Before I begin, I want to briefly address a couple of strategies that I’ll try to adhere to in the pages that follow. First, let me acknowledge a technique that journalists who write about social issues, as I do, often employ in our work. We describe a particular intervention—a school or a pedagogy or an after-school program or a community organization—and try to use that program, either explicitly or implicitly, as a model for others to emulate. Philanthropists and foundations that have as their mission improving the lives of the poor often do something similar: They look for programs that work and try to replicate them, scale them up to reach as broad an audience as possible. There are solid reasons behind the replication strategy. It is the basic growth paradigm of the technology world, in fact: Try a bunch of new things, identify the one that is most successful, and ramp it up. Focusing on successful models is an attractive approach for a narrative journalist, too, because people generally prefer reading emotionally resonant stories about individuals in pursuit of a worthy goal to slogging through lots of dry research and statistics.
But there are limitations to this kind of journalism—and this kind of philanthropy, too. Scaling up doesn’t work as well in social service and education as it does in the tech world. The social-science literature is rife with examples of small, high-quality programs that seem to become much less effective when they expand and replicate. And the focus on individual stories, while satisfying in a narrative sense, can also distract us from what is arguably a more significant question: If this school (or preschool or mentoring program) works, why does it work? What are the principles and practices that make it successful?
So my aim here is to examine interventions not as model programs to be replicated but as expressions of certain underlying ideas and strategies. My premise is that no program or school is perfect, but that each successful intervention contains some clues about how and why it works that can inform the rest of the field. My goal is to extract and explain the core principles of each program I write about and look for common threads running through them.
There is a second challenge facing anyone trying to find strategies to address the problems of disadvantaged children. In this country, at least, we tend to divide childhood into a series of discrete chapters, segmented like clothing sizes or the aisles in a public library: infants and toddlers over here, elementary school students over there, teenagers somewhere else entirely. This is broadly true of researchers, of advocacy groups, of philanthropies, and of government bureaucracies. Take public policy. On the federal level, children’s education in their earliest years is the province of the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs Head Start and other early-childhood programs through its Administration for Children and Families. On the first day of kindergarten, though, responsibility for a child’s education is magically whisked over to the Department of Education, which oversees primary and secondary education. This same bureaucratic divide occurs at the state and county level, where, with rare exceptions, early-childhood and school-system administrators do not collaborate or even communicate much.
These divisions are understandable. Trying to take on the full scope of childhood can seem too sprawling a mission for any one government agency or foundation, let alone any teacher or mentor or social worker. But the chief drawback to this fragmented approach is that we can miss the common themes and patterns that persist through the stages of a child’s life. I aim here to follow a different strategy: to consider the developmental journey of children, and particularly children growing up in circumstances of adversity, as a continuum—a single unbroken story from birth through the end of high school.