Researchers tracked hundreds
of students in Baltimore to find out what top achievers had that others didn’t.
ALANA SEMUELS/
THE ATLANTIC /
What’s the
deciding factor behind kids who meet their potential and those who wind up
falling short?
That’s the
question undertaken by researchers Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist,
and Kathryn Edin, in the book Coming of Age in the Other America.
In 2010, the
authors interviewed 150 black young men and women who were born in the late
1980s and early 1990s to parents who lived in public housing. They spent hours
with the youth, talking to them in cars, in McDonald’s, in front stoops. In
2012, they followed up with 20 who were representative of the group.
Kids who
found what researchers call an “identity project,” essentially a passion or
hobby that helped motivate them, had a better chance to go onto college or
decent jobs. Out of the 116 youth studied who are not
still in high school, 90 percent of those with an identity project graduated,
while only 58 percent of those without one did so. And 82 percent of those with
an identity project were in school or working, compared to 53 percent of those
without an identity project.
The authors come away with some
very concrete policy proposals for how to help students through adolescence and
beyond. They suggest creating more robust mobility programs to ensure that kids
don’t grow up in the same concentrated poverty that their parents did and more
opportunities for “passion projects” in schools and after-schools by investing
more in libraries, clubs, and other institutions, and by expanding funding for
the arts.
The book also argues for
disseminating much more information to low-income students about what happens
when they graduate high school, and how the short-term choices they make about
where to go to school, what kind of degree to pursue, what kind of job to take,
could have very long-term consequences. This means better college and career
counseling in high school, more information about how students can parlay
community college experience into time at a four-year college, and more
information about how different courses of study lead to different jobs.
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