15 Facts About Paul Tough

Paul Tough was born on 1967 and is a Canadian-American writer and broadcaster.

Paul Tough 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.

Paul Tough grew up in Toronto and was educated at the University of Toronto Schools.

Paul Tough has served as an editor of The New York Times Magazine.

Paul Tough then continued his studies at McGill University in Canada for three semesters.

Paul Tough moved back to the United States in 1988 and worked for Harper's Magazine.

Paul Tough returned to radio, becoming senior editor of This American Life.

Paul Tough has written extensively about education, poverty and politics, including cover stories in the New York Times Magazine on the Harlem Children's Zone, the post-Katrina school system in New Orleans, the No Child Left Behind Act, and charter schools.

Paul Tough returned to This American Life in the early 2000s, where he reported, more recently, on the parents enrolled in the Harlem Children's Zone's Baby College.

Paul Tough's writing has appeared in Slate, GQ, Esquire, and The New Yorker.

Paul 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.

Paul Tough described how Canada has "believed that he could find the ideal intervention for each age of a child's life, and then connect those interventions into an unbroken chain of support", with the Zone functioning as a social and economic "conveyor belt" working from children's birth to their college age.

Paul 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".

Paul Tough 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".

The Washington Monthly ran a positive review by Thomas Toch, who stated that Paul Tough made "a compelling case" in "an engaging book that casts the school reform debate in a provocative new light".