Everyone's Golden Ticket

Before I discovered blogging as a communication tool, I wrote school newsletter articles. Last year, I wrote an article that connected the lessons I learned from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which was new at that time, to education. The question I used to frame that article is worth posing again as we approach the mid-point of the year: what does it take to be successful in school? Gladwell’s answer, which he illustrates with examples from Bill Gates to Michael Jordan to The Beatles, is twofold. The first, necessary but insufficient condition that must be met for success is that the circumstances have to be right. Michael Jordan would not have become what he became if he were 5’6” tall, Paul McCartney would not have become what he became if didn’t have both arms and two hands, and Bill Gates would not have revolutionized computing if he did not have access to a university mainframe computer as a high school student. It is necessary to have the right circumstances, but circumstances alone are insufficient.

And according to Gladwell, “natural talent” is irrelevant. That may surprise, because anyone who ever saw Michael Jordan play basketball thinks “talent.” When we listen to the White Album, we think “talent,” and it’s understandable to think Michael Jordan’s ability and The Beatles’ ability owe to innate talent, not hard work. Gladwell would challenge the statement I often hear from students, “I’m just not good at that,” if the student means “I don’t have talent for math,” for example. That’s because according to Gladwell natural talent does not explain why people are successful. Talent as we see it comes from having the right circumstances and hard work.

Thus the second, necessary but insufficient condition is hours and hours of focused, hard work, ten thousand hours minimum, to put a number on it. It is worth reading his book to see the full discussion of his examples, but one example in particular struck me, and it still resonates as we approach the middle of the year. In the early 1990s, researchers asked instructors at Berlin’s Academy of Music to rate violinists’ ability as world-class, good, or unlikely to play professionally. Then the researchers interviewed the violinists about their practice schedule as far back as childhood. What they found was a correlation between instructors’ ratings and how many hours of practice put it by those judged as world class. Gladwell sums it up this way: “The people at the very top don’t work just harder or much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder” (pp. 38-9, Gladwell’s emphasis).

Now if we asked teachers to group their students into three categories of superior, good, and average and then determined how much students worked on learning, would we see the same correlations? I would like to say yes categorically, but if Gladwell is right it’s not just hours and hours of hard work but hours and hours of hard work on the right things under the right circumstances. That’s why for students who are behind we create plans to help them catch up, which is part of the right circumstances. And of course, students who are behind will have to work on areas of deficiency as well as grade level material, which will require them to work not just harder or much harder, but much, much harder. For students who want to become world class academically, they too will have to work very, very hard. One can earn passing or even good grades in less demanding schools by working less, but to be successful, according to Gladwell, hard, focused work under the right circumstances is everyone’s only golden ticket to success.

I read in the December 2 edition of Education Week an article on a study conducted by Caroline Hoxby. Hoxby looked at student achievement in New York City schools. Because the demand for charter school exceeded the supply, 94 percent of students had to go through a lottery to enroll in charter schools, creating a randomly assigned control and treatment group of 80,000 students over seven years. Although her methods and conclusions will surely be debated in the academy, it is worth noting that of those students who finished eighth grade in a charter school, they “performed nearly as well as students in affluent suburban districts” and closed the achievement gap by 86 percent in math and 66 percent in English. What interests me most is that charter schools were not the reason for the gains. For 14 percent of students in charter schools, in fact, the effects of the charter school were negative. Thus it’s not charter schools that makes the difference but the kind of charter schools. Hoxby identifies the characteristics of charter schools whose students are academically successful, and of those, longer school day and more days in the school year, more time devoted to studying English, and a mission emphasizing academic performance stand out.

So what do effective charter schools in New York City have to do with students’ success in Chicago? Using Gladwell to read Hoxby, we see that the first two characteristics of effective charter schools speak to the circumstances the schools create and their demand for hard work, and the third speaks to the circumstances the schools create for students to succeed. There is nothing special about a charter school unless it creates the right circumstances and the demand for hard work. It’s another question why all schools don’t get that done, or how charter schools in New York City have been able to get that done for 86 percent of its students over the last seven years. What Hoxby describes are the circumstances for success, but it must also be the case that students in these schools worked hard. Just being there may have worked for Chance Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski’s novel, but students can’t just show up in a good school and expect to be successful. After reading Gladwell, one can only conclude that students whose luck gained them a spot in a charter school that created the circumstances for their success and demanded that they work hard had to work not just harder or much harder but much, much harder to close the achievement gap. Together, the right circumstances and hard work are the necessary and sufficient conditions for success, what we could call a golden ticket.

I should say, everyone has the opportunity to create a golden ticket if they have the right circumstances. At CVCS, students have the right circumstances for success. We have a robust curriculum. Hours and hours of hard work on a thin curriculum would not meet the condition of right circumstance. Moreover, students have the opportunity to work a longer school day than students in other schools, or perhaps I should say, as long as students in suburban schools (like my daughter, who works from the time she gets home until 7:00 or 8:00 every night). We have teachers and families working together to support children. We create individual paths for students to help them meet their goals. Once the circumstances are right, all that remains is hard work, and that’s up to students. There is only one way to get a golden ticket, and at CVCS, everyone has the opportunity to create one for themselves.