Success and Sterotyoes

The two article summaries for this week focus on the stereotypes and real reasons for success and achievement. In our preplanning summer meetings, I talked about an NPR report I had heard a few years ago outlining the three most important success indicators:  IQ, socioeconomic status, and self-control. It’s not that you can’t be successful if you don’t have those three—but success is easier with them.

Too often kids (and adults) look at highly successful people, especially athletes, and credit their success to raw talent that magically blossomed. (Most of us have probably heard that Albert Einstein failed middle school math and Bill Gates was a college drop-out.) However, as the articles below illustrate, success almost always includes hard work and education within a supportive environment. That's why Carol Dweck and Greg Bamford (out preplanning speaker last August) ask teachers and parents to connect student achievement with effort.

Enjoy the weekend!

Joe

In the NBA, Zip Code Matters

                                                                                        

The NBA’s best player by far is LeBron James, who was born poor to a 16-year-old single mother in Akron, Ohio. The conventional wisdom is that his background is typical for an N.B.A. player. A majority of Americans, Google consumer survey data show, think that the N.B.A. is composed mostly of men like Mr. James. But it isn’t.

I calculated the probability of reaching the N.B.A., by race, in every county in the United States.

Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the N.B.A. for both black and white men.

But this tells us only where N.B.A. players began life. Can we learn more about their individual backgrounds? Additionally, black N.B.A. players are about 30 percent less likely than the average black male to be born to an unmarried mother and a teenage mother.

From 1960 to 1990, nearly half of blacks were born to unmarried parents. I would estimate that during this period roughly twice as many black N.B.A. players were born to married parents as unmarried parents. In other words, for every LeBron James, there was a Michael Jordan, born to a middle-class, two-parent family in Brooklyn, and a Chris Paul, the second son of middle-class parents in Lewisville, N.C.

These results push back against the stereotype of a basketball player driven by an intense desire to escape poverty. In “The Last Shot,” Darcy Frey quotes a college coach questioning whether a suburban player was “hungry enough” to compete against black kids from the ghetto. But the data suggest that on average any motivational edge in hungriness is far outweighed by the advantages of kids from higher socioeconomic classes.

What are these advantages? The first is in developing what economists call non-cognitive skills like persistence, self-regulation and trust. We have grown accustomed to hearing about the importance of these qualities for success in school, but players in team sports rely on many of the same skills.

To see how poor non-cognitive skills can derail a career in sports, consider the tragic tale of Doug Wrenn, who was born five years before LeBron James, also to a single mother in a poor neighborhood. He, too, was rated among the top basketball players in high school. But Wrenn, unlike LeBron James, was notoriously uncoachable and consistently in legal trouble. He was kicked off two college teams, went undrafted, bounced around lower leagues,moved in with his mother and was eventually imprisoned for assault.

The second relevant advantage of a relatively prosperous upbringing is height. The economist Robert W. Fogel has demonstrated the impact of improved early life nutrition on adult height over successive generations. Poor children in contemporary America still have substandard nutrition, holding back their development. They have higher infant mortality rates and lower average birth weights, and recent research has found that poverty in modernAmerica inhibits height.

After winning his second N.B.A. championship last June, LeBron James said in an interview: “I’m LeBron James. From Akron, Ohio. From the inner city. I am not even supposed to be here.” Twitter and other social networks erupted with criticism. How could such a supremely gifted person, identified from an absurdly young age as the future of basketball, claim to be an underdog? The more I look at the data, the more it becomes clear that Mr. James’s accomplishments are more exceptional than they appear to be at first. Anyone from a difficult environment, no matter his athletic prowess, has the odds stacked against him.

Article that summarizes the book The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

The conventional wisdom is that without warning, in the midst of ordinary, everyday life, a Kid from Nowhere appears. The Kid posses a mysterious natural gift for painting/math/baseball/physics, and through thepower of that gift, he changes his life and the lives of those around him.

But it’s not magic. It’s not genes.

Coyle found a consistent formula:

Ignition – An event or role model that provides powerful motivation to work hard and a belief that excellent performance is achievable.

Master coaching – These teachers are “talent whisperers” who help develop a love for doing something, fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in students.

Deep practice – Hard, sustained work at the outer limits of one’s current ability, developing physical or mental skill to the next level.

In Coyle’s visits to one talent hotspot after another, he found the same basic process: a lot of slow, difficult work (in the neighborhood of 10,000 hours, the amount that some researchers say is necessary for high proficiency), excellent coaches or teachers (soft and loving at first, then more demanding), and a spark of inspiration – all producing amazing achievement. Here are some of the hotspots:

Brazilian soccer – With five World Cup victories, 900 young players signed by professional European clubs each year, and a procession of stars, there’s no question that Brazil is a talent hotspot. The conventional explanation is that it’s the climate, a traditional love of the sport, and the drive to escape poverty – but those factors were in place in the 1940s and 50s when Brazil did not excel internationally. Coyle found the real reason: since the 1950s, Brazilians have trained in a particular way that improves ball-handling faster than anywhere else in the world. Young Brazilians playthousands of hours of futsal – a shrunk-down version of soccer played with a smaller, heavier ball in an enclosed space.

The Bronte sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne, living in the middle of nowhere with their tyrannical father and no mother, wrote some of the greatest works of English literature – among them Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, and The Tenant of Windfell Hall –before dying at a young age. The explanation? The sisters spent countless hours writing “immature and imitative” children’s books just for fun before settling down to write more serious literature. Their childhood writings were collaborative deep practice where they developed their storytelling muscles.

Japanese schools – The Japanese want their kids to struggle. American teachers, though, worked like waiters. Whenever there was a struggle, they wanted to move past it, make sure the class kept gliding along. But you don’t learn by gliding. One study found that Japanese 8th graders spend 44 percent of their class time inventing, thinking, and actively struggling with underlying concepts. American students spend less than one percent on similar activities.

Parents, of course, are the ultimate teachers. Carol Dweck’s advice to parents boils down to two rules: Pay attention to what your children are fascinated by, and praise them for their effort.