Heather Metzgar

Artifact Reflection
April 11, 2020

Helping Children Succeed was an excellent and applicable required text in the

Curriculum Theory class. The book starts with a statistic from 2013 about how just over half of

the students in the United States are categorized as low income. In 2020, I am sure that statistic is

outdated, and 51% has grown significantly. In MFISD, nearly 70% of our students are

categorized as low socio-economic. Students coming from poverty tend to face significant

barriers that contribute to their performance in schools such as inadequate healthcare, poor

nutrition, less supervision, less sleep, higher absenteeism, less access to enrichment, and often

less access to books or reading at home. In the opposite environment, children coming from

families with an average to above-average income who are read to, talked to, taken care of

nutritionally and medically, come to school way ahead of poor children.

What I love about Helping Children Succeed is that it highlights interventions and

strategies that have shown success in overcoming some of the challenges that often come with

poverty. Tough features interventions such as infant nutrition, parent training, home visits, and

child-care provider training. He challenges the conventional standards used for college and

career success. Instead, He focuses on non-cognitive qualities such as curiosity, self-control, and

grit and how fostering these skills better prepares students for adulthood. Tough argues that data

such as school attendance, discipline, on-time grade progression, and GPA, better predict future

success rather than test scores.

The overall message from Tough is that schools must focus on addressing non-academic

barriers before students are ready to learn the content schools teach. Although we know reading,
writing, and problem-solving are required skills to succeed in most workplace environments as

well as personal in relationships, schools must also focus on the soft-skills that will equip

students to persist during trials and tribulations that we all experience in life. Helping Children

Succeed is a short and practical book that has essential information for educators today as they

grow, evolve, and continue to learn how to serve their students better.