How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (27 page)

By the fall of her senior year, Kewauna was consumed with the process of applying to college. But she was starting from scratch in learning about the system—Was there really both a DePaul University and a DePauw University?—and at the beginning of the year, she had a tendency to go a little overboard. In September, she told me she was planning to apply to twenty-three colleges, including some highly competitive ones like Duke and the University of Chicago. By some measures, Duke was not an entirely unreasonable goal for Kewauna. She had finished her junior year as an almost-straight-A student—there were a few A minuses on her final transcript, but not a single B—despite a demanding course load that included honors algebra II, honors American literature, sociology, and biology. But there was a problem: she had not done at all well on the ACT.

On the first practice ACT test, at the beginning of her junior year, Kewauna got an 11, which is a very low score: it placed her at the first percentile nationally, behind 99 percent of all American high-school juniors. She worked hard on ACT training throughout her junior year, studying many hours each week with an online service called PrepMe that OneGoal had contracted with, and walking into the official ACT test in April, she felt much better prepared than she’d felt for her practice test. But it turned out to be a frustrating day for her nonetheless. There was still so much on the test that she didn’t know, and even in sections where she was familiar with the material, she wasn’t able to get through the questions as quickly as she wanted. “When I got out of the test, I was crying,” she told me. “I told Miss Stefl I thought I wasn’t going to get into college at all. I was really mad at myself.” When she got her results back a month or so later, she had scored a 15. That meant she had improved by an impressive four points since her diagnostic test, but it also meant she was only at the fifteenth percentile nationally. The Chicago public schools’ average is 17.
ACT’s official standard for college-readiness is 20. Incoming students at Duke usually score above 30. (The maximum possible score is 36.)

Charles Murray would almost certainly have found Kewauna’s college ambitions distressing. In
Real Education,
he argued that only students who score in the top 20 percent
of the population on tests of cognitive ability should attend college; in his ideal world, only the top 10 percent would go. The idea that someone who scored in the bottom half of a standardized achievement test’s distribution, let alone in the bottom fifth, like Kewauna did, might seriously aspire to college would strike him, one imagines, as pure lunacy. “As long as it remains taboo
to acknowledge that college is intellectually too demanding for most young people, we will continue to create crazily unrealistic expectations among the next generation,” Murray wrote. Students who score in the bottom third on cognitive tests like the ACT are unsuited for college, he wrote; they are also “just not smart enough
to become literate or numerate in more than a rudimentary sense.”

Jeff Nelson looks at the ACT quite differently than Charles Murray does. “I think the ACT is a very good measure of how effective your education has been,” he told me. “But I don’t think it’s a good measure of intelligence. The average incoming score of our students is hovering around a fourteen, or the tenth percentile. And I adamantly do not believe that ninety percent of students at that age are actually more intelligent than the students we’re working with. What I
do
believe is that ninety percent of the population is receiving a better education than our students have received.”

For Nelson, the distinction is in some ways a semantic one. You can call the quality that the ACT measures intelligence if you want, but regardless of what you call it, he believes, the ability to get a high score on the test is not essential to college success and college persistence. Nelson bases that belief on his reading of Melissa Roderick’s work and on the book
Crossing the Finish Line
but also on the real-life experiences of OneGoal’s alumni, who consistently attend schools that their ACT scores say should be out of their league and then regularly succeed at levels that their ACT scores suggest should be impossible. “Noncognitive skills like resilience and resourcefulness and grit are highly predictive of success in college,” Nelson told me. “And they can help our students compensate for some of the inequality they have faced in the education system.” A student like Kewauna, Nelson said, “will show up on campus with many important tools for success that other students do not have. And those skills are going to be more useful in getting her to graduation day than a good score on the ACT.”

7. Kewauna’s Ambitions

When Kewauna’s mother, Marla McConico, was a junior in high school, back in the late 1980s, she took the ACT with the rest of her class. She doesn’t remember her exact score, but it wasn’t very good. “After I got those scores back, I felt so like a failure,” she told me when I visited with her and Kewauna one fall day. “I thought, ‘I can’t get into college with these scores.’ So I just didn’t bother with it.”

Kewauna’s relationship with her mother was close but often fraught, and her strategy in life sometimes seemed to be to do the exact opposite of whatever her mother had done when she was Kewauna’s age. Her mother fell in love with Kewauna’s father as a teenager and made a series of shortsighted decisions as a result; Kewauna kept her boyfriend at a distance, determined not to make her college decisions based on his plans. Her mother took her eyes off her academic goals; Kewauna’s remained fixed on hers. Her mother was derailed by a bad ACT score; Kewauna was determined to overcome her own bad ACT score.

But as Kewauna proceeded through the fall of her senior year, her mood grew heavier, and when I spoke with her one afternoon in the middle of October, she sounded uncharacteristically pessimistic about her future. She had started to hear back about some of the scholarships that she had applied for, and she was getting turned down for each one, she presumed because of her ACT score. “I’m getting kind of depressed about the whole situation,” she told me. “I worked so hard on all those applications, and I really do need that money for college.”

We talked a lot that day about her years at Plymouth Middle School, which she attended back when she lived in Minnesota. Kewauna traced a lot of her current academic difficulties to sixth grade, when, because of her poor grades and bad behavior, she was placed in a remedial class called WINGS. Officially, WINGS stood for Working Innovatively Now for Graduation Success, but Kewauna told me that at Plymouth, the joke was that it was called WINGS because the kids used to sit in class all day just eating chicken wings. That was an exaggeration, she said—but not much of one. “We never did
anything
in that class,” she said. “It was for kids who needed help, but they didn’t give us any help. We didn’t read. We didn’t study. We just played video games and watched movies and ate popcorn. It was fun, but that’s why I’m struggling with the ACT now. That’s why I’m getting denied from scholarships. Those two years were when we were supposed to be learning punctuation, commas, metaphors, all that stuff. When they bring it up today, they say, ‘Remember when we learned this?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t! I never learned any of that.’”

Kewauna’s other lingering regret was that during her freshman year of high school at ACE Tech, when she had had a chance to start over, she had squandered it, skipping class, goofing around, hanging out with her friends instead of studying. She got mostly Cs and Ds that year. She even failed phys ed. “I wasn’t thinking about the future,” she told me. “At that point, I just wanted to have fun.” She was only fourteen, and she didn’t think anything mattered; it wasn’t until she was a sophomore and started applying herself a little more that she learned that her GPA was cumulative all through high school, which meant that her freshman grades would directly affect her college prospects. That was why, in her junior and senior years, she became so preoccupied with keeping a near-perfect GPA—doing extra-credit work, staying after school to get help from her teachers. Still, she sometimes talked about her past like it was a stain on her record that she would never be able to erase.

The college Kewauna had set her sights on most intently was the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the flagship college of the state’s university system, rated by
U.S
.
News & World Report
as the thirteenth-best public university in the country. Urbana is about two and a half hours south of Chicago, which felt like the right distance to Kewauna—not so far that she’d get homesick, but still far enough for her to feel independent. She had visited the campus on a OneGoal field trip in her junior year, and she loved it: the quad, the student center, the lecture halls, the Applebee’s. “That’s my dream, number-one, please-let-me-get-in school,” she told me. “If I don’t get in, I’m going to cry for like six days.”

But by the beginning of February, Kewauna had scaled back her college ambitions a bit. She had applied to the University of Chicago, the most prestigious college in the state, but she told me she no longer wanted to go there even if she did get in. She had been admitted to a couple of her safety schools, including the University of Illinois in Chicago, but she was hoping for something better. She hadn’t given up on Urbana—that was still her first choice—but she now had a clear second choice as well: Western Illinois University, in Macomb, which was somewhat less competitive than Urbana but still had an average incoming ACT score of 21, well above Kewauna’s score. She had visited Western the previous year, and she had warm memories: “I fell in love with that school,” she told me. “I felt really comfortable there. The people were friendly. The dorm rooms—everything was perfect.”

That winter, she developed what seemed to me a more stoic, farsighted view of her college future than she had had when I met her. “If I don’t get into one of my top schools, maybe I wasn’t meant to go there,” she told me. “I would be disappointed, but I would work hard wherever I got in, and then maybe after a year or two I could transfer to one of my number-one schools.” She had decided to quit beating herself up about the mistakes she made in her freshman year too. “I can’t keep saying, ‘Oh my goodness! I messed up my freshman year,’” she told me. “It’s already done. I did what I did. It’s a lesson for me. And when I go to college, I’ll make sure that this time I don’t make the same mistakes in freshman year. I’m going to be on task. Plan things out. Have a schedule, be really organized, be focused, meet the right people.”

February was an anxious month; Kewauna kept checking the mail, calling admissions offices just to make sure they had everything they needed from her. Finally, at the end of the month, she got good news: she had been accepted to Western Illinois. Because of her low ACT score, she was enrolled in a special freshman-support program that would provide her with extra tutoring and counseling in her first year. Three of Kewauna’s close friends from ACE Tech got into Western as well, and together they made plans to head to Macomb.

8. Closing the Gap

Recently, two labor economists
at the University of California, Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, analyzed surveys of time use by college students from the 1920s through the present. They found that in 1961, the average full-time college student spent twenty-four hours a week studying outside of the classroom. By 1981, that had fallen to twenty hours a week, and in 2003, it was down to fourteen hours a week, not much more than half of what it had been forty years earlier. This phenomenon transcended boundaries: “Study time fell for students from all demographic subgroups,” Babcock and Marks wrote, “for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity.” And where did all those extra hours go? To socializing and recreation, mostly. A separate study of 6,300 undergraduates
at the University of California found that students today spend fewer than thirteen hours a week studying, while they spend twelve hours hanging out with friends, fourteen hours consuming entertainment and pursuing various hobbies, eleven hours using “computers for fun,” and six hours exercising.

To many observers, these statistics are cause for alarm. But Jeff Nelson sees this situation as an opportunity for his students. He recalled for me his own freshman year at the University of Michigan, when he did what a lot of other upper-middle-class kids do at the beginning of their college careers: he didn’t work very hard. For some affluent students, freshman year is about drinking heavily; for others, it’s about pledging a fraternity or trying to write for the student newspaper. That time is certainly not always wasted, but it generally doesn’t contribute much to a student’s academic outcomes. And so Nelson sees freshman year as a “magical timeframe” for OneGoal students “where they can radically close the achievement gap.” As Nelson explained his theory in one of our early conversations, “Freshman year is this unique moment in time. Kids who have not had to persevere as much walk into college and they coast, for the most part. Or they’re partying too hard. And in that moment, if our kids are working diligently and building relationships with professors and studying and using all of the skills that we’ve trained them to use, they can close the gap. We’ve seen it time and time again, that all of a sudden a kid who might have been three or four grade levels behind in high school has caught up in a really significant way to his peers by the beginning of sophomore year.”

Her first fall at Western Illinois, Kewauna took introductory courses—English 100, Math 100, Sociology 100. None of them was easy for her, but the course she found most challenging was Biology 170, Introduction to Health Careers. The professor was a popular lecturer, so the class was pretty full, and most of the students were upperclassmen. On the first day of class, Kewauna did what Michele Stefl had recommended: she politely introduced herself to the professor before class, and then she sat in the front row, which until Kewauna sat down was occupied entirely by white girls. The other African American students all tended to sit at the back, which disappointed Kewauna. (“That’s what they
expect
you to do,” she said when we talked by phone that fall. “Back in the civil rights movement, if they told you you had to sit in the back, you wouldn’t do it.”)