Fenger High School, in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood, fits to a T the worst-case scenario story we’ve all heard: It’s in an impoverished neighborhood, it has faced insane amounts of gang violence, and its test scores fall so far below the state average that viewing them as a graph is like looking at archeological strata. And yet, one can’t argue that Chicago Public Schools hasn’t made an effort to pull the school out of the bottom bracket. Former schools CEOs Arne Duncan and Paul Vallas tried several initiatives, including hiring an outside contractor to coach teachers, creating a freshman academy and building a math-and-science academy replete with a $525,000 NASA-sponsored science lab. The school continued to face the same challenges.
The answer to Fenger’s and urban education’s ills—or as close as there can be to an answer—may be found in the latest book by New York Times writer Paul Tough, How Children Succeed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27). It begins with the work of University of Chicago economist James Heckman, who studied the GED and discovered that earners of that degree were no more likely to achieve success than the average person who didn’t finish high school. That has led to numerous other studies, many of which are all pointing to the same thing: Achievement is less dependent upon early mastery of certain skills (e.g. reading, math) and more the product of noncognitive skills, what Tough calls “grit” and “character.”