Paul Tough

It’s long been true that kids from affluent families tend to do better in school (and on standardized tests) than kids from low-income households. Despite decades of government initiatives and the tireless work of social workers, psychologists, and educators, this gap persists. It has become the central issue in American education, as over half of public school students are now classified by the federal government as ‘low-income.’ 

In this keynote, drawing from his new book Helping Children Succeed, Paul Tough provides a new framework for understanding the challenges of low-income children and offers some innovative solutions. It starts with the biological mechanisms that accompany adversity. Children adapt to their surroundings: Stable, loving early environments incline kids to trust and be curious. But when children grow up amidst violence or chaos—what some doctors call “toxic stress”—their stress-response systems are set to look for trouble everywhere. In school, it’s often hard for them to focus, stay calm, and trust their peers and teachers, which makes it difficult to keep up academically. They are more likely to be disciplined or punished, but less likely to receive the genuine help and understanding they need. 

If we want to help children develop the character strengths like grit or self-control that Tough first explored in How Children Succeed, we first need a more thorough understanding of adversity, home life, and brain development. In a keynote that distills groundbreaking research from psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists, Tough outlines the small steps parents, educators, and civic leaders can take to meaningfully change student motivation and behavior—especially among kids from low-income backgrounds. 

Our society currently places a great deal of emphasis on intelligence as the sole indicator of value in children’s education. But in this talk, Paul Tough lays it bare: we believe that success comes from those who score highest on tests, from preschool to SATs. Yet evidence indicates that our story here might be dead wrong. The work of a new generation of researchers and educators points to the fact that the qualities that have a better shot at indicating lifelong success are “non cognitive” or what we might refer to as “personality traits” such as: curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, self-control, and grit. 

Using the tools of science, Tough peels back the mysteries of character and traces the links between early childhood neurological development and environment. By showing how “nature” and “nurture” are intertwined, Tough explores how childhood stresses modify life success and the surprising ways that parents do—and do not—prepare their children for adulthood. Tough helps us understand how early adversity affects childhood emotional, social, and cognitive development in ways that will carry on throughout  their entire lives, and what we can do about it.

For most of the 20th century, colleges and universities in the United States were powerful instruments of social mobility and increasing equality. Each generation’s population of college-educated adults was bigger and more diverse than the one before it—a phenomenon that helped create the great American middle class and produced the most powerful economy in the world. Today, the system of higher education in the United States tends to work very effectively for higher-income families, but it is no longer accomplishing its traditional mission of helping ambitious poor and working-class young people reach the middle and upper classes. In this talk, Paul Tough introduces the innovative new ideas—proposed by psychologists, sociologists, and economists—on how to address this problem, including a nationwide effort to better identify and recruit high-achieving low-income students to highly selective colleges. He dives into the creative solutions administrators and researchers are testing out—inexpensive interventions that plant positive ideas in the minds of struggling college students, helping them develop the grit and perseverance and sense of belonging they need to persist and succeed. If these researchers’ preliminary results hold up, says Tough, we may be on the verge of solving one of the biggest social challenges of our generation.