Latino Kindergartners Behave Well, But Can’t Read

I recently finished reading the book, “How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character,” by journalist Paul Tough. Tough provides an optimistic view of how a different kind of education might be the key in raising disadvantaged, urban, students of color out of poverty and into the middle class. He offers research from developmental psychology, the new area of positive psychology, economics, sociology, and education, to show that with a focus on students’ character and social skills, schools can overcome some of the cognitive and more traditional academic deficits that they carry as a burden. 

He does not discount that economic issues, poor institutional support, bad education policy, racism, and privilege conspire against urban minority youth, but his goal is to focus more on the pragmatic question of how to change lives in the face of the seemingly intractable forces of poverty and disadvantage. 

Not all of the research he presents is new, but it is powerful in its endurance; his ability to synthesize the vast literature into a cohesive argument is great. His argument is that character can be a stronger predictor of success in school than traditional measures of intelligence. Character includes, persistence, an ability to not be afraid of risk and failure and to learn from mistakes, the ability to delay gratification, to work hard, and being nice.

As I mentioned, psychologists have long known that these characteristics are associated with later success in life. One of the most famous examples of one of these characteristics is the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, which examined delayed gratification and self-control among pre-school age children.  In the experiment, a child is placed alone in a room with a marshmallow in front of her. A researcher tells the child that she will return in a few minutes and that if the child does not eat the marshmallow until her return, she can have two marshmallows. Videos of children anxiously awaiting the return of the experimenter and deciding whether to take the route of instant gratification are pretty hilarious.

The amazing findings of this study are the long-term relationship between success and putting off some pleasure. Researchers followed up with children who were able to put off the reward and found that they were more likely to graduate from high school, hold a job, and go to college than kids who were not able to wait.

For many years, psychologists believed that these were inherited traits that could not be changed and that they went along with the inherited trait of intelligence. But Tough shows that recent research has disentangled the two and has also shown that these character strengths can be learned, even very late in life, even after receiving a lousy traditional inner-city education. He provides some hopeful case studies of young people in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, who do amazing things like become chess masters and win national championships, do well at elite liberal arts colleges, and who simply beat the odds of the status that they were born into. 

This book, while a pleasure to read, with some very strong points, is geared more toward the black-white binary of how we view education, poverty, and race issues in America.

Latinos present a unique conundrum in light of Tough’s thesis and the research that supports it. Latinos, because of the strong cultural values of respect (respeto), obedience in hierarchical familial relations (machismo; familismo), calmness (tranquilidad), and hard work (echarle ganas), embody the character attributes that should lead to success later in life. Studies of Mexican-American youth confirm that they have better social skills in the toddler and pre-school years than non-Latino children. Simply, they are much better behaved-they follow directions, are obedient, and quiet.

Part of the reason that Mexican-American children are so well behaved is because they spend much of their childhoods up to kindergarten with their mothers. Latina mothers are the least likely of all ethnic groups to send their kids to daycare or pre-school. Again, we see the strong cultural orientation toward family and close-knit need for trust (confianza) shapes the behavior of Latinos. Latina mothers in general believe it is bad parenting to send their kids to be cared for out of the home. This allows them to have tight control over their kids’ development, making them much stronger in terms of their social skills.

The downside is that Latino children miss out on the academic focus that many pre-schools have in today’s age. A landmark study done in the 1960’s examined the effects of pre-school on low-income children in Michigan. The Highscope Perry Pre-School Study, similar to the marshmallow study, looked at the long-range effects of enrollment in a high quality pre-school. The findings were similarly powerful and astounding, with lower incarceration rates, higher incomes, and higher IQ scores for those who attended the school. 

We see the effects of not attending pre-school in the pre-literacy skills of Latino kindergarteners. They show up to school not ready to read, the way their non-Latino peers who went to pre-school are prepared, showing up already knowing their letters and numbers. These academic gaps only widen as time goes on, and as my colleague René Luis Alvarez noted in a previous post, Latinos end up at a significant disadvantage in terms of their high school graduate rates.

The story for Latinos becomes bleaker when we see that even their social and behavioral advantages are not maintained once they spend more time in dysfunctional public schools.

Just this week a study was released showing that diagnosis of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder is up among Latinos; this is a finding that reveals quite the opposite type of good social behavior that I described above. That being the case, it is not so surprising that we see Latino children like this 7-year-old who was handcuffed by the police for misbehaving in school. This is not to say the diagnoses are accurate or justified, nor was the inappropriate, overreaching response. Most likely the opposite is true, but where did the good social behavior that is found in the younger years go? 

So, Latinos, as usual, defy either-or solutions. The complexity and cultural heterogeneity of this group requires not only the focus on character, as Tough suggests, but a dedication to the maintenance of those social skills. Additionally, for a group that may have difficulties with English and has a parental generation with low levels of formal education, we can’t simply rely on good behavior and “ganas;” this is especially true because once in school, Latino children and youth quickly lose the social advantages they had, simply as a matter of survival in many urban public schools-especially true for boys, for whom it does not really pay off to be quiet, subservient, and respectful. Such a comprehensive approach that focuses on academics and social and cultural skills from a very young age is a tall order, but a necessary one given the youth and rapid growth of this group.