David and Goliath

by

Malcolm Gladwell

David and Goliath: Chapter 2: Teresa DeBrito Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Gladwell turns his attention to Shepaug Valley Middle School in Connecticut. Although the school was originally built to accommodate large numbers of children during the baby boom, it now has a very small enrollment rate, since the surrounding area’s population has shrunk considerably. There are, for example, only 80 children in the sixth grade. Given these statistics, Gladwell asks readers a question: “Would you send your child to Shepaug Valley Middle School?” To address this question, he reminds readers that the story about Ranadivé suggests that common conceptions of advantages and disadvantages are not always accurate. He then guesses that the majority of parents would like to send their children to Shepaug Valley because of its small class sizes, since the general assumption is that this is an advantage.
Although he hasn’t said it yet, it’s already clear that Gladwell is suspicious of the idea that small class sizes are actually beneficial. The question becomes, then, whether students succeed more often in larger classes or smaller classes. When applying the framework of the biblical David and Goliath story to this situation, the answer to this question depends upon whether or not traditional advantages in education are always advantageous, or if they sometimes become detrimental.
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Many people believe that smaller class sizes are desirable, Gladwell notes, adding that multiple governments have made substantial efforts to reduce the number of students in each class. In the United States, 77 percent of the population agrees it would be better to use tax money to decrease the average class size than to raise teachers’ salaries. Considering that Americans rarely agree upon something so unanimously, this is quite significant. The question remains, though, of whether or not students actually benefit from smaller class sizes. To address this, Gladwell looks at the class sizes at another middle school in Connecticut from between 1993 and 2005. The numbers fluctuate greatly, but what experts have found is that there are no “statistically significant effect[s]” of the changes in class size.
Right away, Gladwell debunks the idea that smaller classes have a profound effect on student success. Although studies of the relationship between class size and academic performance have yielded no “statistically significant” results, it’s still notable that smaller classes clearly don’t have an overwhelming influence on performance—otherwise, the data would clearly and unanimously reflect this. Consequently, Gladwell has already destabilized society’s opinion of what counts as an advantage when it comes to education.
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Gladwell acknowledges that there have been many studies on class size, and all of them have yielded different results. Some find that there is a positive correlation between class size and student success, but just as many studies find that there’s a negative correlation (meaning students actually do worse in smaller classes than in larger classes). For all intents and purposes, then, it makes sense to say that smaller class sizes don’t meaningfully impact how well students perform. And yet, the United States hired roughly 250,000 new teachers between 1996 and 2004 in order to reduce the average class size, meaning that taxpayer costs rose by 21 percent. Despite all this spending, though, Gladwell argues that reducing class size isn’t the advantage everyone thinks it is.
In this section, Gladwell simply emphasizes the idea that small class sizes aren’t as beneficial as everyone thinks. And yet, the United States has thrown significant amounts of money into reducing the number of students in each classroom. In turn, readers once more see the extent to which people invest themselves in traditional notions of what’s advantageous, even when there’s no data to support such beliefs.
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Switching tracks, Gladwell introduces an unnamed character, whom he identifies as one of the most successful and powerful people in Hollywood. This executive grew up in Minneapolis, where he worked hard as a kid to organize a conglomerate of neighborhood children to shovel his neighbors’ driveways, contracting these workers out and taking a cut of their pay. This entrepreneurial spirit arose from the working-class values the boy learned from his father, who emphasized the importance of hard work and admonished him when he left lights on or acted lazily. When he was 16, he worked at his father’s scrap-metal business and found the work unbearably taxing and boring. He now thinks his father hired him to encourage him to “escape” a life of manual labor. When he went to college, he started a laundry service for his rich classmates, then attended business and law school.
It’s not yet clear why Gladwell has introduced this unnamed character. However, the fact that this man came from a modest working-class background and eventually became successful supports the idea that greatness can emerge from hardship. Because he always had to work hard and practice frugality, this man developed an entrepreneurial spirit that undoubtedly helped him succeed later in life. In this sense, then, his economic disadvantages are partially responsible for his eventual triumphs.
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The Hollywood executive eventually started working in Hollywood (of course) and became so successful that he now has a mansion in Beverly Hills and owns both a private jet and a Ferrari. Gladwell upholds that the executive has a unique understanding of money because of his working-class upbringing in Minneapolis. The executive fears, however, that he won’t be able to give his children the same kind of understanding of the value of money, since they are growing up surrounded by wealth and could technically have whatever they want—if, that is, he gave it to them. He tells Gladwell that people underestimate how difficult it is for rich parents to raise children, suggesting that there’s most likely some place between poverty and extreme wealth that is ideal for childrearing. 
Having overcome hardship himself, the most difficult challenge in the Hollywood executive’s life these days is figuring out how to instill the same values in his children that he himself grew up with. This is challenging because he grew up in significantly different circumstances than his children. And though all parents want to provide their children with whatever they want, doing so isn’t a particularly effective childrearing technique. In fact, the executive recognizes that his children might be better off in the long run if they had to face the same difficulties he himself faced as a child and young man, since these are the very same hardships that led to his success. In other words, he doesn’t want his children’s advantages to end up working against them.
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Quotes
Gladwell acknowledges that people are hesitant to sympathize with millionaires complaining about their wealth. At the same time, he points out that the Hollywood executive’s concerns about parenting underscore an important idea that he believes most people intuitively grasp—namely, that “more is not always better” when it comes to how money affects parenting. Needless to say, it’s difficult to raise children in poverty, since parents need certain resources to make their jobs easier. Struggling to make enough to care for a child is exhausting, emotionally taxing, and time-consuming. And yet, Gladwell asserts that more money doesn’t always make it easier to raise children. Instead, “money makes parenting easier until a certain point—when it stops making much of a difference.”
Gladwell proposes that wealth can have diminishing returns. Though he recognizes that people need a certain amount of money to set themselves up to be successful parents, he also suggests that too much money can have adverse effects. At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive—if earning a certain amount of money makes parenting easier, shouldn’t earning more money make it even easier? However, the central thesis of David and Goliath is that advantages aren’t always what they seem. In the same way that Goliath’s strength isn’t always beneficial, then, money ceases to be helpful once people reach a certain level of wealth.
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Researchers have found that money stops profoundly affecting happiness around a household income of $75,000. Once a family makes more than that amount, they stop noticing substantial differences. For example, if one family makes $75,000 and their neighbors make $100,000, their neighbors will perhaps be able to own a nicer car or go out to restaurants more often, but the extra $25,000 won’t make it significantly easier for them to be “good parents.” Keeping this in mind, Gladwell proposes that a graph of the relationship between parenting and wealth would show a curved line that slowly plateaus after reaching the $75,000 mark.
The most important thing to take away from Gladwell’s argument about money is that more is not always better. While it’s true that an extra $25,000 per year would certainly influence a family, it wouldn’t change the way they live in a fundamental or meaningful way. As a result, it’s unlikely that a family making $100,000 would be happier than a family making $75,000. At the same time, it’s worth noting that Gladwell conflates studies about money’s effect on happiness with his own ideas about the relationship between wealth and parenting. Though it’s likely that these two things are rough equivalents, Gladwell doesn’t actually specify why this information about happiness would impact the process of raising children.
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Continuing his argument about the effect of money on parenting, Gladwell says there’s a certain point at which wealth starts making parenting harder again. This is because it’s difficult to say no to children when the kids know their parents could buy them whatever they want. In working class families, parents need only explain that it’s not financially possible for them to buy a pony, but wealthy parents have to find ways to explain that although they’re capable of purchasing a pony, they’re not going to do so. In accordance with this, a proper graph of the relationship between parenting and wealth would be what’s known as an inverted-U curve (a graph with a line that resembles an upside-down U). On the left side, the graph shows a positive correlation between wealth and parenting, but the line plateaus once it hits the $75,000 mark and then begins to plunge.
In the same way Gladwell previously proved that Goliath’s strength is only beneficial in certain circumstances, he now asserts that wealth doesn’t always have a positive effect on parenting. It helps people who earn less than $75,000 per year to receive more money, but after this threshold, money actually makes parenting more difficult. By outlining this trend, Gladwell once again challenges the idea that an advantage is always an advantage, ultimately positing that such things are highly circumstantial.
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Returning to the topic of academia, Gladwell proposes that the relationship between student success and class size is also an inverted-U curve. To explain this, he suggests that, though class sizes have no effect on academic achievement when classes are in a “medium range,” they do have noticeable effects at either end of the spectrum. For instance, there are classes in Israel with as many as 40 students, and these classes perform worse than other classes in Israel with only 20 students. In Connecticut, though, some teachers have found it even more difficult to effectively educate children in extremely small classes. This is because it’s helpful to have enough students to start exciting discussions or to break into even groups. Plus, small classes sometimes feel too intimate for shy students, therefore making it harder to draw them out of their shells.
One of the most important lessons that emerges from David and Goliath is that it’s unwise to assume something is categorically good or bad. The vast majority of people in the United States believe that smaller classes lead to better academic results, but this only true when a class is reduced from, say, 40 to 20 students. If, on the other hand, a class is reduced to a very small size, the entire dynamic shifts and makes it harder for teachers to meaningfully engage their students. Accordingly, it’s unwise to assume that smaller classes are unequivocally better than larger classes, just as it’s unwise to assume that strength is always more advantageous than speed or agility.
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The downsides of small classes are so stark that Teresa DeBrito—the principal of Shepaug Valley—actively worries about the school’s shrinking enrollment, despite what most people think about the benefits of small classes. A former teacher herself, she fondly remembers teaching a class of 29, though she admits it was quite a bit of work. Still, this larger size made it easier for her to get students excited or involve them in more interesting discussions. Of course, she doesn’t want all of the classes at Shepaug Valley to have 29 students, but her fear of extremely small cohorts underscores the fact that people have become blindly obsessed with the idea that smaller classes lead to greater success—something that isn’t always true.
Teresa DeBrito’s fondness of larger classes supports the idea that smaller classes aren’t always preferable. At the same time, she recognizes that having too many students in one class can overwork the teacher. Therefore, there must be a happy medium, a class size that doesn’t overextend the teacher but isn’t so small that it’s impossible to incite lively discussion. This size, it seems, would exist in the middle—or at the apex—of an inverted-U curve measuring the relationship between class size and student success.
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To illustrate Teresa DeBrito’s point, Gladwell references an elite private boarding school in Connecticut called Hotchkiss. The tuition at Hotchkiss is $50,000 per year, and the administration proudly boasts about its “intimate” class sizes. Even though research shows that classes can be too small, Hotchkiss continues to abide by the idea that smaller is better. This, Gladwell says, is because the school has unquestioningly accepted that “the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.” This, however, is untrue, as evidenced by the successful Hollywood executive’s difficulty in raising his children.
The assumptions people form about what is or is not an advantage are largely tied to arbitrary ideas about wealth and status. To that end, many people are obsessed with the idea that whatever costs the most or is the most prestigious is unquestioningly the best—a miscalculation that Gladwell will continue to scrutinize throughout David and Goliath.
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