(Illustration by Ben Hickey)
Several years ago, Teach for America assigned Tom Wooten to a New Orleans middle school in a poor, racialized community. Wooten noticed that his most promising, hardest-working seventh and eighth graders were often the same students struggling the most with the transition to high school, which was less structured than life in middle school, and then to college, a school environment with minimal structure. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that only 15 percent of those from the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution who attend college receive a bachelor’s degree eight years later.
Wooten, now assistant professor of sociology at Louisiana State University, has a new paper that makes a powerful case for why low-income students whose dreams of a college degree and future prosperity are going unfulfilled. He devoted two years to ethnographic fieldwork that enabled him to see the extent to which messaging and cultural expectations hinder bright, low-income students.
“The concept of grit has been embraced by a large cross-section of society,” Wooten says. “When I taught middle school, we had posters about grit. We gave football-coach-at-halftime-type speeches about how hard students would have to work to attain their dreams. In my research, I watched high school students getting the same messaging from their teachers. I only registered that this could be a problem when I saw how these students started applying these lessons in college.”
Wooten discovered that as low-income students became overcommitted by taking on ambitious course loads, paying jobs, and extracurricular activities, they turned to a familiar script: “I’m not working hard enough. I’ve got to be grittier. This is my fault.” Students who took on more than they could handle—a common mistake for all college students and a particular hazard for poor students—were blaming themselves for their struggles. “Instead of cutting down, they were doubling down,” Wooten says. “Their diagnosis was ‘I’m not working hard enough.’”
Embedding with two senior classes at two New Orleans high schools, Wooten followed a cohort of eight young Black men. He sat at empty desks at the back of the classroom, filling notebooks with observations and conducting interviews. To build relationships and friendships, Wooten joined the students at lunch, on field trips, at band practices, and even at work. He also spent hundreds of hours getting to know their families and social networks. Most of the students were the first in the family to attend college. They struggled with the transition for reasons that soon became clear to Wooten.
Cultural messages about grit—particularly that disadvantaged, racialized students need to work harder than most—caused harm, he found. “Making it does require hard work, but we need to stop using this over-the-top rhetoric about effort when we teach young people,” Wooten says. “Telling a student, ‘Easy does it,’ or ‘Pace yourself,’ might be more beneficial than telling them, ‘Give it everything you’ve got.’”
In addition, the students’ experience of growing up in poverty gave them a very different motivational outlook than what is commonly understood by educators. “A big theme in scholarship on education that is qualitative and focuses on the aspirations of poor, racialized kids is how poverty causes students to give up, but I don’t think that is the dominant story to tell in the United States today,” Wooten says. Instead, he found that for many disadvantaged young people, difficult circumstances only enhanced their drive to succeed.
“Poverty was a huge reason that participants in my study got overcommitted. Some had to work to make ends meet. Others were just really eager to chase their dreams after spending their whole childhoods yearning for opportunities they’d never gotten,” Wooten recalls. “Lots of research describes how poverty can make kids give up on their dreams, but I mostly saw the opposite process. Poverty seemed to make the young men I followed chase their dreams with extra urgency and fervor.” Effort was double-edged: Too much of it was self-undermining, preventing the student’s successful transition to college.
“Important social science studies emphasize the importance of young people’s doggedness and persistence in academic advancement,” says Annette Lareau, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “This valuable piece of research problematizes these findings, highlighting unintentional negative consequences from students’ effort.”
Find the full study: “Effort Traps: Socially Structured Striving and the Reproduction of Disadvantage” by Thomas Wooten, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 130, no. 2, 2024.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.