What a College Dropout Can Tell You About Changing the Odds

Author Paul Tough just gave a fascinating speech about his book, which takes on a startlingly simple question: Why is it that poor kids tend to do so badly in school and in life? And more importantly, what can we do to change that?

The book, Whatever It Takes, chronicled the ups and downs of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a groundbreaking effort by nonprofit guru Geoffrey Canada to “flood the zone” in one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods with both social services and tougher schooling to close the achievement gap. Families go through a “conveyor belt” of services from prenatal parenting boot camp -- dubbed Baby College – to a stellar preschool to a system of charter schools.

“He didn’t want to keep helping a few kids beat the odds,” Tough said of Canada and his quest. “He wanted to change the odds for children in Harlem -- and in big numbers.”

The project has had some remarkable successes. And the book is no slouch, either. It is phenomenally written, full of human detail and scholarly depth from neuroscience to sociology, and an amazing tale to boot -- I read the entirety of the book on a sunny February afternoon on the beach. (I live in San Diego. Go ahead and hate me.)

And the Zone could be coming soon to a city near you. Obama and Arne Duncan have talked about the idea of replicating the project by fostering “Promise Neighborhoods” in 20 cities, run jointly by the federal government and local businesses and nonprofits.

Tough has some worries about cloning the Zone, including that local nonprofits may lack the strict accountability that characterized Canada and his programs, but he sounded largely excited about seeing the plan go forward in an era when big questions such as what makes a good teacher are dominating the education debate.

“This is really the first new big anti-poverty strategy since welfare reform and in many ways the first comprehensive one since the war on poverty, and its apparently going to be run not by the housing department or the health and human services department but by the education department,” Tough said, cautioning that he was unsure if it would work. But he added, “If we can all manage to hang on to our jobs, we’re going to have front row seats.”

Here are a few other tidbits you might have missed from the speech:

Tough comes from a family of educators but dropped out of college – twice. The second time he dropped out of McGill College after taking a magazine internship that became his calling.

He took off six months from his job to finish writing the book, a period during which he did no reporting, only reading and research.

One reporter praised Tough for the personal stories he featured in the book, but Tough thought he actually didn’t do a great job at finding those stories, except at Baby College. He struggled with interviewing middle schoolers, for instance, but Tough felt that “there was something at Baby College that made people want to talk.” It didn’t hurt that he had a captive audience, cornering parents in the cafeteria before and after the classes.

He is “both dismayed and encouraged” by the debate over whether poor children just need better schools or just need social services. “The fact that it is being argued in such a dichotomous, one-side-or-the-other way seems just nuts,” Tough said. Interestingly, he added that the two people who have signed manifestos on both the need for social services and the need for better schools are Geoffrey Canada and Arne Duncan.