Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why

Short Review: This is a short but very helpful look at why educating children from difficult backgrounds is harder and some of the promising areas education research. There is a mix here, it is both the difficult children's background (early development, stress, violence, low familial attachment, etc) and the institutions (focus on discipline, things that are easy to assess and institutional control) that contribute to the problem.

We can make changes to the environments of the children outside of school and we should work on that. But schools should be primarily concentrating on the institutional issues that make educating difficult children more difficult. I am happy that Tough does not present silver bullets. There are solutions, but the solutions are primarily long term environmental and institutional changes not short term program.

This is a very short book and so best thought of as an introduction and a good book for discussion. But it is surprisingly broad in its look at the issues for a book that is so short.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/helping-children-succeed/