Grit – Necessary But Not Sufficient

From the Marshall Memo #451

In this Education Gadfly commentary on Paul Tough’s new book, How Children Succeed [see Marshall Memo 450, #5 for more], Robert Pondiscio of the Core Knowledge Foundation worries that most people’s big takeaway from the book will be, “It’s all about character” or “Grit trumps cognitive ability.” In fact, the book tells the story of one student’s unsuccessful attempt to pass the rigorous entrance examination for Stuyvesant High School in New York City and makes a different point: grit and character matter, but to compensate for big gaps in knowledge and skill, schools need to provide years of intense, effective content instruction.

The story of this student is instructive. He was a chess master in his Brooklyn middle school, and could have beaten any member of Stuyvesant’s chess team. But when his teacher, Elizabeth Spiegel, took on the challenge of preparing him for Stuyvesant’s entrance exam in six months, she found that his math skills were at the second and third-grade level. She pushed him hard, counting on his keen intelligence and likening math to chess, which he had picked up quickly. But math is different from chess; it takes years to build the knowledge, vocabulary, and skills necessary to operate at the high-school level.

“It might not have been possible to turn him into an elite student in six months, as Spiegel had hoped,” says Tough. “But how about in four years? For a student with his prodigious gifts, anything seems possible – as long as there’s a teacher out there who can make succeeding in school as attractive a prospect as succeeding on the chessboard.” 

“Is Grit Enough?” by Robert Pondiscio in The Education Gadfly, Sept. 6, 2012 (Vol. 12, #33), 

http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/education-gadfly-weekly/