Grit, overemphasized; agency, overlooked

Our new relentless focus on grit is undermining what’s really required to help students achieve.

Grit is receiving a lot of attention as a critical component for academic success. Americans admire rugged individualism, but overemphasizing grit oversimplifies the problems facing education and what it takes for students to achieve.

Isabel Garcia, a junior at a public high school in Queens, N.Y., is a good example. Isabel has cerebral palsy, which restricts her from fully controlling her movements. Isabel’s teachers say she’s one of their hardest workers — full of “grit” — always completing assignments on time and maintaining respectful averages in the 80th percentiles. However, when it comes to standardized testing, Isabel fails repeatedly. Her teachers feel a shared helplessness in knowing that she has prepared for hours but cannot succeed in the testing environment required for these assessments.

Though Isabel’s teachers devote extra time and help her with testing techniques, they know the odds are against her. All the grit in the world won’t help Isabel on state tests like the comprehensive Regents Exams, which she must pass to earn the well-regarded Regents Diploma.

Isabel’s story illustrates the problem of focusing on grit: losing sight of structural obstacles in the path of student success. Millions of other students like Isabel have physical, emotional, and social disabilities that prevent them from thriving in traditional settings. When we say one student succeeds because they are “grittier,” educators and policy makers ignore the hurdles for students like Isabel, who are determined but face institutional limits to unlocking their potential as young scholars.

By overemphasizing grit, we tend to attribute a student’s underachievement to personality deficits like laziness. This reinforces the idea that individual effort determines outcomes. Failing students cease to be a collective concern that potentially could be addressed through creative policies. This way, differences in student performance are discussed apart from factors that contribute to them, such as disparities in per-pupil spending, unequal access to resources, and tremendous differences in how much time middle-class and lower-income children spend learning.

Infinite grit won’t remedy the income disparity in America, the highest among First World countries. Socioeconomic status and race continue to be the dominant predictors for future academic success and college-readiness. If we change our language from talking about the “achievement gap” to acknowledging an “opportunity gap,” we might do more to address the limitations confronting our learners.

Instead of grit, we’d be wiser to focus on building capacity through agency. Like grit, agency requires action but considers one’s ability to act and create change, without glossing over structural inequalities. Agency is not an individual trait. Schools, groups, and communities can organize to grow agency for collective interests.

Focusing on grit has distracted educators and policy makers from the real issue of structural obstacles in the path of student success.

P.S. 40 in Bedford Stuyvesant has achieved the highest gains in mathematics and literacy of all public elementary schools in Brooklyn. All of its students come from homes below the poverty line, 28% are in special education, and 40% are homeless. Certainly most of these students and their teachers possess enormous grit. But to fully explain their phenomenal success in this challenging context requires acknowledging how the school works to build each student’s agency to contend with obstacles. The school assertively addresses academic and nonacademic needs. Through community efforts, it has built partnerships with social services and healthcare agencies, extended its school day, and worked with community organizations to address the needs of parents. The school improved achievement by first expanding opportunity.

Agency empowers young people to use education to take control of their lives. As young people come to view knowledge as a source of power, they become invested in learning and able to see the relevance of school in shaping their future.

If you teach a kid to fish, you have taught him how to feed himself.

But why stop there?

Build a support system to help her understand why the river is polluted, so she can organize with friends to get the river clean, making it possible for the entire community to eat, too.

Citation: Kundu, A. (2014). Backtalk: Grit, overemphasized; agency, overlooked. Phi Delta Kappan, 96 (1), 80.