David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

2. The story of Vivek Ranadivé and the Redwood City girls’ basketball team suggests that what we think of as an advantage and as ...

those intimate classrooms. Virtually everywhere in the world, parents and policymakers take it for granted that smaller classes ...

day, 77 percent of Americans think that it makes more sense to use taxpayer money to lower class sizes than to raise teachers’ s ...

at school than students at the old crowded Shepaug—right? It turns out that there is a very elegant way to test whether this is ...

1994 11 1995 17 1996 14 1997 13 1998 16 1999 15 2000 21 2001 23 2002 10 2003 18 2004 21 2005 18 In 2001, there were twenty-three ...

the same teachers, the same principal, the same textbooks. It was in the same building in the same town. The local economy and t ...

experiments have many advantages over formal experiments. So what happens if you use the natural experiment of Connecticut—and c ...

the data. In this study, I found estimates that are very precisely estimated around the point zero. I got a precise zero. In oth ...

concluded with a paragraph like this: In four countries—Australia, Hong Kong, Scotland, and the United States —our identificatio ...

effect of comparable magnitude can be ruled out in science. The nine school systems for which we can rule out large-scale class- ...

concluded that there were only two places in the world—Greece and Iceland—where there were “nontrivial beneficial effects of red ...

country after another has spent that kind of money because we look at a school like Shepaug Valley—where every teacher has a cha ...

3. Not long ago, I sat down with one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. He began by talking about his childhood in Minnea ...

He had eight, sometimes nine, kids on the payroll. In the fall, he would switch to raking leaves. “I would go and check their wo ...

to go. “Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification —then you learn to value it differently.” H ...

We’re paying for you being lazy. But if you need lights for working—twenty- four hours a day—no problem.’” The summer of his six ...

would be motivated to do something more.” In college he ran a laundry service, picking up and delivering dry cleaning for his we ...

prizes and a string of extraordinary successes—to the point where he now has a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane ha ...

I learned it. It was kind of like trial and error. I liked the juice of it. I got some self-esteem from it. I felt more control ...

own way in the world. But because of his success, it would be difficult for his children to learn those same lessons. Children o ...