Whatever It Takes By Paul Tough Themes

Whatever It Takes by Paul ToughThemes: Create visionary leadership Foster an environment that eliminates barriers to success Mobilize shared responsibility and mutual accountability Focus on resultsChapter 5: Battle Mode 127.1: ‚Everything we do at Promise Academy is going to be different ‛Visionary Leadership 127.2: ‛the woman who would have direct responsibility for the success of the6th grade: Terri Grey, principal of Promise Academy Middle School.‛Visionary Leadership 128.4: ‚We want every single one of you to go to college.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 129. 1: Coleman report- how minority students were shortchanged by fundinginequities, but concluded students’ home environments and peer groupsmattered more than their schoolsShared responsibility and mutual accountability 129.1: ‚Could good schools overcome bad environments, or not?‛Shared responsibility and mutual accountability 129.2: Rothstein, author of Class and Schools argued that it was unfair andmisguided to put all of the blame for the poor academic performance of poor andminority student on schools and teachersShared responsibility and mutual accountability 129.3: Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, authors of No Excuses: Closing the RacialGap on Learning argued the real problem was not socioeconomic disadvantage; itwas a school system that didn’t educate poor childrenShared responsibility and mutual accountability 130.2: Successful charters: KIPP Academy founded by Levin and Feinberg,extended day, extended year, strict rules of conduct; Amistad Academy, NorthStar Academy1

130.3: Thernstroms concluded that poor minority students could succeed if theywere immersed in an educational environment that was demanding, disciplined,and well runEnvironment eliminates barriers to success 134.2: Canada believed Promise Academy students needed more instructionaltime (extended day, extended year, tutoring am/pm, remedial catch-up drills)Focus on results 135.2: Stanley Druckenmiller, funder ; Canada agreed with Druckenmiller that abusiness model was the right approach for Promise Academy; act like a ruthlesscapitalist devoted to the bottom lineFocus on results 136.3: ‚We have to be every bit as focused on results as they are.‛Focus on results 137.2: ‚How much do we need to do? Start from the result you want toachieve work backward, figuring out every single thing you have to do in orderto get there.‛Focus on results 145.4: ‚The war is those 1s; those kids we don’t think are going to move. We can’tsurrender that ground. Don’t put this off. Go into battle mode now and staythere. Fight the war now.‛Visionary LeadershipChapter 6: Bad Apples 159.3: Practices that delivered results: more time on task, an extended day and anextended school year, principal/teacher recruitment and training, lessonplanning as an art form, yearly, monthly, daily goals, formative assessment, datato inform/reform instructionFocus on results 162.1: ‚If you are made to feel special and elite, you tend to work harder.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 162.2: ‚And this situation- a blighted neighborhood producing a select group ofhigh-achieving kids who manage to accomplish great things and succeed beyond2

their peers- was exactly the one Canada was trying to avoid when he set upHCZ.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 162.2: ‚Canada was tired of programs that helped a few kids beat the odds andmake it out of the ghetto; his goal was to change the odds, and to do it for all ofHarlem’s kids.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 163.1: ‚ the only way to save large numbers of poor children in a neighborhoodlike Harlem was to give them all a high-quality education, even the leastmotivated and least prepared, beginning at a very young age, and to do it in thecontext of a broader transformation of the entire community.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 165.1: ‚The only thing that needed to be fixed at Promise Academy was ‘blockingand tackling’, the basic nuts and bolts of school management that Terri Grey wasunable to master; solving discipline problems, collecting useful data on students’progress, developing curriculum, managing teachers.‛Visionary Leadership 167.3: ‚Grey felt that Canada was demanding Kipp like results without givingher the toolsEnvironment eliminates barriers to success 170.2: ‚We’re in the kid saving business. That’s not what schools traditionallydo, but that’s what we do.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 171.1:‛So you’ve got to rally the troops. That’s why you’re a leader. We’re in awar. You have to walk in the door with a take-no-prisoners, I’m in charge, moveover a new sheriff’s in town attitude. I don’t care what the evidence is. I believethere’s a way of getting this done.‛Visionary Leadership 172.1: ‚Expectations will be set very high for your children. If we try to reach thestars, we will land on the moon.‛Visionary Leadership 172.2: ‚By working hard I mean you have to make every effort at all times tosucceed. Failure is not an option. We expect your children to be responsible for3

his or her behavior, and failure to adhere to these commitments will result on theloss of privileges.‛Visionary Leadership 172.3: ‚The new sheriff had apparently arrived.‛Visionary LeadershipChapter 7: Last Chance 175.3: ‚Pinder concluded that he needed what Grey had what Grey had onlydreamed of: a dean of students, an individual whose sole responsibility wasmaintaining order in the school.‛Visionary Leadership 175.3: ‚ Pinder and Finn conducted an all day discipline for every teacher in theschool, sharing the tips and strategies that Finn had gathered.‛Visionary Leadership 178.1: ‚We have to do better. The sole purpose of us being here –teachers,assistants, everybody-is to prepare you to go to college. Every decision that Imake, every choice that we make as educators is going to be made so that youcan be-‚Visionary Leadership 178.2: ‚We have not lowered our standards this year; we have raised ourstandards.‛Focus on results 183.2: ‚Druckenmiller’s largesse, and 40 new part-time reading and mathspecialists had been hired for the school’ second year.‛Eliminate barriers to success 184.1: ‚Canada’s plan for the year was to gather as much data on each studentand to crunch and sort and cross-reference it so carefully and completely thatevery adult who came into contact with a child would know exactly his or heracademic strengths and weaknesses ‛Focus on results 187.3: ‚Crisis is good. As worried as everybody is about the reputation of theorganization and the school, I think it is well worth it to be in the heart of this4

battle and to struggle with it. It’s been a long time that we as an agency have putourselves n the line.‛Visionary Leadership 187.4: ‚It is clear to me that if we don’t get good scores this year, things will haveto change.‛Mobilize shared responsibility and mutual accountabilityChapter 8: The Conveyor Belt 193.1: ‚Dimitry Materov, 2007, ‚Skill begets skill; learning begets learning. Earlydisadvantage if left untreated, leads to academic and social difficulties in lateryears. Advantages accumulate; so do disadvantages.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 194.1: ‚His conclusions are in many ways similar to Geoffrey Canada’s: the bestand simplest way to prepare children for a successful life is for their parents togive them everything they need at home, in their earliest years.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 194.2: ‚ he was deeply engrossed in his early childhood initiative, and he wasincreasingly preoccupied by a concept he was calling the conveyor belt.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 195.3: ‚Canada added another section to the conveyor belt: a brand new programto precede Gems called the Three-year-old Journey (graduate school version ofBaby College), open to parents whose children who had been selected in thekindergarten lottery.Environment eliminates barriers to success 196.2: ‚In 2008, nearly every incoming kindergarten student would be a graduateof an intensive 11 month pre-kindergarten program, and their parents wouldhave been through two separate parenting programs. They would be preparedfor kindergarten in a way that few children in Harlem had ever been before.‛(Baby College, Three-year –Old Journey, Harlem Gems, Promise Academy)Environment eliminates barriers to success 197.2: ‚ if we start with kids very early, and we provide them with the kind ofintense and continuous academic rigor and support that they need, then when5

they get to the middle school and high school level, were not going to need thosesuper human strategies at all.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 198.3: ‚if we continue waiting until middle school and high school to intervenewith poor students of color I just don’t think that we’re going to change thenumbers in America as a whole.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 205.1: ‚Harlem Gems did all of the regular pre-kindergarten activities; howeverthe difference was that throughout the day, at every turn, the emphasis was onlanguage.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 207.2: ‚Most remarkably, over three years, not a single student was stillconsidered delayed or very delayed after a year at Harlem Gems.‛Environment eliminates barriers to success 210.3: ‚More than any other kind of intervention in the loves of low-incomechildren, intensive prekindergarten programs have an impressive track record.Environment eliminates barriers to success 212.3: ‚Fall, 2007, the first Promise Academy kindergarten class, the studentschosen at the lottery in April 2004, would be going into third grade, where theywould take their first NYS reading and math assessments. If they looked likeaverage American scores, then Canada would have the first concrete evidencethat he might be onto something that he might have finally found the rightstrategy and the right tools not just to close the gap between poor kids andmiddle class kids, but to keep it closed.‛Create visionary leadershipFoster an environment that eliminates barriers to successMobilize shared responsibility and mutual accountabilityFocus on results6

1 Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough Themes: Create visionary leadership Foster an environment that eliminates barriers to success Mobilize shared responsibility and mutual accountability Focus on results Chapter 5: Battle Mode 127.1 ‚Everything we do at Promise Academy is going to be different‛ Visionary Leadership 127.2 ‛the woman who would have direct responsibility for the success of the