Paul Tough: Directing Attention Away from "No Excuses" Pt. 1

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Helping Children Succeed was reported and written with the generous support of five philanthropic organizations: the CityBridge Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Raikes Foundation, the Bainum Family Foundation, and the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.

 –Paul Tough

Paul Tough has written a new book that aspires to put into action a host of bad ideas that Tough advocated in his 2012 book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.  In that book, Tough outlined the eugenics-inspired elitist dream to use schooling to alter poor children’s brains and nervous systems so that they, essentially, become academically immune to the effects of poverty—that corrosive malady that Tough’s wealthy patrons have no interest in doing anything about.  And why should they if the segregated urban poor can produce the test scores that are required to grow the wildly lucrative “no excuses” networks like KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, Mastery, Green Dot, Rocketship, etc. 

Instead of suggesting that some part of the billions in philanthropic dollars be used to attack the problem of child poverty at its roots, Tough, in that 2012 book, focused, instead, on the virtues of the “no excuses” charter reform schools to develop “performance character,” which he claimed would provide enough grit, self-control, and gratitude to neutralize the damaging effects of poverty on poor children’s low test scores. 

Tough’s first book fantasized about exploiting the neural plasticity of children of the poor, and the KIPP schools were held up as models of successful programs that grind out gritty kids who excel in self-control, gratitude, zest, and the other corporate character virtues that allow for high productivity among students and workers, despite deplorable living and work conditions.  Like most fantasies, Tough’s 2012 book depended upon creating an alternate reality to match his dystopian pipe dream of dredging new neural pathways in children’s brains to improve their performance character, or work habits. 

In Tough’s gritty sci-fi fantasy, he falsely equated higher test scores that KIPP’s unpaid child workers generate under the soul-crushing tutelage of inexperienced teachers as an indication that improved character (grit and self-control) had been achieved.  Like other measures used in the myopic world of corporate education reform, Tough found the proof in the bottom line, and as with other amoral enterprises aimed at increasing the bottom line, the human costs for achieving the numbers did not matter.  If test gains could be sustained by emphasizing Tough’s preferred virtues of keeping-your-nose-the-grindstone grit production and living in a behavioral straightjacket, then so much the better: no expensive socioeconomic changes or politically costly sociological alterations would be required.

Of course, we now know how the KIPP Model schools use an accounting system based on avoiding the liabilities of lower-scoring children, along with the application of a form of pedagogical savagery that no middle class citizen would ever condone for anyone other than the black and brown children of the poor.

While these findings were never reported by the corporate media, a number of disturbing high profile stories from these “no excuses” hell schools could not be ignored.  Problem children isolated and locked in padded rooms, problem children collected together in basements as influential guests toured the school, children forced to on sit the floor for a week until they “earned” their desks, children choked and dragged by administrators, children with scrapes and bruises from administrators, children forced to bark like dogs and wear garbage cans on their heads, young children whose work was thrown in the floor as teachers denounce their efforts, young children forced to stand in front of the entirely school and apologize for having to use the bathroom at the wrong time.

Most importantly, KIPP’s commissioned Mathematica researchers ((Tuttle, Gill, Gleason, Knechtel, Nichols-Barrer, & Resch, 2013) determined a year after Tough’s 2012 book came out that the extraordinary renditions being used on KIPPsters were NOT, in fact, producing the  “character” results that were being claimed by Tough and the Seligman/Duckworth pseudoscience cabal upon which the “grit” empire is built.  Steinberg (2014) offers this summary of the Mathematica findings that “were not so widely broadcast”:

They [students] weren’t more effortful or persistent.  They didn’t have more favorable academic self-conceptions or stronger school engagement.  They didn’t score higher than the comparison group in self-control.  In fact, they were more likely to engage in ‘undesirable behavior,’ including losing their temper, lying to and arguing with their parents, and giving teachers a hard time.  They were more likely to get into trouble at school.   Despite the program’s emphasis on character development, the KIPP students were no less likely to smoke, drink, get high, or break the law.  Nor were their hopes for their educational futures any higher or their plans any more ambitious (p. 153).

If the new paternalists’ multi-billion dollar charter business was to continue with the support of elite neoliberals who could not politically afford to support such dehumanization in the name of schooling, a new public relations campaign would be required and a new diversion created.  Paul Tough’s new book signals the beginning of the new PR campaign.  In fact, Tough’s new book can be downloaded as a pdf for free, and David Brooks and other paid hacks have been moving attention away from the “no excuses” schools to a “kinder gentler” form of school indoctrination as a way to neutralize criticism of the dominant variety of charter schools still preferred by a system based on racist and classist policies.

Tough’s new book, in fact, brings word that white philanthropists are doubling down, once again, on treating the symptoms of poverty, which are now acknowledged as low esteem, lack of motivation, disconnectedness, and low academic achievement.  The big story in Tough’s new book, Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why is of a sea change in the public relations messaging from the charter industry and the elite paternalistic foundations that constitute the corporate education reform movement.  No longer are the bare-knuckled segregated charter schools held up as models of corporate effectiveness and efficiency, even though the U. S. now has thousands of these hell schools operating across the urban landscape.

The new model is a kinder, gentler form of corporate school, one in which children are relieved of the caustic and dehumanizing environments of the “no excuses” catechism for an “expeditionary” kind of  project based Common Core curriculum aimed, still, at creating levels of grit and self control to neutralize the devastations of poverty and social neglect.  Because Tough’s patrons have their eye on the 51 percent of the K-12 market who now qualify for free or reduced price lunch, the new model will have to represent an alternative to the penal “no excuses” charters that now house large swaths of black and brown urban school children.  

And if the first Tough vision was of the creation of a black superchild with Booker T. Washington political sensibilities, the second one is of no less compliant super social child that is as likely to be white as black, an economically segregated child who gains strength from his connectedness to other children of the disconnected.  And children of the white poor, for sure, will require another form of paternalism and manipulation to become gritty, self-controlled, and grateful customers of Common Core.  White parents would never allow the kinds of treatment recommended for disadvantaged children of color, who are still warehoused in the “no excuses” schools all across America.

So regardless of how much Paul Tough’s patrons would like to shift the focus from the hellish “no excuses” corporate reform schools that, thus far, have been celebrated as the solution to educating the urban poor in segregated schools, the fact remains that the majority of the 7,000 charters in this country are of the same brutal variety that Tough and the billionaires have now begun to downplay. 

It is with little fanfare, then, that attention now moves away from the toxic KIPP Model schools.  While Tough’s 2012 How Children Succeed… celebrated the KIPP Model with over ninety glowing mentions of KIPP in just the first hundred pages, the 2016 Helping Children Succeed… includes exactly one mention of KIPP in the entire book.  No doubt, Tough’s book allows us to see that charter industry is now concentrated on diverting attention from the corrosive “no excuses” reform schools to a new educational tool with a new method for re-wiring children to self-control and persist, without question, in any required task.

Tough explains that the solution new depends upon “deeper-learning strategies:”

Deeper-learning strategies are often presented as a corrective to the no-excuses philosophy of education associated with some of the earliest and best-known charter-school networks, including KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First. In their early years, especially, those schools, which serve mostly low-income students and often achieve standardized-test scores that are far above average for such students, emphasized strict behavior codes, requiring students to comply with a rigorous set of rules about how to dress and how to sit in the classroom and how to walk through the hallways. At many of those schools, elaborate systems of incentives and punishments were (and often still are) a central part of the strategy for managing and motivating students.

But more recently, the sharp dividing lines that once existed between no-excuses and deeper-learning schools have begun to blur. In the fall of 2015, Elm City Preparatory Elementary School in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the founding schools of the Achievement First network, introduced a wholesale redesign of its curriculum that includes an embrace of many of the beliefs and practices of deeper learning, including an increased emphasis on experiential learning and student autonomy. Students at Elm City (86 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch) now control their schedule and follow their own personal interests in their learning much more than they used to, and they have more autonomy in the subjects they study, including daily “enrichment” courses in robotics, dance, and tae kwon do. Once every two months, Elm City teachers lead students on a two-week “expeditionary” project in which they deeply study a single subject, sometimes involving extensive time outside school visiting a farm, museum, or historical site (pp. 125-126).

Can the dividing line between punishing segregated test prep charters and “deeper learning” schools be rubbed out by one Achievement First experimental school in New Haven?  

Probably not, especially when the Achievement First (AF) school most in the news since Tough published his book is AF’s flagship upper school, which is also in New Haven, where students (98% black) conducted a mass walkout on May 31 to demand a more humane discipline system and more diversity among faculty members (75% white).  How embarrassing.

KIPP, Chemical Reactions, and Character: Mapping Out the New Eugenics Agenda

A slightly different version of this review was published yesterday at Substance News.

Paul Tough, KIPP, and the Character Con: A Review of How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
Jim Horn 

When we look at these kids and their behavior, it can all seem so mysterious….But at some point, what you’re seeing is just a complex series of chemical reactions.  It’s the folding of a protein or the activation of a neuron.  And what’s exciting about that is that those things are treatable.  When you get down to the molecules, you realize, that’s where the healing is.  That’s where you’re discovering a solution” (p. 26).  Paul Tough quoting Nadine Burke Harris

Two days before the 2012 presidential election, Rachel Maddow ran a clip from an interview with uber-conservative, Paul Ryan, who not so long ago had plans, you might recall, to be Vice-President of the U. S.  The interview was conducted by a local reporter in Flint, MI, one of the poorest and most violent urban areas of America.  Ryan offered this suggestion for solving the crime and violence problems of Flint:

            the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity in the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society.

Maddow and most other progressives were aghast when they heard an Ayn Rand conservative like Paul Ryan say such a thing.  Oddly, however, when a New York Times writer/reporter draws the same conclusion, as Paul Tough does in his bestseller, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, the “progressive” establishment is either silent as church mice or ready to throw contributions (tax deductible) into the corporate offering plate to actively support school programs like KIPP that are aimed to do just what Paul Ryan had the temerity to admit, and for which we are rightfully indignant. 

Tough’s liberal framing of Paul Ryan’s goal to teach America’s urban poor good discipline and character is imbued with a thinly-veiled social engineering urge that is growing stronger by the day.  It is based on a messy collection of far-fetched extrapolations from a science-seeming psychological intervention that is now being employed in the education reform schools by non-professionals who haven’t the foggiest notion of what kind of damage they are doing to the children of the poor who are, otherwise, being “cured” of the ill effects of poverty. Tough is a good writer, too good to have written such an implausible promo for the kinds of neo-eugenic ministrations that he supports in this book as a solution to the “character problem” and the “executive functioning” problem of those among us who are now viewed by elites in much the same way that the grandfathers of Tough’s generation might have viewed the “culturally deprived” version of the “white man’s burden” during the 1950s and 1960s. 

There are significant differences between then and now, however, and the most obvious one has to do with money.  In the 1960s, the War on Poverty poured billions into job training programs and educational interventions like Title I, all aimed to ameliorate some of the grosser educational inequities with programs that left in place structural inequalities like segregated housing that were viewed by liberals as too entrenched and controversial to garner support for changing. Today poverty rates are higher than when President Johnson declared the War on Poverty in 1964, but the preferred solution over economic intervention is a thoroughly unproven and un-researched form of psychological programming for children that hopes to excavate new roadways in the cognitive maps of young brains in order to inoculate them from the effects of poverty, which remains a problem too expensive to fix for the elites who advocate this new form of eugenics.  Today’s concentration of social efficiency goals would make the advocates of scientific management a hundred years ago blush, with even the charity by the rich, now called venture philanthropy, turned into tax-sheltered investments with immediate returns as well as a big future payoff.  Cashing in down the road will come as a result of the systematic indoctrination of a whole generation of urban poor, to be accomplished through corporate reform schools that are given free rein to run their psychological experiments on America’s most vulnerable children.

The old eugenics of our great-grandfathers advanced the belief that those deemed a threat to the health of society, by way of inheritable behaviors, mental disorders, character malfunctions, and physical disabilities, had defective “germ plasm” that could not be improved but, rather, needed curtailing from further reproduction in offspring. That “crisis” led to 30-plus states passing mandatory sterilization laws that produced over 60,000 individual sterilizations.  The unfinished legacy of that dark episode lives on, with victims even today hoping to be somehow compensated for their sexual maiming during another “progressive” era that eagerly embraced social steering based on a crackpot pseudo-science over the rights of its most vulnerable citizens. 

The new eugenics is not nearly so pessimistic about changing the defective character of the poor.  In fact, today’s equally arrogant and misguided scheme to save poor children from their defective character is full of positivity, you might say, from the guru of positive psychology, himself—Dr. Martin Seligman.  Seligman’s pioneering work on learned helplessness and learned optimism are central, in fact, to the carving of new cognitive tracks in the malleable brains of elementary and middle school children, whose structural plasticity lends itself well to alternating jolts of learned helplessness and learned optimism—the mainstays of the new and improved post-New Age version of breaking ‘em down to build ‘em up.

And what kind of character flaws is Tough trying to find scientific justification for altering?  Well, it’s not children’s moral character that the white missionary girls from TFA are trying their darnedest to improve in these charter reform schools like KIPP; it is, rather, something Tough calls “performance character,” which is a distillation of the more expansive list of traits developed by Seligman and Peterson that, if developed fully, will create an unending psychological drip of happiness memes.  Think of it as if the power of an invisible hand had writ these qualities on every poor child’s digital tablet to carry around with them and apply as each situation demands:  grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, curiosity (p. 76).  Gone are those old-school character traits such as honesty, integrity, loving thy cubicle companion, etc.  Tough, in fact, attempts to make the case that moral character is based on moral law that, by necessity, is imposed by some higher authority.  In following Seligman and Peterson, Tough claims “moral laws were limiting when it came to character because they reduced virtuous conduct to a simple matter of obedience to a higher authority” (p. 59).

Moral character is traded in, then, for “performance character.”  The new “performance character” traits that KIPP co-founder, David Levin, has boiled down for child consumption focuses first and foremost on “grit,” which is to say the individual possession of a kind of crusty abrasiveness or personality pumice that may turn any barrier into “zest,” we might suppose.  According to Tough, Levin believes his approach stands far above any charge of cultural colonialism because “the character-strength approach is…fundamentally devoid of value judgment” (p. 60).  Tough doesn’t bother to explain how Levin’s derived values of grit, self-control, and gratitude are any less of an imposition than, let’s say, wisdom, justice, and temperance.  We may only surmise that Levin’s blindness to his own imposition of corporate ethics is intended to cloak any sign of force feeding for the children who are imposed upon daily to view their own mistreatment as an indicator that they, themselves, are not working hard or being good enough to be treated with dignity.  The drawing below is a copy of a worksheet that Seligman disciple, Angela Duckworth, has used in developing the performance character curriculum for poor kids in Philadelphia schools.  Note that children are taught to swallow and digest the abuse handed down by authority figures whose verbal assaults are to be viewed as sure signs of their care for children who must do better in order to avoid what children believe is deserved denigration (click image to enlarge).

Tough’s book is out to promote an abusively-deployed variety of moral colonialism disguised as character building, even if he takes the most roundabout way to reach the conclusion from which he started, which may be stated thusly for those disinclined to read the book:  KIPP and the education reform schools like it are doing the necessary work to save non-privileged, defective cultures from their own defective character, by making their children salable commodities in the future job market through a psychological regimen we would call brainwashing if it were used by a drug-crazed preacher in a faraway jungle like Guyana.   Tough’s defense of the new eugenics is built upon a shaky collection of scientific tidbits and inappropriate analogies to other more humane interventions that Tough apparently believes are not unalike the pedagogical brutality and mind alteration practices that occur in the corporate reform schools such as KIPP.  For instance, Tough analogizes from his experiences reporting on New York City’s chess champion school, IS 318, and through a number of examples of single-minded obsession paying off in the world of chess, suggests there is some lesson that may be transferred to understand KIPP’s 10,000 hours of total compliance test preparation and psychological throttling.  As in other examples that Tough employs in his book, there are more differences between KIPP’s academic rigor mortis and becoming a chess champ than there are similarities. 

The first and most glaring difference has to do with a significant word that Tough advocates for and uses a good deal in the book—volition.  Now while the great chess champions do, indeed, choose at some point in their lives to be champions, as Scottish grandmaster, Jonathan Rowson, exemplifies in Tough’s retelling, the children of KIPP do not choose an education based on an unyielding behavioral catechism enforced by non-psychologists imposing behavioral-cognitive treatments to produce total compliance and complicity by children in their own subjugation.   Secondly, if the single-minded pursuit of becoming a grand master allows one to conclude that “chess is a creative and beautiful pursuit” and a “celebration of existential freedom,” what does the manipulative pursuit of scholar dollars teach, or years of enforced silence, or the thousands of hours of lockdown test prep accompanied by endless reams of mindless worksheets?  Is there some celebration of existential freedom in this “productive” performance of KIPPsterism?

Thirdly, if 10,000 hours of chess practice makes one a master, what does 10,000 hours of KIPP provide?  A slave who has learned how to accept her bondage, along with a mediocre score that earns a seat in a third-tier university where the odds are 5:1 of washing out?  This college outcome remains a stubborn fact, even with KIPP’s river of tax-sheltered cash to provide counselors, college academic coaches, and other interventions to raise the KIPP college graduation rate. Fourthly, the “joyousness” that results from chess is produced by the analysis of a problem and application of a solution from a repertoire of proven solutions or novel ones.  How is this at all analogous to the entirely rule-bound and low-level imitative and rote anesthesia of KIPP learning?  Tough offers no clues but seems to believe that sitting these two very different phenomena side by side will somehow lead readers to assume they are similar.

Tough does something similar at other places in the book.  For instance, the subject of stress reduction among children of impoverished families occupies a significant section in the first half of the book.  Stress levels are closely tied to “executive functioning” among children, and stress overloads are predictive of low executive functioning.  Since the improvement of “executive functioning,” as defined by increased memory skills, is the Holy Grail of the education reform industry, the industry has to pay attention to stress.  According to Tough’s interpretation of the research literature, however, it is not really stress that is the problem but, rather, the body’s response to stress.  Just as poverty is not the problem, but the stressed reactions to poverty:  “It wasn’t poverty itself that was compromising the executive function abilities of the poor kids.  It was the stress that went along with it” (p. 20). Now if this distinction seems too stupid for words, stick with me for a moment.  Since poverty is not the problem but, rather, the stress that goes along with it, and since the stress is not the problem but, rather, the body’s reaction to it, it stands to reform industry reason that changing the body’s reaction may now be viewed as the way to short-circuit the effects of poverty. And, of course, to change the body, we must change the mind, which is to say, we must change the brain: 

The reason that researchers who care about the gap between rich and poor are so excited about executive functions is that these skills are not only highly predictive of success; they are also quite malleable, much more so than other cognitive skills. The prefrontal cortex is more responsive to intervention than other parts of the brain, and it stays flexible well into adolescence and early adulthood.  So if we can improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning, we can increase his prospects for success in a particularly efficient way (p. 21).

In the pursuit of “better executive functioning,” Tough appears totally oblivious to the fact that KIPP adds another form of stress atop the ones already at work on children living in poverty.  It seems, too, that Tough finds nothing breath-taking about the neo-eugenic agenda of these new 21^st Century efficiency zealots, who prefer child brain tinkering to the more expensive structural interventions and resource reallocations required for addressing poverty.  If KIPP and the KIPP wannabe reform schools can “improve a child’s environment in the specific ways that lead to better executive functioning [better memorization skills], then who needs to be concerned, it would seem, that these new environments are segregated, total compliance reform “families” run by young, white missionary types who have been treated generously, themselves, to Seligman’s performance character regimen during their six weeks of TFA teacher training. The quote above certainly clears up what Tough meant back in the Introduction when he waxed poetic about using “the tools of science to peel back the mysteries of childhood” (p. xxiv). 

In this entirely creepy form of scientific reductionism practiced on children deemed defective by their poverty, the sociological and psychological manifestations of poverty are boiled down from actions to behaviors to neuronal reactions to molecular and protein interactions.  And these most basic interactions are, then, alterable with the right “cognitive control system” that can re-regulate anti-social urges by altering the brain chemistry that controls them.  If you think this sounds too much like a variation on Clockwork Orange, you would be right, and if you think that Paul Tough surely could not be promoting such a system, I invite you to read the book.

In the end, Tough’s zeal for pseudo-scientific psychological experimentation on children by non-professionals is driven by his own misplaced anger on behalf of poor children.  As the angry do-gooder, then, he represents the liberal element of the coalition in support of the new eugenics.  He is joined by the college presidents such as liberal ethicist and president of UPenn, Amy Gutmann and over twenty other Ivy League presidents who share Tough’s misdirected anger and who have created a special category of affirmative action for former KIPPsters.  For conservatives who support KIPP and the other learning chain gangs that emulate them, the goal of social control is as transparent as was Paul Ryan’s calloused comments in Flint, Michigan.  For liberals like Tough, however, who blame parents, teachers, and schools in these poorest neighborhoods for failures that the inequitable system of schooling has guaranteed and its high stakes testing perpetuates, the goal becomes masked by a technicist indignation and a privileged arrogance that is used by liberals to set themselves apart from the racist and classist system from which all of us privileged folks benefit.  And if Tough could make the case that he, indeed, acknowledges his own role in the system that we, the privileged, perpetuate, which would create the moral necessity to change things for the better, he fails to keep in mind that children’s brains are not things that are to be changed so that our economic privileges may be kept inoculated from the required financial sacrifices that could help us avoid, perhaps, the further rotting away of our moral fiber. 

Teachers who have taught at KIPP and who are sharing their stories know why children refer to KIPP as Kids in Prison Program.  They know about enforced silence that keeps them from getting to know and connect with their students.  They know about their screaming colleagues who rant and rave to maintain order, and they know about the humiliation children are made to feel at even minor infractions of the rules.  They know about barking orders to “Track Me,” and  they know about the constant surveillance that leaves no peace for students or teachers. They know about the special education children whose IEPs are ignored.  They know, too about the management methods that always made them feel as if the 70-90 hours they were giving each week was not enough, and they know about the sense of personal weakness they felt on those rare occasions when they had to use a sick day.  They know all about the guilt they felt for having a life outside KIPP.  They know about children who have been mistreated and abused, and they know about administrators and teachers who lost jobs because their humanity got in the way of rule enforcement to subdue children and to make them as hard as the psychological catechism they are brainwashed to live by.  They know about the children whose emotional family histories kept them from making it through the KIPP gauntlet, and they know those children blamed themselves, rather than the draconian “no excuses” school model that provides millionaire investors with tax breaks to fund the cheapest of all solutions to the problems that arise from poverty.

I think that Paul Tough is probably ignorant of all these things that teachers know, but I am not at all sure he has any curiosity to find out what teachers, children, and parents know.  I do hope the next book that he is paid to write about education reform schools goes beyond the search for evidence to support some hare-brained theory meted out upon poor children in ways that thoroughly displace the humane responsiveness and humility required to help any children, poor or otherwise, to become whole adults, rather than emotional eunuchs trained to perform, and not to think and feel.

Reference:

Tough, P.  (2012).  How children succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character.  New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Paul Tough, KIPP, and the "Science" of Cultural Sterilization

Paul Tough is touring the country promoting his new book, which is is to say he is on a nationwide tour promoting KIPP.  For the book, How Children Succeed:Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character  reads as an unabashed paean to the kind of segregated, bare-knuckled corporate education reform for the poor that has made KIPP the darling of the oligarchs and hedge funders. With the help of CIA consultant, Dr. Martin Seligman and his disciples at UPenn, the KIPP gang is developing a designer mind intervention intended to create a culturally-sterilized corps of black order takers and low level corporate drones who never complain and always ask How High? when the boss man says, Jump.

If the KIPP neo-eugenic treatment can be perfected by Seligman and David Levin (co-founder of KIPP), America may finally be on the road to ridding itself of the inferior and depraved cultures that are responsible for poverty and its effects, and we may herald a new day when the unfit accept their own responsibility for their unfitness and, then, work double time to make up for their own shortcomings that keep them from entering the the gritty corporate bubble where down always looks up, where everyone keeps on the sunny side of an increasingly shady Wall Street.

Yesterday the Memphis Commercial-Appeal had a story on the eminent visit of Tough to the Memphis KIPP store to pump his book and KIPP.  Now from Tough's past writings in the New York Times, we know that David Levin of KIPP did not conceive his "character building" KIPP program until 2005, when he first met Prof. Seligman.  And according to Tough, the character curriculum with its report card broken down to tenths of points did not go into effect until 2011.  So it was amazing to me that Commercial Appeal story had this:

Two years after it began emphasizing character in New York KIPP schools, college graduation rates there jumped to 46 percent. (Nationally, according to census data, 10 percent of students in poverty graduate from college.)

Does anyone with half a brain intact see a problem here?  How could a program started two years ago in a middle school affect college graduation rates for students from years ago?  How do I know the 46 percent rate is from years ago?  Because I found it in an excerpt of Tough's misleading and obfuscating book:

In addition to targeting character development through message saturation, Levin has also introduced a CPA (Character Point Average) for his students at KIPP, to go alongside their GPA. Teachers give every student a score on each of the 7 character strengths during reporting periods, which scores are then crunched into a CPA that shows up on a student’s report card. On parent-teacher interview night, the teachers go over the student’s CPA with the student and their parents, and together they explore which character strengths should be targeted for improvement, and how to go about doing this (loc. 1768-93).
The importance of having the CPA is that it implies that character is not only important, but that it can be improved. And once again, psychologists agree that this is a very important message—and one that is very effective in increasing achievement in many different areas (loc. 1729-44, 1747).

It is still too early to draw any definitive conclusions regarding whether or not the measures being taken at KIPP will bring success. However, recent numbers regarding the college graduation rate of KIPP alumni look promising. As tough reports, “the six-year graduation rate had gone up from 21 percent, for the Class of 2003… to 46 percent, for the Class of 2005” (loc. 1803). Still, many of the students at KIPP continue to struggle with issues of character strength (loc. 1809), so the new measures cannot be considered a silver bullet—though they are at least promising.

This is exactly how embedded lies by well-paid propagandists end up as monstrous quotable lies in newspapers that reporters like Jane Roberts record without ever checking or even thinking about the ridiculousness of the claim.

Meanwhile, the wholesale indoctrination of KIPPsters continues unabated and celebrated by those wealthy donors who believe that manipulating the psychology of children offers a more efficient solution to the ravages of poverty than actually doing something about poverty.

Gritty and Grateful: Manufacturing Morality and Engineering Character, Pt. 1

KIPP teachers believe their job is to teach 49 percent academics and 51 percent character.  --Mike Feinberg 

Dr. Martin Seligman and his fellow psychological engineers are on a campaign to save the world by making it "happy," or at least to make sure that those who are not "happy" attain a level of "character" so as not to intrude on the well-deserved happiness of those who already have attained "authentic happiness."

Seligman has consulted the sages from Aristotle to the Zuni to come up a list of 24 common traits found among human civilizations, past and present, that would seem to constitute qualities that represent the individual and collective good of us humans.  From Paul Tough's NYTimes Magazine piece last Sunday:

The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude. 

Included on Seligman and Peterson's list but missing from Tough's short list are creativity, open-mindedness, love of learning, persistence, leadership, forgiveness, humility, prudence, hope and spirituality. 

Now pared down even more from Dr. Positivity's original list of 24 character traits is the final list adopted by KIPP, Inc. which translates "hope" as "optimism," changes "self-regulation" to "self-control," and uses "grit" for "persistence."

KIPP, Inc. Character Education: zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity. 

Now there is hardly any controversy to be generated from the Seligman and Peterson virtue list nor the abridged Tough list or even the Spartanized Feinberg and Levin list.  What will create hot debate and outrage, however, is that Seligman would engender these traits, virtues, qualities by devising interventions that essentially replace choice, reflection, and metacognition with behavioral-cognitive treatments.

In short, Seligman prefers a society that is psychologically engineered to be happy and productive to one that is ethically deliberative or, perhaps, one that is outraged that human civilization is in the process of being sacrificed for corporate profits.  How else can psychologists justify their existence to corporations that pay their bills if they do not have something that can benefit corporations?

Here is a sampling of instruments that Seligman's "authentic happiness" team is working to perfect.  You can actually help Dr. Seligman by filling out these questionnaires.  Thought that Myers-Briggs inventory was intrusive when you applied for that position?

Featured Questionnaire:

Compassionate Love Scale
Measures your tendency to support, help, and understand other people

Emotion Questionnaires:

Authentic Happiness Inventory Questionnaire
Measures Overall Happiness

CES-D Questionnaire
Measures Depression Symptoms

Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire
Measures Current Happiness

General Happiness Questionnaire
Assesses Enduring Happiness

PANAS Questionnaire
Measures Positive and Negative Affect

Engagement Questionnaires:

Brief Strengths Test
Measures 24 Character Strengths

Gratitude Questionnaire
Measures Appreciation about the Past

Grit Survey
Measures the Character Strength of Perserverance

Optimism Test
Measures Optimism About the Future

Transgression Motivations Questionnaire
Measures Forgiveness

VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire
Measures 24 Character Strengths

VIA Strength Survey for Children
Measures 24 Character Strengths for Children

Work-Life Questionnaire
Measures Work-Life Satisfaction

Meaning Questionnaires:

Close Relationships Questionnaire
Measures Attachment Style

Compassionate Love Scale
Measures your tendency to support, help, and understand other people

Meaning in Life Questionnaire
Measures Meaningfulness

Life Satisfaction Questionnaires:

Approaches to Happiness Questionnaire
Measures Three Routes to Happiness

Satisfaction with Life Scale
Measures Life Satisfaction

Fun parlor games, right?

KIPP's industrial strength school model for behaviorally neutering children is taking these parlor games one step further by devising a "gritty" curriculum for its imposition of self-control, gratitude, etc., and then assigning grades that would follow students just like their Algebra scores.  No doubt this new character testing will reap big benefits for KIPP's total compliance program.  Do you really think that you are going to get into Brown, young KIPPster, if you show little gratitude for that helpful teacher who is screaming in your face for your own good?

Below, in fact, is a cartoon worksheet (click to enlarge that is now in use in KIPP schools to teach the virtues of zest, grit, self-control, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism and curiosity:

Don't be sad or angry, boys and girls.  Be gritty and grateful!  Don't have a meltdown just because you have been put in isolation after your teacher has humiliated you in front of your classmates.  Show some zest--earns some KIPP dollars.

 Paul Tough's celebratory piece notes that the first KIPP character report cards went out last year at all four NYC KIPP stores:

Logistically, the character report card had been a challenge to pull off. Teachers at all four KIPP middle schools in New York City had to grade every one of their students, on a scale of 1 to 5, on every one of the 24 character indicators, and more than a few of them found the process a little daunting. And now that report-card night had arrived, they had an even bigger challenge: explaining to parents just how those precise figures, rounded to the second decimal place, summed up their children’s character. 

Two decimal places, wow! 

Now no one is going to get up in arms about these most marginalized children being treated like caged animals who are taught to be helpless and then happy. After all, these children have already shown they are disposable by the fact that we use taxpayer dollars to fund these corporate reform schools that thrive on this model.  This is the model to emulate in urban America.


But will the public recoil when the Seligman plan comes to privileged leafy enclaves like Riverdale, which it the subject of Part II.