Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

But not only did he teach them calculus, he (and his colleague, Benjamin Jimenez) took them to the top of the national charts in math. In 1987, only three other public schools in the country had more students taking the Advanced Placement Calculus test. Those three included Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science, both elite math-and-science-oriented schools in New York.

What’s more, most of the Garfield students earned test grades that were high enough to gain them college credits. In the whole country that year, only a few hundred Mexican American students passed the test at this level. This means there’s a lot of intelligence out there being wasted by underestimating students’ potential to develop.

Marva Collins

Most often when kids are behind—say, when they’re repeating a grade—they’re given dumbed-down material on the assumption that they can’t handle more. That idea comes from the fixed mindset: These students are dim-witted, so they need the same simple things drummed into them over and over. Well, the results are depressing. Students repeat the whole grade without learning any more than they knew before.

Instead, Marva Collins took inner-city Chicago kids who had failed in the public schools and treated them like geniuses. Many of them had been labeled “learning disabled,” “retarded,” or “emotionally disturbed.” Virtually all of them were apathetic. No light in the eyes, no hope in the face.

Collins’s second-grade public school class started out with the lowest-level reader there was. By June, they reached the middle of the fifth-grade reader, studying Aristotle, Aesop, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Poe, Frost, and Dickinson along the way.

Later when she started her own school, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Zay Smith dropped in. He saw four-year-olds writing sentences like “See the physician” and “Aesop wrote fables,” and talking about “diphthongs” and “diacritical marks.” He observed second graders reciting passages from Shakespeare, Longfellow, and Kipling. Shortly before, he had visited a rich suburban high school where many students had never heard of Shakespeare. “Shoot,” said onef Collins’s students, “you mean those rich high school kids don’t know Shakespeare was born in 1564 and died in 1616?”

Students read huge amounts, even over the summer. One student, who had entered as a “retarded” six-year-old, now four years later had read twenty-three books over the summer, including A Tale of Two Cities

and Jane Eyre. The students read deeply and thoughtfully. As the three- and four-year-olds were reading about Daedalus and Icarus, one four-year-old exclaimed, “Mrs. Collins, if we do not learn and work hard, we will take an Icarian flight to nowhere.” Heated discussions of Macbeth were common.

Alfred Binet believed you could change the quality of someone’s mind. Clearly you can. Whether you measure these children by the breadth of their knowledge or by their performance on standardized tests, their minds had been transformed.

Benjamin Bloom, an eminent educational researcher, studied 120 outstanding achievers. They were concert pianists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers, world-class tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists. Most were not that remarkable as children and didn’t show clear talent before their training began in earnest. Even by early adolescence, you usually couldn’t predict their future accomplishment from their current ability. Only their continued motivation and commitment, along with their network of support, took them to the top.

Bloom concludes, “After forty years of intensive research on school learning in the United States as well as abroad, my major conclusion is: What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.” He’s not counting the 2 to 3 percent of children who have severe impairments, and he’s not counting the top 1 to 2 percent of children at the other extreme that include children like Michael. He is counting everybody else.

Ability Levels and Tracking

But aren’t students sorted into different ability levels for a reason? Haven’t their test scores and past achievement shown what their ability is? Remember, test scores and measures of achievement tell you where a student is, but they don’t tell you where a student could end up.

Falko Rheinberg, a researcher in Germany, studied schoolteachers with different mindsets. Some of the teachers had the fixed mindset. They believed that students entering their class with different achievement levels were deeply and permanently different:

“According to my experience students’ achievement mostly remains constant in the course of a year.”

“If I know students’ intelligence I can predict their school career quite well.”

“As a teacher I have no influence on students’ intellectual ability.”