By John Thompson.

Part One: (read Part Two here). I can’t wait to read and reread Paul Tough’s new book, Helping Children Succeed: What works and Why. Tough’s Atlantic Magazine preview mostly prompted unadulterated joy from reading such an excellent synthesis of scientific research. But it also serves as a reminder that I should not repeat my mistake with his previous masterpiece, How Children Succeed, and get my hopes up and assume that corporate reformers will really listen to Tough and his sources.

In fact, I suspect that many accountability-driven reformers will respond as they have long been doing with Tough’s and others’ indictments of data-driven, competition-driven reform; they will quote Tough and continue – or even step up – the policies that Tough argues against. My first post, however, will focus on the ways that Tough explains what reformers have done wrong since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, and how science points the way toward a new era of respectful and humane school improvement.

Tough’s Atlantic article doesn’t mince words, and it immediately repudiates the cornerstone of the contemporary reform movement.  Tough says, “The truth, as many American teachers know firsthand, is that low-income children can be harder to educate than children from more-comfortable backgrounds.” Had output-driven reformers understood that, I doubt we would have gone down their test-driven, competition-driven path. New opportunities have arisen, however, since “the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Act, which dominated federal education policy for the past decade and a half, was finally euthanized.”

First, we now know what most education researchers anticipated would be the likely result of data-driven accountability. The reformers’ quest for metrics to drive their reward and punish schemes would fail to produce reliable estimates of the effect of individual teachers on student performance, even when it was narrowly defined as testable outcomes. But, who knows? Had technocratic reformers been aware of the facts of inner city life, they might have refined their regression analyses by trying to control for the numbers of funerals that students attended in order to better estimate whether teachers were meeting their test core growth targets.

One would have thought that Tough’s 2011 New Yorker article featuring Nadine Burke Harris would have shown the futility of value-added models, using primitive test scores and hopelessly simplistic measures of comparing student characteristics, for teacher evaluations. Reformers might now admit grudgingly that “the most important environmental factor in children’s early lives … is the way their parents and other adults interact with them,” and that “a second crucial role that parents play early on is as external regulators of their children’s stress.”  But top-down reformers seemed to be incapable of understanding the role of multiple “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs) on classrooms with a large percentage of kids who have survived trauma.

Tough again cites Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician and trauma researcher in San Francisco, who found:

Just 3 percent of children in her clinic with an ace score of zero displayed learning or behavioral problems. But among children who had an ace score of four or more, 51 percent had learning or behavioral problems. A separate national study published in 2014 found that children with two or more aces were eight times as likely as children with none to demonstrate behavioral problems and more than twice as likely to repeat a grade in school. According to this study, slightly more than half of all children have never experienced a serious adverse event—but the other half, the ones with at least one ace, account for 85 percent of the behavioral problems that children exhibit.

Moreover, it is estimated that between 10 and 15 percent of the student body in most high-poverty schools have experienced high levels of toxic stress.

One would have thought that policy makers would have immediately grasped the “limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in education,” and realized “that for young people whose neurological and psychological development has been shaped by intense stress, straightforward reward systems are often especially ineffective.” Somehow, from their perch far above actual schools, reformers didn’t understand that so-called “high-poverty, high-performing” No Excuses charter schools – who do not accept and retain nearly as many of those 10 to 15% of students with multiple ACEs – are largely irrelevant to the question of what it takes to scale up improvements in high-challenge neighborhood schools.

Second, as market-driven reformers found themselves dealing with relatively more students who have survived multiple ACEs, they started to adjust their pedagogies in order to increase noncognitive skills. Many try to sound like Tough when they shift gears to the socio-emotional. But, he explains that those characteristics are shaped in in ways that are “subtle and intricate.” Moreover, Tough clearly writes:

Nobody has yet found a reliable way to teach kids to be grittier or more resilient. And it has become clear, at the same time, that the educators who are best able to engender noncognitive abilities in their students often do so without really “teaching” these capacities the way one might teach math or reading—indeed, they often do so without ever saying a word about them in the classroom.

Tough makes his case in a subtle and nuanced way, drawing on scholars such as former inner-city teacher, Camille A. Farrington, at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. Farrington shows, “There is little evidence that working directly on changing students’ grit or perseverance would be an effective lever for improving their academic performance.” She shows that “a student’s academic perseverance … is highly dependent on context.” In other words, Farrington’s findings are consistent with those of John Merrow who explains why the goal should not be “building a better teacher.”  Instead we must make teaching “a better job” by making it a “team sport.”

I could go on and, for instance, praise Tough’s analysis of C. Kirabo Jackson’s work on teachers with high value-added in testable subjects, and “another distinct cohort of teachers who were reliably able to raise their students’ performance on his noncognitive measure,” and how they “did not necessarily overlap much.” But, room should be left for Tough’s hopeful conclusion:

Perhaps with the demise of the law, the education debates that raged so furiously during the No Child Left Behind era—on charter schools and Common Core, teacher contracts and standardized testing—might now give way to more-productive discussions about what low-income children need to succeed. We know a lot more than we did when the law was passed about the powerful environmental forces that are acting on many low-income children, beginning in infancy. And we know a lot more than we used to about what interventions and strategies—both at home and in the classroom—most effectively help these young people thrive in school and beyond. A national conversation that starts from this growing scientific consensus and moves forward into policy might be our best chance to improve the lives of the 51 percent of American public-school students who most need our help.

Part One: (read Part Two here)

What do you think? Can those who have been committed to reward and punish be persuaded to pay attention to adverse childhood experiences? Will they start to allow teachers to offer the same holistic and engaging instruction to poor children of color as they demand for their own kids?

Dr. John Thompson is an award-winning historian and an award-winning inner-city teacher. Now retired, he is the author of A Teacher’s Tale: Learning, Loving and Listening to Our Kids.