating for young people in the classroom.
Once students reach that point, no collection of material incentives or punishments is going to
motivate them, at least not in a deep or sustained way.

All of which brings me back to the question of how to help children develop those mysterious
noncognitive capacities. If we want students to act in ways that will maximize their future
opportunities—to persevere through challenges, to delay gratification, to control their
impulses—we need to consider what might motivate them to take those difficult steps. What
Deci and Ryan’s research suggests is that students will be more likely to display these positive
academic habits when they are in an environment where they feel a sense of belonging,
independence, and growth—or, to use Deci and Ryan’s language, where they experience
relatedness, autonomy, and competence.

So what do those academic environments look like? And how do we help teachers to create
them?

A few years ago, a young economist at Northwestern University named C. Kirabo Jackson
began investigating how to measure educators’ effectiveness. In many school systems these
days, teachers are assessed based primarily on one data point: the standardized-test scores of
their students. Jackson suspected that the true impact teachers had on their students was more
complicated than a single test score could reveal. So he found and analyzed a detailed
database in North Carolina that tracked the performance of every single ninth-grade student in
the state from 2005 to 2011—a total of 464,502 students. His data followed their progress not
only in ninth grade but throughout high school.

Jackson had access to students’ scores on the statewide standardized test, and he used that as a
rough measure of their cognitive ability. This is the number that education officials generally
look at when trying to assess teachers’ impact. But then Jackson did something new. He
created a proxy measure for students’ noncognitive ability, using just four pieces of existing
administrative data: attendance, suspensions, on-time grade progression, and overall GPA.
Jackson’s new index measured, in a fairly crude way, how engaged students were in school—
whether they showed up, whether they misbehaved, and how hard they worked in their
classes. Jackson found that this simple noncognitive proxy was, remarkably, a better predictor
than students’ test scores of whether the students would go on to attend college, a better
predictor of adult wages, and a better predictor of future arrests.
Just as early stress sends signals to the nervous system to prepare for trouble, early warmth and
responsiveness send the opposite signals: You’re safe; life is going to be fine.

Jackson’s proxy measure allowed him to do some intriguing analysis of teachers’

effectiveness. He subjected every ninth-grade English and algebra teacher in North Carolina
to what economists call a value-added assessment. First he calculated whether and how being
a student in a particular teacher’s class affected that student’s standardized-test score. Then,
separately, he calculated the effect that teachers had on their students’ noncognitive proxy
measure: on their attendance, suspensions, timely progression from one grade to the next, and
overall GPA.

Jackson found that some teachers were reliably able to raise their students’ standardized-test
scores year after year. These are the teachers, in every teacher-evaluation system in the
country, who are the most valued and most rewarded. But he also found that there was
another distinct cohort of teachers who were reliably able to raise their students’ performance
on his noncognitive measure. If you were assigned to the class of a teacher in this cohort, you
were more likely to show up to school, more likely to avoid suspension, more likely to move
on to the next grade. And your overall GPA went up—not just your grades in that particular
teacher’s class, but your grades in your other classes, too.

Jackson found that these two groups of successful teachers did not necessarily overlap much;
in every school, it seemed, there were certain teachers who were especially good at
developing cognitive skills in their students and other teachers who excelled at developing
noncognitive skills. But the teachers in the second cohort were not being rewarded for their
success with their students—indeed, it seemed likely that no one but Jackson even realized
that they were successful. And yet those teachers, according to Jackson’s calculations, were
doing more to get their students to college and raise their future wages than were the much-
celebrated teachers who boosted students’ test scores.

Jackson’s study didn’t reveal whether these teachers increased their students’ grit or optimism
or conscientiousness and by how many percentage points. Instead, it suggested that that’s
probably the wrong question to be asking. Jackson’s data showed that spending a few hours
each week in close proximity to a certain kind of teacher changed something about students’
behavior. And that was what mattered. Somehow these teachers were able to convey deep
messages—perhaps implicitly or even subliminally—about belonging, connection, ability,
and opportunity. And somehow those messages had a profound impact on students’
psychology, and thus on their behavior.

The environment those teachers created in the classroom, and the messages that environment
conveyed, motivated students to start making better decisions—to show up to class, to
persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale
setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student’s school day. And those decisions
improved their lives in meaningful ways. Did the students learn new skills that enabled them
to behave differently? Maybe. Or maybe what we are choosing to call “skills” in this case are
really just new ways of thinking about the world or about themselves—a new set of attitudes
or beliefs that somehow unleash a new way of behaving.

So which messages most effectively motivate young people to persevere? And how does a
teacher convey them to students? These are particularly lively questions in education right
now, and the scholar trying most comprehensively to answer them is Camille A. Farrington, a
former inner-city high-school teacher who now works at the University of Chicago
Consortium on School Research. When she was teaching, Farrington sometimes felt mystified
by the choices that some of her students made. Why weren’t they more consistently motivated
to work hard and thus reap the benefits of a good education? As a researcher, Farrington has
carefully investigated this question, and in 2012, she and a team of colleagues published a
report titled “Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners,” which offered some novel answers.

The report was in many ways a reaction to the recent push among educators to identify,
assess, and teach noncognitive skills. While Farrington agreed with the growing consensus
that a student’s ability to persevere in school was important, she was skeptical of the idea that
perseverance could be taught in the same way that we teach math, reading, or history. “There
is little evidence that working directly on changing students’ grit or perseverance would be an
effective lever for improving their academic performance,” Farrington and her colleagues
wrote. “While some students are more likely to persist in tasks or exhibit self-discipline than
others, all students are more likely to demonstrate perseverance if the school or classroom
context helps them develop positive mindsets and effective learning strategies.”

They went on to identify a phenomenon they called academic perseverance—the tendency to

maintain positive academic behaviors despite setbacks. What distinguishes students with
academic perseverance, they wrote, is their resilient attitude toward failure. These students
continue to work hard in a class even after failing a few tests; when they are stumped or
confused by complex material, they look for new ways to master it rather than simply giving
up. Academic perseverance, in Farrington’s formulation, shares certain qualities with
noncognitive capacities such as grit and self-control and delay of gratification. But unlike
those personality traits, which psychologists have shown to be mostly stable over time, a
student’s academic perseverance, according to Farrington, is highly dependent on context. A
student might be inclined to persevere in school in 10th grade but not in 11th grade. He might
persevere in math class but not in history.

Christopher Lewin, a 12th-grader at WHEELS, whose students are among the most
disadvantaged in the New York City public-school system (Gillian Laub / Getty)

In essence, what Farrington found was this: If you are a teacher, you may never be able to get
your students to be gritty, in the sense of developing some essential character trait called grit.
But you can probably make them act gritty—to behave in gritty ways in your classroom. And
those behaviors will help produce the academic outcomes that you (and your students and
society at large) are hoping for.

What makes a student persevere in any given classroom on any given day? Farrington’s
answer is that it depends on his academic mind-set: the attitudes and self-perceptions and
mental representations that are bouncing around inside his head. That mind-set is the product
of countless environmental forces, but research done by Carol S. Dweck, a Stanford
psychologist, and others has shown that teachers can have an enormous impact on their
students’ mind-sets, often without knowing it. Messages that teachers convey—large and
small, explicit and implicit—affect the way students feel in the classroom, and thus the way
they behave there.
Farrington has distilled this voluminous mind-set research into four key beliefs that, when
embraced by students, seem to contribute most significantly to their tendency to persevere in
the classroom:

1. I belong in this academic community.

2. My ability and competence grow with my effort.

3. I can succeed at this.

4. This work has value for me.

If students hold these beliefs in mind as they are sitting in math class, Farrington concludes,
they are more likely to persevere through the challenges and failures they encounter there.
And if they don’t, they are more likely to give up at the first sign of trouble.

The problem, of course, is that students who grow up in conditions of adversity are primed, in
all sorts of ways, not to believe any of Farrington’s four statements when they’re sitting in
math class. This is in part due to the neurobiological effects of adversity, beginning in early
childhood. Remember that one of the signal results of toxic-stress exposure is a hyperactive
fight-or-flight mechanism, which does not encourage in students the soothing belief I belong
here. Instead, it conveys opposite warnings, at car-alarm volume: I don’t belong here. This is
enemy territory. Everyone in this school is out to get me. Add to this the fact that many
children raised in adversity, by the time they get to middle or high school, are significantly
behind their peers academically and disproportionately likely to have a history of
confrontations with school administrators. These students, as a result, tend to be the ones
placed in remedial classes or subjected to repeated suspensions or both—none of which
makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.

Most American schools don’t do a particularly good job of creating environments that convey
to students, especially low-income students, the four beliefs that Farrington identified. What
Kirabo Jackson seems to have discovered is that certain educators have been able to create
such an environment in their own classroom, regardless of the climate in the school as a
whole. Until recently, though, school-wide strategies that encouraged these positive mind-sets
in students were rare.

Now, however, some new, more comprehensive approaches are emerging. Many of them
draw on the neurobiological research that explains how a childhood full of toxic stress can
produce obstacles to school success. They take as their premise that in order to help students
overcome those obstacles, it may be necessary to alter some basic practices and assumptions
within an entire school. These efforts target students’ beliefs in two separate categories, each
one echoing items on Farrington’s list: first, students’ feelings about their place in the school
(I belong in this academic community), and then their feelings about the work they are doing
in class (my ability and competence grow with my effort; I can succeed at this; this work has
value for me).

MS 45 eighth-graders doing small-group work with Gordana Micovic. The nonprofit Turnaround
for Children encourages teachers at the school to focus on creating a climate of belonging. (Gillian
Laub / Getty)
One example of this comprehensive approach is Turnaround for Children, a school-
transformation nonprofit that works in high-poverty schools in New York City; Newark, New
Jersey; and Washington, D.C. According to research done by the organization, many of the
behavior-management challenges that educators in high-poverty schools face are due to the
combustible combination, in the classroom, of two cohorts of students. The first is a small
group of students who have experienced high levels of toxic stress (and likely have high ace
scores) and as a result are angry and rebellious and disruptive. This group, Turnaround
estimates, represents between 10 and 15 percent of the student body in most high-poverty
schools. Students in the second cohort have also experienced adversity and stress, but not to
the same intense degree. These students are less likely to start trouble, but their highly
sensitive fight-or-flight mechanisms are easily triggered when trouble arrives.

When Turnaround is contracted to work at a particular school, its intervention team, usually
three or four people, begins by addressing the psychological needs of potentially disruptive
students, sometimes offering them on-site counseling and mentoring, often referring them and
their families to mental-health services. At the same time, the organization’s team works to
improve the classroom environment as a whole, coaching teachers in behavior-management
techniques that dial confrontations down rather than up, and giving them strategies to help
create a climate of belonging and engagement in the classroom.

Turnaround then expands its intervention to focus not just on the emotional atmosphere of the
classroom but also on the teaching and learning that happens there. Last spring, I visited
Middle School 45, in the Bronx, a high-poverty public school where Turnaround had been
working for about a year. During my visit, much of the intervention team’s focus was on
encouraging teachers in what it called cooperative learning, a pedagogical approach that
promotes student engagement in the learning process: less lecture time; fewer repetitive
worksheets; more time spent working in small groups, solving problems, engaging in
discussions, and collaborating on long-term creative projects. It’s a style of teaching and
classroom organization that is relatively common in independent schools and in wealthy
suburbs but quite unusual in inner-city public schools.

For many teachers at MS 45, embracing this part of the Turnaround model was a challenge.
Giving students more autonomy in their learning meant giving up control. And like many
teachers at other high-poverty schools, those at MS 45 had come to believe that with students
as potentially disruptive as theirs, strong, dominant teacher control was the only way to keep
the classroom calm and orderly; handing over the reins would mean chaos. But Turnaround’s
coaches eventually convinced the teachers—or most of them, anyway—that giving students
more opportunity to experience autonomy and to engage deeply in their own learning would
improve their motivation and mind-set. When the teachers tried these new methods, they
discovered, often to their surprise, that they worked.

That process was also in evidence at another school I visited recently: Polaris Charter
Academy, on Chicago’s West Side. Polaris is affiliated with a national nonprofit called EL
Education. (The organization was known as Expeditionary Learning until October, when it
changed its name.) The EL Education network is made up of more than 150 schools: urban,
suburban, and rural; charter and traditional public; high-poverty and middle-class. Polaris,
which enrolls students from kindergarten through eighth grade, has one of the more
disadvantaged student bodies in the network: 94 percent of the students are eligible for free or
reduced-price lunch, and the neighborhood where the school is located, West Humboldt Park,
has high rates of violent crime, unemployment, and poverty.
Like Turnaround, EL Education uses two parallel strategies to try to develop the most
beneficial academic mind-set in its students. The first strategy has to do with belonging and
relationships; the second has to do with work and challenges. On the relationship side, the
most important institution at EL schools is Crew, an ongoing, multiyear discussion and
advisory group for students. Each EL student belongs to a crew, which typically meets every
day for half an hour or so to discuss matters important to the students, both academic and
personal. In middle school and high school, the groups are relatively intimate—10 or 15 kids
—and students generally stay in the same crew for three years or longer, with the same
teacher leading the group year after year. Many EL students will tell you that their crew
meeting is the place where they most feel a sense of belonging at school; for some of them,
it’s the place where they most feel a sense of belonging, period.

The central premise of EL schools is that character is built not through lectures or direct instruction
from teachers but through the experience of persevering as students confront challenging academic
work.

Crew is the centerpiece of EL’s strategy for immersing students in an environment of

supportive relationships. But just as significant an element of the EL formula is its
pedagogical strategy. Classrooms at EL schools are by design much more engaging and
interactive than classrooms in most other American public schools. They are full of student
discussions and group activities large and small; teachers guide the conversation, but they
spend considerably less time lecturing than most other public-school teachers do. EL students
complete a lot of rigorous and demanding long-term projects, often going through extensive
and repeated revisions based on critiques from teachers and peers. They frequently work on
these projects in collaborative groups, and many projects conclude with students giving a
presentation in front of the class, the school, or even a community group. In addition, students
are responsible, whenever possible, for assessing themselves; two or three times a year, at
report-card time, parents or other family members come to the school for meetings known as
student-led conferences, in which students as young as 5 narrate for their parents and teachers
their achievements and struggles over the past semester.

The pedagogical guru behind EL’s instructional practices and curriculum is Ron Berger, the
organization’s chief academic officer. Berger, who spent 28 years working as a public-school
teacher in rural Massachusetts and an educational consultant before joining EL Education,
clearly feels a special connection with those EL schools, like Polaris, that enroll high numbers
of students growing up in adversity. When we spoke, he explained that this feeling of
connection is rooted in his own childhood: He grew up with four siblings in a chaotic and
unstable family. He knows firsthand how stress and trauma at home can unsettle and derail a
child’s development, and he understands that without the right intervention, the child may
never recover from those early setbacks.

EL schools have been shown in independent studies to have a significant positive effect on
academic progress. A 2013 study by Mathematica Policy Research revealed that students at
five urban EL middle schools advanced ahead of peers at comparison schools by an average
of 10 months in math and seven months in reading over the course of three years. The
research also shows that an EL education has a greater positive impact on low-income
students than it does on other students.

Berger said he is not surprised by that latter fact; he has a clear sense of the barriers that keep
some low-income students from learning, and how and why the EL model might be able to
help them overcome those barriers. “Some kids get withdrawn and protective,” he told me.
“Other kids get this kind of shell of being a tough guy, and they’re frozen in school. Either
way, it restricts them from being able to contribute in class, to be a part of discussions, to raise
their hand, to show that they care about their learning. It holds back any kind of passion or
interaction. They can’t take risks in school, and you can’t learn if you’re not taking risks.”
Berger recognizes these behaviors, he said, because they are exactly what he himself did
when he was a kid.

Students at EL schools, Berger said, can’t hide the way that he did. Crew helps pull them out
of their shell, and in class they’re compelled daily to interact with their peers and teachers in
group discussions and to collaborate on group projects, and before long that kind of
interaction begins to feel natural. When I visited another EL school last spring, the
Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (known as wheels), in Upper Manhattan,
almost every classroom I observed was engaged in some kind of elaborate discussion or
creative project that demanded involvement from every student. In one seventh-grade social-
science class, the students were clustered in groups of four, working together with markers on
a big poster. They had been assigned to represent either the Federalist or the Republican Party
during the political debates of the 1790s, and they covered their posters with slogans and
arguments supporting the case for their vision of government, preparing for a class-wide
debate. The teacher glided from table to table, asking questions and offering advice, but for
the most part the students managed themselves. I was struck by the unusual fact that these
were middle-school students studying U.S. history who seemed genuinely to be having fun.

What’s more, these students were among the most disadvantaged in the New York City
public-school system. Eighty-eight percent of the student population at wheels has a family
income that falls below the federal cutoff for a free lunch, and almost all are Latino or African
American. They belong to a demographic, in other words, that in many big-city middle and
high schools is seen as a behavioral challenge and an academic liability. In social-science
class that day, however, they were learning complex material and behaving perfectly well—
and not because they were incentivized with rewards or threatened with punishments, but
because school was, for that period at least, actually kind of interesting.

Teachers and administrators at EL schools talk quite a bit about character—their term for
noncognitive skills. The central premise of EL schools is that character is built not through
lectures or direct instruction from teachers but through the experience of persevering as
students confront challenging academic work. This, to me, is the most significant innovation
in the work that is going on at EL schools. In general, when schools do try to directly address
the impact that a stress-filled childhood might have on disadvantaged students, the first—and
often the only—approach they employ has to do with their students’ emotional health, with
relationships and belonging. And while those students certainly need the sense of connection
that comes from feeling embedded within a web of deep and close relationships at school, the
crucial insight of EL Education is that belonging isn’t enough on its own. For a student to
truly feel motivated by and about school, he also has to perceive that he is doing work that is
challenging, rigorous, and meaningful.

Approaches like those employed by Turnaround for Children and EL Education are growing
in attention and prominence. But they are still quite rare. Most low-income students in the
United States today are enrolled in schools where they are frequently disciplined but seldom
challenged. That strategy clearly doesn’t work very well for those students, and the research
that psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists have been amassing in recent years now
allows us to understand, more clearly than ever before, exactly why it doesn’t work.

What is exciting to me about visiting schools like wheels and Polaris and MS 45 is that you
can see the possibility, however embryonic, that a new approach to educating low-income
children—one rooted in what we’re discovering about brain development, human psychology,
and the science of adversity—might now be emerging.

A new approach to educating low-income children—one rooted in what we’re discovering about
brain development and the science of adversity—might be emerging.

In December, the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Act, which dominated federal
education policy for the past decade and a half, was finally euthanized, replaced by a new law
that mostly shifts down to the states the accountability for student success that No Child Left
Behind centralized in Washington, D.C. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind had as its
guiding principle a noble and important idea: that the academic-achievement gap between
low-income children and their better-off peers could and must be closed. The law was
spectacularly unsuccessful at accomplishing that goal—the gap in eighth-grade reading and
math test scores has barely budged since 2003—but the failure of its methods doesn’t
diminish the urgency of its central goal.

Here’s a hopeful thought: Perhaps with the demise of the law, the education debates that
raged so furiously during the No Child Left Behind era—on charter schools and Common
Core, teacher contracts and standardized testing—might now give way to more-productive
discussions about what low-income children need to succeed. We know a lot more than we
did when the law was passed about the powerful environmental forces that are acting on many
low-income children, beginning in infancy. And we know a lot more than we used to about
what interventions and strategies—both at home and in the classroom—most effectively help
these young people thrive in school and beyond. A national conversation that starts from this
growing scientific consensus and moves forward into policy might be our best chance to
improve the lives of the 51 percent of American public-school students who most need our
help.