Paul Tough

Paul Tough (born 1967) is a Canadian-American writer and broadcaster. He is best known for authoring the works Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America and How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.

Background and career He grew up in Toronto and was educated at the University of Toronto Schools. As a teenager, he was co-host of Anybody Home, a weekly youth-oriented programme broadcast nationally on CBC Radio until the show's cancellation in 1983. He has also served as an editor of The New York Times Magazine. Tough moved back to the United States in 1988 and worked for Harper's Magazine. In 1990, he received the Livingston Award, along with Jack Hitt, for an article they wrote about computer hackers that was published in Esquire.

He returned to radio, becoming senior editor of This American Life. in the mid-1990s. In 1998, he returned to Canada to serve as editor of Saturday Night. By 2000, Tough had returned to the United States to found Open Letters, an online magazine. His writing has appeared in Slate, GQ, Esquire, and The New Yorker.

Books Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America and How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, which he published through Houghton Mifflin in 2008 and 2012 (respectively).

How Children Succeed built upon the work of James Heckman, University of Chicago economist and Nobel lauterate, that stated that education should focus more on promoting the psychological traits of "conscientiousness" among children at young ages rather than more IQ-related studies later in life. Tough wrote explicitly, "There is no anti-poverty tool that we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable than character strengths". He cited research such as the famous Perry Preschool Project to state that nurturing, supportive personal relationships with adults in educational settings promote non-cognitive attributes that lead to higher incomes, less criminality, and other benefits, even when children face harsh early environments, to deliver a message that Tough found "a bit warm and fuzzy" but "rooted in cold, hard science". As a key example, he cites the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who studied how students instructed that people can boost themselves intellectually get higher grades than those who believe in a fixed idea of intelligence. The Boston Globe ran a supportive article by Jenifer B. McKim; she wrote, "In this concise book, Tough provides deep research, expert testimony, and eloquently described real-life characters to make his case."