On some level, these are traits we all try to instill in our children. (Indeed, Tough devotes a section of his book to the anxiety of many upper-middle-class parents that they are failing in this regard.) But poor children too often don’t have parents who can serve that role. They develop habits that impede their ability to learn. Often they can’t even see what the point of learning is. They act indifferently or hostile in school, though that often masks feelings of hopelessness and anxiety.

What was most surprising to me was Tough’s insistence, bolstered by his reporting, that character is not something you have to learn as a small child, or are born with, but can be instilled even in teenagers who have had extraordinarily difficult lives and had no previous grounding in these traits. We get to meet a number of children who, with the help of a program or a mentor who stresses character, have turned their lives around remarkably. We meet Dave Levin, the founder of KIPP, perhaps the best charter school chain in the country, whose earliest graduates run into problems when they get to college — only 21 percent of them had graduated after six years, according to Tough — and then begins stressing character traits to turn things around.

And we also meet Nelson, the founder of OneGoal, which takes disadvantaged students when they are juniors in high school — most of whom believe that college is an unattainable goal — and transforms them into responsible young adults who can succeed in good universities. OneGoal has a “persistence rate,” as Nelson calls it, of 85 percent, meaning that that’s the percentage of students from OneGoal who are making their way through college. (The program hasn’t been around long enough to have a graduation rate.) By comparison, nationally, around only 8 percent of the poorest students ever graduate from college. Nelson told me that OneGoal is expanding to Houston next year, and it hopes to be in five cities by 2017.

I hope it happens. Tough’s book is utterly convincing that if disadvantaged students can learn the noncognitive skills that will allow them to persist in the face of difficulties — to reach for a goal even though it may off in the distance, to strive for something — they can achieve a better life.