Does “Grit” Need Deeper Discussion?

Grant,
I so appreciate your thoughts here as they (and Ira’s) are widening my lens on this whole idea. I have always bought into the idea of having opportunities to persevere and to work through when things don’t go your way. I guess that’s why I liked the thoughts about grit. Yet, what you and Ira have reminded me of is that this idea can not be thought about or discussed as either good or bad without considering the context of one’s life or situation. For many children, they don’t need any additional opportunities to “grow grit.” They are gritty enough as it is, and more and more opportunities actually have a detrimental effect.

I used to laugh about my mom always saying, “don’t worry, honey, it builds character” and me responding, “then it seems that I will have a lot of character!” What I was blessed with, however, is a context that was pretty free from hardship and scarcity in comparison. So, those challenges I faced did provide me a chance to flex my perseverance and grit muscles. In contrast, I wonder what muscles we should be thinking about for many children who do experience hardship and scarcity. Ira’s notion of slack is interesting, and I will think on it more. But perhaps we should also be thinking of ways to “grow” someone’s experience with nurture, with faith and belief from adults surrounding them, and with love.

I went to see Paul Tough speak at The Lamplighter School in Dallas last night, and I’m writing to share a few notes that were meaningful for me:

I heard Mr. Tough say that, for all kids, education is emphasizing the wrong stuff when it uses cognitive metrics like IQ and SAT/ACT. His thesis might be that there’s a growing body of research which suggests that noncognitive traits matter… a lot. Tough might encourage us to look in a familiar direction: do schools emphasize what matters for kids?

Mr. Tough did/does talk about low SES kids and schools – maybe more than we’ve given him credit for in this discussion thread. He makes a clear distinction — kids who live in poverty are surrounded by adversity all the time. Tough cites research that names this concept toxic stress. He makes an impassioned plea that what these kids need is protection from toxic stress – not more of it. I hear him advocating for the same sorts of wrap-around services that scholars like Richard Rothstein (and others) have been writing about for some time. (Aside: I would add that choosing KIPP as his primary example is problematic – the KIPP model is too controversial and too wrapped up in elevating self-control – which too often looks like ‘conformity’ to norms from the dominant culture… Mr. Tough cited Expeditionary Learning last night – http://www.elschools.org. I think it’s a stronger case study!)

Mr. Tough’s reporting also suggests that high SES kids need more exposure to adversity. I like that he admits that the title of his 2011 NYT story “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” is an editorialist’s overstatement. He explains that it’s not so much that high SES kids need to experience failure as much as they need authentic experiences that include the real possibility of failure. He asks whether we confuse stress (low risk of failure) and challenge (higher risk of failure). I like his (simplistic, I know…) analogy of comparing exercise by climbing a StairMaster (high stress/low challenge) to exercise by climbing a mountain (high degree of challenge). I think Tough is on to something when he posits that high SES kids have lives full of stress that lack real challenge. I hear a nod to Dewey and the value of having a healthy set of real experiences — followed by reflection, feedback -meaningful engagement in metacognitive processes – and then time/opportunities for 2nd, 3rd attempts.

For all kids, Paul Tough might suggest that we ask: HMW help children learn to manage stress, challenge/adversity, and possibility of failure more effectively (rather than protecting some and/or not protecting others)? HMW adults model responses to failure effectively? HMW talk openly with kids about our setbacks and how we’ve learned/grown?

Thanks again, Grant – I am grateful to you for connecting all of us together in a space that promotes reflection and dialogue… all in the service of kids.

Holly,

I missed your follow up. I do regret some of my exchange with Vicki, because I did not start out to label her as “pro-eugenics.” I said, “Even someone I think of “as smart” as @coolcatteacher – Vicki Davis – jumps in the water with pro-eugenics professor Angela Duckworth and brings “teaching grit” into her classroom.” Which may have been overkill, but I guess I am offended by Duckworth fans, and I let that carry me away in the following Twitter exchange.

Because you are right. Unless you followed earlier Twitter exchanges regarding Duckworth and Galton, you would likely no know the origins of her beliefs – the curriculum of colleges of education rarely include history or philosophy I have learned.

But I do hope dialogue can grow from “verbal combat.” That’s the culture I was raised in. The result being that grudges and personal anger have never been my style. Early in my Twitter life I clashed repeatedly and angrily with another educator. Today he and I share an office and work many projects together. Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis, and all that.

Ira

Paul,

Allow me to deconstruct your response, starting with the things you did not say, or perhaps, failed to bother to ask as your journalism moved forward.

Let’s begin with the basics – while yes, the most recent free and reduced lunch statistics I’ve been quoted for New Rochelle High School (whose leaders said 50%, not the 42% you found via Google on the “Great Schools” site, but the economy shifts quickly these days, so who knows), is far less than Fenger, half of Fenger, this is true because of districting, the key cause of scarcity in American schools. Chicago – yes – a Vallas/Duncan district today no matter what you claim – is no poorer overall than New Rochelle (and perhaps no wealthier either), it simply gathers its high school students together differently.

Now, large cities have always done this – but that is the point. If you want to break the problem of scarcity, break the problem of concentrated poverty, you do it via school redistricting, you do it by bringing children and communities together in schools which share resources so that abundance is available. New Rochelle could have two high schools – that would not be unusual in a city with its population in this nation. If it did so – Chicago-style – it would have one Fenger and one New Trier. But it has not chosen to do that, perhaps it learned the lesson of its bitter desegregation struggle. Perhaps it simply is lucky in its history or in its lack of available land for its schools. But either way, there is a lesson there – a challenge to the story you have told.

Why is this important?

Arne Duncan, as CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, as the guiding spirit behind the hiring of a principal like the grotesquely unqualified one you found at Fenger, increased the socio-economic segregation in Chicago’s public high schools through his “school improvement” programs which helped to concentrate the poorest students in fewer schools. If he and his successors had done the opposite, brought communities together, thus bringing resources together, the need for the band-aid social services you so clearly describe would actually lessen. The schools, because of middle class support, would have the kinds of resources now provided by small numbers of home visits, et al.

I am not saying that you are wrong. Believe me, in my years as a police officer in The Bronx I learned to know the absolute value of those who provide these services. I used to search for those services for children and families around Evander Childs High School. And when I worked at a Ministry for the homeless in Grand Rapids, Michigan I even helped to provide those types of services, but honestly Paul, that is not what America’s poor children “need,” even if we might help a few “succeed” by providing that.

Next,

“You’ll notice that nowhere in that proposal do I argue that poor kids need to act more like middle-class white kids,” you tell me, and this is perhaps your most telling statement. You do not even see what you have written, and this strengthens my belief in the nature of New York Times elitism. It is blinding.

I do not know if you have ever read the work of Edward Said, a scholar who has strongly informed my work, particularly his piece on Kipling’s Kim, in his 1994 book Culture and Imperialism. “[W]hether we like it or not,” Said writes of Kipling’s quite beautiful work – a work quite appreciate in many ways of “native” people, “its author is writing not just from the dominating view-point of a white man in a colonial possession but from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning, and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature.”

So when you say:
“Alicia Lieberman, the psychologist who runs the Child Trauma Research Program at UCSF; my reporting on Lanita Reed, the hairstylist whose careful and patient counseling helped set Keitha Jones’s difficult life on a better path; my account of Anita Stewart-Montgomery’s supportive counseling visit to the home of a teenage mother named Jacqui; the entire chapter on I.S. 318, the Brooklyn public school whose chess team has become so successful because of the hard work of both staff and students; as well as the many hours I spent in Kewauna Lerma’s living room on the South Side of Chicago, listening to her and her family as they talked about her struggle to overcome a difficult upbringing and succeed in high school and then in college.
“I did not choose to report on Monisha Sullivan or Keitha Jones or Kewauna Lerma or Steve Gates or James Black because they were powerful; I chose to report on them because they are real people with complicated lives.”
You are not even seeing the unifying strand behind these stories. Yes, they are therapeutic, yes, they are important, but at their essence, they are both charitable and colonial. The lessons in every case (and you can continue – probably rightly – to insist on actual transcribed quotes, but work on life have interfered so far), are that students need conform more effectively to school and societal expectations.

Now, whether that is what children in poverty need to do or not can surely be debated. I say “no” – http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2011/07/pygmalion.html – http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2009/11/colonialism-of-michelle-rhee-or-tfa-v.html – but many say “yes.” I think that is the debate we ought to having here because THAT is our essential disagreement, not what you wrote. But like Said, I am a deep postcolonialist in belief, and I believe in challenging the assumptions which create the power structure – http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2008/05/may-day-retard-theory.html – not trying to “cure” those victimized by that power structure individually.

But I will give you one key example: In your book you tell the story of the girl who, after speaking with her grandmother, breaks the pregnancy/poverty cycle of her family, gets to work, becomes the exceptional student. You also tell the chess club story. Both are, in their own ways, great. But to deny that either path is “middle class style” is absurd. So I will give you a different story, one of what we call “abundance.” In our most “at risk” high school – no, again, no Fenger, but we have not allowed that to happen (though again, we could if we districted like Chicago) – what we added was first, a music studio to our library. This allowed a range of high poverty students, and we’re talking both black and white poverty, to come together around an existing set of community passions, from rap to hillbilly blues, and then to bring the middle class students, with rock, show tunes, and classical added, to join with them. We allowed these students to present their work, and to construct their core course learning via music, we did not impose our passions, our paths on them – rather we embraced theirs. From there we expanded an already inclusive theater program, including what we might call “street dance” and “street music” if we had real streets in that area. We kept kids in school. We kept kids in class. We kept kids engaged and involved in the positive, but our entry point was substantially less colonial in nature.

Again, we can debate whether break dancing in the musical In The Heights provides kids with the societal skills that chess club does, but that is different than insisting that these are not different in significant ways.

You are also missing a key point about your stories. Unlike Kotlowitz, who very well be a friend and mentor to you, I never found in your book the sense that you went out and found the children in your stories. In every case the story – “good” or “bad,” “success” or “failure” – apparently came to you through the researcher, the aid provider, the source of therapeutic intervention. This changes the nature of your reporting in ways I am not sure you understand.

Because when I tell you about children it is based on a different introduction. Whether I tell you about New Rochelle High School, or our schools in Virginia, or Godfrey-Lee Schools in Wyoming, Michigan, I am telling stories based in walking within those places, hearing the range of children directly, engaging the voices “un-introduced” by adult story. I think I have always done that. It is why, in years of working with students with disabilities, I never read the reports before meeting with the children. If you read the reports, if you listen to the adult voices first, you cannot ever quite hear the children in the ways we must.

for now, Ira

Allow me to call “intellectual fraud” here:

Yes Paul, Chicago has distance problems – so does Albemarle County (we cover 726 square miles, roughly the same geographic size as New York City), no New Rochelle does not.

Chicago also has a rather remarkable transportation system which many places lack.

But first, how does Mr. Tough claim both at New Rochelle High School has a 42% free and reduced lunch rate, yet a 10% child poverty rate? Are all impoverished children in high school?

And we have a 29% free and reduced lunch rate in our schools, so that 8% rate now quoted confuses me.

But these statistical challenges hide Mr. Tough’s refusal to accept the obvious. Communities, even communities like Chicago, make choices to concentrate poverty or not. I brought up these comparatives, as I said, to indicate that many communities might choose to concentrate poverty in certain schools, but others do not. Would one of our high schools by as “bad” as Fenger in we concentrated our 29% in one building (that’s a bit larger than our smallest high school), no, not right away. But give it a few consistent years, and it might well become so, as educators and leaders could find reasons to flee.

The excuses Mr. Tough offers for Chicago remind me of those used in the school desegregation battle in Boston in the late 1960s. “Its too far, kids will be on busses for hours each day.” Well, honestly, we have kids on busses for two hours each day. I grew up watching New York City high school kids crossing that city by mass transit every day. These are decisions you either make or do not make.

In closing here, I will say that I have “sat sit in white, wealthy Albemarle County” for about a year now, which must make me seem elitist to a rich kid graduate of Toronto’s most exclusive private school who works for The New York Times. And I will say, quite happily, that I came here to do the work Mr. Tough likes to write about, but never do. But, as I have mentioned, I have worked, lived, fought among the people Tough wants to prescribe solutions for most of my life. I doubt he can understand that, it would require a self awareness I do not see in his work.

But I will say that he can diss the music studio only because he is clueless. He seeks pathology among all not like himself, and that pathology requires cure. It is the ultimate expression of the depressing colonial deficit model which has trapped our children forever. The only thing new in the work of Duckworth and Tough are the names of those elites profiting from these theories.

Sorry Paul, your responses suggest that you understand far less than I thought when I first wrote about your book.

– Ira

Paul,

Poverty is poverty. And poverty rates, even free and reduced lunch rates, are notoriously unreliable numbers, in Chicago, in New Rochelle, even in Central Virginia. Yes, I understand the differential. I also understand that in, say a state with little in the way of Medicaid or “welfare,” and a state with long-held deep suspicion of government, we might have many students not listed on any rolls who desperately need help. I know enough about our students to know your numbers are wrong.

And Paul, there are no “magic bullets.” Not character education, not home visits, not wonderful grandmothers, not music studios, not even diverse high schools. But at the heart of this conversation is the question of where we put pressure and where we put resources.

The stories you tell are pathologies, as I have said. You understand them as pathologies. And I will not doubt that truth – I said this in my first post. We do indeed have a pathological system – a legalized system of child abuse – in this nation. That pathological system creates children with pathologies.

Your book focused on those individual pathologies and possible cures. I believe that puts the blame, and the pressure, and perhaps some resources, in the wrong places, because without changing the pathological system, we simply create more children with pathologies every day, in a race we cannot possibly win.

The reason Paul Thomas, I, and others believe you are letting the powerful off the hook is because you are. At your “best” you prescribe a somewhat better welfare state and somewhat improved funding. That’s nice, if we were “close,” but we are not close.

Without sounding condescending, I will say that I am older than you, and I perhaps have a wider range of life experiences. One thing that age gives me is a knowledge of the experience of a time when America was willing to consider radical solutions. We had a presidential candidate in 1968, one with a powerful chance of winning, who promoted a guaranteed national income. We had a President, in the mid-1960s, who transformed poverty in much of America into something significantly less awful. I can also dimly remember Canada making radical change, beginning socialized medicine, a move which transformed your home society.

What American education needs is an understanding of the need for radical change. You can write plenty of books about Geoffrey Canada or character, or even the wonderful works of a few people. You can even bring essential emotional research to light, but none of that helps kids stuck in poverty – Chicago South Side poverty, or New Rochelle West End poverty, or Esmont, Virginia poverty, unless there is systematic change in our schools – in funding, in curriculum, in pedagogy, in what is valued.

So you discount what New Rochelle is trying, and what we are trying here in Virginia, but I hope you are your audiences won’t discount the argument for abundance. The music studio in the high school was an early step, but hardly the only step, as we try to transform schools to close the opportunity gap. We have, I suppose, talked here about life skills for a dozen years. We call them our Lifelong Learning Competencies, which we list above our state’s content standards on our priorities list – and what you say about that in your book I find correct. But our competencies are designed to be individually actualized, and our paths vary in every community, in every classroom, because only a system which flexes to meet child needs can accomplish anything. We don’t belittle our students. We don’t call them stupid. We take their ideas, passions, interests and use them to build opportunities.

We are attempting systemic change, which is what brought me here, to “sit in white, wealthy Albemarle County,” from working with Special Needs students in Michigan, because it is only in system change, in fundamental change, that we will find answers.

And yes Paul, that is a huge challenge to those in power, including those who own, publish, write, and even read The New York Times. It is a much bigger challenge than talking about how kids must change.

– Ira

This is a copy of the blog posted by Eric Juli earlier today; the original is on his site: http://growinggoodschools.blogspot.com/2014/01/grit-or-slack-are-we-asking-right.html?m=1 I am copying here with his permission to make sure that it become easily viewable as part of the record of this important discussion. Readers can comment here or on his site:

I want to positively contribute to this Grit/Slack debate. I’ve started and stopped this post at least four times since Grant Lichtman asked me to contribute to the discussion on Sunday. Here’s where we are as I see it:

Paul Tough has said that students lack a set of non-cognitive skills, and the current term to define this subset of skills is grit. Josie Holford discussed her frustration with Grit in terms of socio-economic class. Vicki Davis talked about Grit as being how we respond to the tough situations in our lives. Ira Socol offered a new term, “Slack” to frame what kids in poverty lack that middle class and upper class students have in abundance because, he pointed out, kids in poverty are some of the grittiest around.

I agree with all of it and I agree with none of it. Let me try to explain.

At my inner city school, I have to remind my staff all the time that we can only focus on what we can control. We can’t control what happens to our students beyond the time they are with us. We can’t control that there isn’t electricity at home. We can’t always control when students have beds. We can’t control or solve a lack of clothing. We can’t control or be there when our high school students are acting as the parent, because the parent is working multiple minimum wage jobs. We can’t control it when parents are unsupportive.

As hard as it is to admit it and face it. We aren’t in the business of solving poverty. I don’t wake up every day to head to my job as a high school principal to fix poverty. I’m in the business of teaching and learning. I’m in the business of kids. I’m in the business of offering choices and opportunity to students who need a clearer or different path.

Ira’s absolutely right when he frames slack as something that our kids are missing. I had more slack than I knew what to do with and it saved me time and time again. My kids have zero. If there’s such a thing as negative slack, then that’s what they’ve got. But I can’t spend more time than it took to write those sentences focusing on the slack my students don’t have. We don’t have any tools or opportunity to give them slack. In 2014, in inner city Cleveland, where is the slack coming from? It isn’t coming from anywhere. So Ira is right, but it doesn’t move us forward and it isn’t something we have control over.

The same is true with Josie’s points. In my white, middle class sensibility, I agree with every word she wrote. But none of it helps me at school tomorrow. Just because Josie’s frustration is true for her and for me; she and I are more alike than my students and I are, doesn’t make it true, useful or valuable for my students day to day.

I like that Vicki talked about grit in the context of dealing with what’s tough in our lives. That definition is absolutely true for me. But it’s only a small piece of the definition of grit for my students. When I was in high school, the most adversity I faced was being the shortest kid in class and always managing to find myself in the friend zone with any girl I liked. It felt brutal at the time, but let’s be honest…I wasn’t redefining what it is to face adversity and develop grit.

For my students, they have a different idea of what tough is in their lives. We haven’t had school for four days in a row because of extreme cold. Last week, while we were in school, it was also terribly cold, just not dangerous enough to close school. In the last week, I know students who have chosen to lend their coats to younger siblings and cousins, so another could be warm. I have plenty of students without coats at all, and most are choosing to come to school every day we’re in session. I know students who choose to let someone else in their family eat today. They will see how hungry they are tomorrow and see if they need to eat then. I know students who don’t have beds, or who offer their bed to someone else in the apartment. I know students who travel two hours to come to school; a place where they don’t feel valued, respected, cared for, and accepted. I know students who leave work all night, and then come to school in the morning… and then all the money they earn goes to the rent or to keep the lights on. My students know more about being tough as teenagers than many people learn in a lifetime.

But I want to make a key addition to Vicki’s definition. Vicki talked about tough. I want to posit that there’s a difference between life-tough and school-tough. When Ira talked about the grittiness of kids in poverty, I think he’s referring to life-tough. My students have life-tough down. They know how to handle life-tough. Most don’t know anything other than life-tough. What they don’t know how to deal with is school-tough.

Ira talked about traditional school success in the context of compliance. I’m not sure I agree with that. To be fair, inner city educators have turned compliance into an art form. And we’re fairly focused on it at our school as well. But if grit has school-tough in the definition, I can point to some specific indicators, aspects or skills that my students do lack. For me, I don’t use grit or slack. I call them Habits of Mind. But the words don’t matter. Essentially, these are the skills and tools we need to do school well. And let me say, in no uncertain terms, that my students and students in poverty across the country do school terribly.

For example, I have plenty of students who are below grade level. But I have plenty of students who are at or above grade level too. Regardless of how they read, write, or do math, most of my students are currently failing. And yet they are the toughest kids I know. If grit is just being tough, and persevering, then why are my kids struggling academically so much? Here’s what I think. The toughness my kids exhibit in life does not transfer to school. Academic perseverance, academic stick-to-it-ivness, academic courage, academic behaviors, academic skills, academic dispositions, do not transfer just because a student is “gritty” outside of school.

My students with one shirt, no food, who travel two hours to get to school, who give up at nothing in life outside of school, give up all the time, a thousand times a day, in academic settings. I don’t really know Ira, but I think I can hear him say at this point, that this is what white middle class conformity expects of them and it isn’t right. To that I say, of course it isn’t right. But it’s the world. It also isn’t right that my students are in poverty to begin with. But they are; so we deal with it. I can only address what we have control over. To get out of poverty, my students need to be successful in school. I’ve built a career believing that education is the ticket out. To be successful in college and careers, my students need school-tough. And they just don’t have it. What’s right has very little to do with what is.

There’s plenty more to say, but I want to get this posted so I can get into the conversation.
And that brings me to an important point I want to make. If this grit/slack conversation is about what we do to help kids, then I’m in until the end. If this is really a conversation about what ought to be different in the world, then I’m out after this post. I want to talk about what we have control over. Poverty is bad. Okay, but it ain’t changing anytime soon. And I have to go work with kids tomorrow, who aren’t expecting poverty to go away anytime soon. We still need to figure out how to help them be successful; poverty or not.

Here’s an important piece: I haven’t figured out how to teach my students school-tough. I don’t know how to teach them all academic-courage and academic-perseverance. I know how to do it with individual kids. In that arena, I can claim success. But I’m the principal of a school now, not a classroom teacher. I haven’t figured out how to teach an entire school how to do school well. And I certainly haven’t figured out how to help my teachers teach my students how to do school well. Is that a conversation you want to have? Can we shift away from whether or not this is a middle class expectation, or a conversation about compliance to one of what we do to help students like mine develop the toolbox to help themselves? That’s what I want to talk about. Do you want to talk about word choice or actions? My students, and all those like them, don’t need a debate about word choice. They need actions. Are you in?

Re: “Do you believe it is morally acceptable to help kids break out of the cycle of poverty without ending the structural causes that started the cycle in the first place?”

My argument is not about choosing (in fact, I see the “no excuses” advocates as the ones who have thrown up there hands, fatalistically, saying as many do that there is nothing they can do about systemic inequity and poverty).

We have a moral imperative to end social inequity AND educational inequity. But without addressing social inequity, in-school efforts will be greatly weakened.

Currently, the “grit”/”no excuses”-based reform movement is allowing poverty to be essentially ignored, allowing those in power with privilege to avoid accountability for social inequity, and perpetuating in-school inequity by increasing the accountability/standards/testing dynamic that is NOT a solution to inequity.

Further, many of the direct applications of “grit”/”no excuses” ideologies also slip into paternalism—which is unacceptable. The “missionary zeal” of TFA and the “middle-class code” of Ruby Payne are examples of that paternalistic failure. The “no excuses” movement has actually embraced the term “paternalism” justifying what I see as classist/racist practices masked as “saving” poor children.

We need to move forward committed to ending social inequity and educational inequity while being vigilant about not slipping into paternalism.

No easy task, I admit, but to answer the Q, it isn’t morally acceptable; it is morally necessary. The question is HOW and in conjunction with WHAT.

For some time I have been bothered how people can distort an educational concept and idea, depending how they view their goals in educating young people. I have read many recommending ‘ praising or rewarding effort or the process ‘ to reinforce a ‘ growth mindset’. Instead of helping kids see learning as essentially process , the association of process, grit , a growth mindset with outcomes , see PLthomased -not only distorts the learning process but undermines learning. Alfie Kohn in his article on why self- discipline is overrated acknowledges the importance of things like self- discipline and grit , but only when they come after the kid enjoys his learning and finds it relevant and engaging. Once we have the ‘ meat ‘ – the 4 Cs of intrinsic motivation – choice-autonomy, content-curriculum , competence , collaboration- community we can add the spice of ‘ grit’.

I feel like an important distinction needs to be made between little-g grit and big-G Grit. Little-g grit is perseverance during an everyday type task, and sure, that’s not fundamentally or always a virtue. As Gow’s blog post points out, there are times you may want to dabble in something and then let it go, or times when you give something a good effort, realize it’s not going to happen, and are better off backing away (for me, this was the sport of basketball).

Big-g Grit though, that means that when you have identified a serious passion or goal, you have the capacity to show resilience in order to make it happen. The issue for many kids growing up in poverty isn’t whether or not they want to become apple experts– it’s whether or not they want to have the opportunity to be the artist, the doctor, the reader-of-books, whatever it is they have THEMSELVES set as an aspiration. I don’t much care if a kid follows a traditional and straight-line path through college and into a career track or whether she decides to become a polymath world-traveling, organic-farming hippie who changes her mind about her career two dozen times… so long as she has the opportunity to choose.

The realities of growing up in poverty – as Tough and others have detailed quite extensively – is that you are very likely to regularly experience traumas which get in the way of reaching those aspirations. You are weighed down on a neurochemical level by toxic stress, by insecure attachments, by poor nutrition, in some cases by PTSD! (you’re also likely going to poorly-run schools that aren’t messaging a sense of high expectations, but that’s another matter). It’s not fair, but the evidence for these realities is overwhelming, and it makes pursuing one’s dreams that much harder – not impossible, but that much harder. The way to combat the risk factors, to level the playing field that poverty’s effects tilts so wildly, is through resilience factors, which include tremendous amounts of outside support (and ‘slack’-giving actions), as well as cultivating growth mindsets and beliefs that increase the probability for overcoming challenges you didn’t invite to meet the hopes you have declared.

So let’s not conflate grit and Grit. One is a tool that can, like any tool, be applied to either positive or negative effect; the other is a way of giving kids a chance to fully embody their self-defined potential.

-Elliot