Today's Reading
To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten into adulthood, Chetty's team turned to another possible explanation. In fourth and eighth grade, the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities. Here's a sample:
* Proactive: How often did they take initiative to ask questions, volunteer answers, seek information from books, and engage the teacher to learn outside class?
* Prosocial: How well did they get along and collaborate with peers?
* Disciplined: How effectively did they pay attention—and resist the impulse to disrupt the class?
* Determined: How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles?
When students were taught by more experienced kindergarten teachers, their fourth-grade teachers rated them higher on all four of these attributes. So did their eighth-grade teachers. The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills. When Chetty and his colleagues predicted adult income from fourth-grade scores, the ratings on these behaviors mattered 2.4 times as much as math and reading performance on standardized tests.
Think about how surprising that is. If you want to forecast the earning potential of fourth graders, you should pay less attention to their objective math and verbal scores than to their teachers' subjective views of their behavior patterns. And although many people see those behaviors as innate, they were taught in kindergarten. Regardless of where students started, there was something about learning these behaviors that set students up for success decades later.
ACTING OUT OF CHARACTER
When Aristotle wrote about qualities like being disciplined and prosocial, he called them virtues of character. He described character as a set of principles that people acquired and enacted through sheer force of will. I used to see character that way too—I thought it was a matter of committing to a clear moral code. But my job is to test and refine the kinds of ideas that philosophers love to debate. Over the past two decades, the evidence I've gathered has challenged me to rethink that view. I now see character less as a matter of will, and more as a set of skills.
Character is more than just having principles. It's a learned capacity to live by your principles. Character skills equip a chronic procrastinator to meet a deadline for someone who matters deeply to them, a shy introvert to find the courage to speak out against an injustice, and the class bully to circumvent a fistfight with his teammates before a big game. Those are the skills that great kindergarten teachers nurture—and great coaches cultivate.
When Maurice Ashley assembled his chess team for the national championships, a student named Francis Idehen wasn't one of the best eight players. Maurice picked him anyway due to his character skills. "Another kid was a superior chess player," Francis tells me, "but he hadn't developed the emotional self-regulation that Maurice felt was important."
And when the Raging Rooks fell behind in the penultimate round of nationals, Maurice Ashley didn't pull out a book of secret plays. He didn't talk to them about strategy at all. "I reminded them about discipline," he notes—a skill they'd been practicing together for two years.
Their character skills caught the eye of the legendary chess coach Bruce Pandolfini, who had guided multiple protégés to national and world championships. After watching the Raging Rooks march to victory, Pandolfini marveled:
Nothing fazed them. Most kids under pressure will start hurrying a little bit or showing their feelings, but not them. They took their time, and they were absolutely poker-faced at the board. I've never seen kids that age so cool. They were like professionals.
If a knight on the chess board was a Trojan horse, inside it Maurice had smuggled an army of character skills. They helped the Raging Rooks surge as their opponents floundered. "He was always conveying life lessons without being heavy-handed," Francis says. "It was less about executing a chess plan than understanding of self and mastery of self. That was pivotal in my life."
Maurice had seen the value of character skills in his own life. Growing up, he watched his mother sacrifice everything to move to America while his grandmother stayed behind in Jamaica to raise him and his siblings. When they finally made it to New York a decade later, they knew opportunity wouldn't just come knocking—they'd have to build their own doors.
After stumbling onto a book about chess in his high school library, Maurice decided to join the school team. But he quickly discovered he wasn't good enough. He poured himself into improving and went on to become the captain of his college team. When he got an offer to teach chess in Harlem schools for $50 an hour, he jumped at the invitation.
Today, if you ask anyone in the chess world about Maurice, they'll tell you he's a brilliant strategist. In the middle of a game, if you castle instead of moving your bishop, he can tell you the number of moves it will take him to checkmate you, and whether you'll lose your queen in the process. He's played ten games simultaneously against ten different opponents and won them all—blindfolded. But he believes character matters more than talent.
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***** TABLE OF CONTENTS *****
Prologue: Growing Roses from Concrete
I.Skills of Character
Getting Better at Getting Better
1. Creatures of Discomfort
2. Human Sponges
3. The Imperfectionists
II.Structures for Motivation
Scaffolding to Overcome Obstacles
4. Transforming the Daily Grind
5. Getting Unstuck
6. Defying Gravity
III.Systems of Opportunity
Opening Doors and Windows
7. Every Child Gets Ahead
8. Mining for Gold
9. Diamonds in the Rough
Epilogue: Going the Distance
Actions for Impact
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