Collection 1: "Marita's Bargain" by Malcolm Gladwell

A few blocks over is Grand Concourse, the borough's main thoroughfare.

A few blocks over is Grand Concourse, the borough's main thoroughfare.

By the end of eighth grade, 84 percent of the students are performing at or above their grade level, which is to say that this motley group of randomly chosen lower-income kids from dingy apartments in one of the country's worst neighborhoods—whose parents, in an overwhelming number of cases, never set foot in a college—do as well in mathematics as the privileged eighth graders of America's wealthy suburbs.

Similarly, the pioneer of public education in Massachusetts, Horace Mann, believed that working students too hard would create a "most pernicious influence upon character and habits....Not infrequently is health itself destroyed by overstimulating the mind."

The reformers, Gold writes: strove for ways to reduce time spent studying, because long periods of respite could save the mind from injury.

Rest also presented particular opportunities for strengthening cognitive and analytical skills.

Unless a wheat or cornfield is left fallow every few years, the soil becomes exhausted.

Summer vacation is a topic seldom mentioned in American educational debates. It is considered a permanent and inviolate feature of school life, like high school football or the senior prom.

It seems counterintuitive but we do things at a slower pace and as a result we get through a lot more.

There's a lot more retention, better understanding of the material.

"She was a horrible math student in fifth grade. She cried every Saturday when we did remedial stuff. Huge tears and tears."

Marita used to go to a parochial school down the street from her home, until her mother heard of KIPP.

Marita went on: I leave school at five p.m., and if I don't lollygag around, then I will get home around five-thirty.

On the strength of that performance, 90 percent of KIPP students get scholarships to private or parochial high schools instead of having to attend their own desultory high schools in the Bronx.