Introduction—lapsleyand murray
Daniel Lapsley and Charles Murray are clearly concerned about the compelling (and daunting) challenges facing our society when it comes to developing young people of good character—those who are strong enough to do the right thing. At the Character Education Partnership (CEP), we share those same concerns. And while Lapsley, Murray, and CEP have different opinions regarding the history, nature, root causes and scope of the challenge, we agree strongly that it is essential to foster caring relationships within schools, families, and communities.
In his commentary on the critical transition from childhood to adolescence and later to adulthood, Lapsley (this issue) states that,
Effective character education is not only an intervention or a curriculum or something that takes place in schools. Indeed, what happens in schools is deeply embedded in overlapping systems of influence that include family, peers, and neighborhoods…. What adolescents need is at least one good relationship with a caring adult in the family or community, the development of cognitive and self-regulation skills, a positive view of self and a sense of one’s mastery and effectiveness. (p. 19)
While Murray (this issue) uses slightly different language in positing a more critical view of the character education challenge in America, he also speaks to the need for fostering community by stating that, “Age-old wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us” (p. 10). The need for relationships is clear, and is increasingly spilling over into the education realm as family and community structures change, notes Murray.
Unfortunately, this need for positive and healthy relationships with adults is not being adequately addressed through current education reforms. Despite growing national attention to the importance of school climate and bullying prevention, many initiatives do not do enough to encourage systemic and comprehensive change, and are often one-time programmatic “fixes” that are easily abandoned.
At CEP, we believe strongly that character education is not simply a program. It is not about slogans, posters, catch-phrases of the month, or stand-alone curriculum. Also, significant changes do not happen overnight; authentic school transformation takes years— and hard work. Rather, comprehensive character education is about intelligently and intentionally creating a positive school culture and climate, anchored to community-developed ethical and performance values. It is about school improvement and reform—a way of life and a way of being—built on the power of caring and respectful relationships; students to students, student to adults, and adults to adults. And to be truly effective, character education requires sustained, long-term commitment.
Current challenges
Our schools are faced with myriad daily challenges that affect decisions about classroom priorities. Instructional time is precious, and state and national standards drive curricula development. Furthermore, recent impacts of the economic downturn and shrinking per pupil revenue have affected district and school-level building decisions. The end result for many public and private schools has been smaller budgets, teacher layoffs, school closures, classroom consolidations and increasing class sizes.
Compounding these issues has been a new national movement toward teacher pay for performance and mandated standardized testing requirements. All have contributed to a reshuffling of administrator and teacher priorities. Taken together, these realities have forced schools to make difficult choices. Less funding, time, commitment, and resources for character-based programs and dwindling associated professional development and teacher training all have hampered the movement toward comprehensive character education and deliberate focus on climate and culture-based improvement and reform.
Despite the current emphasis on bottom-line accountability and standards, the unavoidable social need for character development is still present. In fact, even as school-based character education proponents labor to overcome the roadblocks to successful implementation, teachers, administrators, parents and community members recognize society’s ongoing character-related challenges demand more attention, not less. Narvaez (2008) concludes that schools and families must work together, but that extended families are often spread far and wide, and overworked parents are as distracted as children.
Narvaez (2008) laments,
Ideally, the family home provides deep emotional nourishment for the child, but rarely does this happen in a typical U.S. household these days. In a day when children are emotionally malnourished, much rides on the adults they see every day—educators. In fact, the most important protective factors against poor outcomes for a child are caring relationships with adults. First, with an adult in the family, and second, with an adult outside the family. (p. 316)
And even at a time when more U.S. parents are either too connected (with an unrealistic and unhealthy push for high achievement and “helicoptering”) to assure their children succeed without hardship, or too disconnected (by being physically or emotionally absent), there is a positive trend emerging. Psychologist, clinician and author Madeline Levine (2012) states,
When I first began to travel around the country, many parents found it difficult to take a clear-eyed look at the cost of too much involvement, too much enrichment, too much stress, and too little recognition of the real needs of children. Thankfully, I no longer encounter such skepticism; the toll of a narrow version of success has become painfully obvious to most parents. What parents are clamoring for now are solutions. “What should I do?” has become the collective mantra of my audiences around the country. (p. 5)
With growing recognition that children’s needs for healthy development are often not being met, there is an opportunity for change and reform—within schools and among our families in America and across the globe.
Positive School Climate and Caring Relationships
Schools that commit to partnering with parents while focusing on a determined pursuit of positive culture and climate exhibit the kinds of caring and respectful environments that promote academic excellence, healthy relationships, reduced antisocial behaviors, and improved school safety. The National School Climate Council (2007) concludes that a positive school climate fosters youth development and learning necessary for a productive and satisfying life in a democratic society. This climate includes norms, values, and expectations that support people feeling socially, emotionally and physically safe. In such environments people are engaged and respected. Students, families and educators work together to develop, live and contribute to a shared school vision. Educators model and nurture an attitude that emphasizes the benefits of, and satisfaction from, learning. Each person contributes to the operations of the school as well as the care of the physical environment.
Character and citizenship are the critical elements of a positive school culture and climate. Elias (2008) states that,
Smart school leaders know that the interpersonal life of schools—in classrooms, hallways, recess periods, lunchrooms, buses, study halls, school athletic and nonathletic teams, clubs and performance groups, and formal and informal gatherings of students, staff, and parents— rests on the character of the people involved. (p. 31)
Schools with a deliberate, proactive and comprehensive approach to creating caring, positive, democratic school cultures enable students to learn not only the academic skills they need to succeed in life, but also the personal skills they will need—skills such as empathy for others, resiliency in the face of failure or adversity, and self-control. These skills can be fostered through a variety of research-based character education and social emotional learning programs and practices.
11 Principles of Effective Character Education
Comprehensive, multifaceted character-based reform, social emotional learning skills-building and school culture/climate improvement have been CEP’s central focus since its inception in 1993. CEP was established as a nonprofit, nonpartisan national coalition leader committed to putting character development at the top of the nation’s education agenda. To provide standards for proactive and comprehensive character education, CEP has published a framework, the 11 Principles of Effective Character Education, which is summarized below:
The school community promotes core ethical and performance values as the foundation of good character.
The school defines “character” comprehensively to include thinking, feeling, and doing.
The school uses a comprehensive, intentional, and proactive approach to character development.
The school creates a caring community.
The school provides students with opportunities for moral action.
The school offers a meaningful and challenging academic curriculum that respects all learners, develops their character, and helps them to succeed.
The school fosters students’ self-motivation.
The school staff is an ethical learning community that shares responsibility for character education and adheres to the same core values that guide the students.
The school fosters shared leadership and long-range support of the character education initiative.
The school engages families and community members as partners in the characterbuilding effort.
The school regularly assesses its culture and climate, the functioning of its staff as character educators, and the extent to which its students manifest good character.
These 11 principles have been used in schools across the nation and by many foreign countries as a school improvement framework, and hundreds of National and State Schools of Character have been recognized for their exemplary work involving character development. Additionally, these schools provide a rich source of real-world case studies highlighting the many benefits of instituting a positive relationship-centered school environment, including reduced bullying and disrespectful behavior, increased academic performance, decreased disciplinary referrals and suspensions/expulsions, increased staff satisfaction and retention, decreased absences and truancy, and increased student and parent engagement (CEP, 2012).
These essential elements combine to create a community of students, staff, parents and neighbors who collaborate to support student development. All would not be possible without the caring and respecting relationships which emerge as both a foundation and result of the comprehensive process. Schools of character adopt and focus on multipronged approaches that contribute to a defining of positive school culture, and are living examples which demonstrate the transformational power of character education when it is carefully and comprehensively implemented. For instance, consider the following data representing recent National Schools of Character (NSOC) (CEP, 2012):
The average daily attendance rate of the 2012 NSOC was 96% compared to 94% nationwide.
Eighty-eight percent of the 2012 NSOC reported high levels of respect among staff and parents.
Ninety-one percent of the 2012 NSOC experienced very few disciplinary referrals or saw a decline over the past 3 years.
One hundred percent of the 2012 NSOC reported passing rates on state reading and math assessments above the national averages.
Ninety-three percent of the students attending the 2012 NSOC participated in service learning in 2010-2011.
Eighty-four percent of the 2012 NSOC saw very few suspensions or had a decline over the past 3 years.
Key Research Findings
CEP does not specifically promote or prioritize the efficacy of individual character programs. Rather the conditions that enable character education to be effective demonstrate that many of the most effective programs support improvements in school safety and climate, academic achievement, and caring relationships.
Berkowitz and Bier (2005) examined over 100 studies and identified 33 character-based programs with scientific evidence supporting their effectiveness. Based on these findings, Berkowitz, Battistich, and Bier (2008) concluded that (1) Character education programs can effectively promote character development, (2) Character education positively influences academic achievement, and (3) Character education has a broad impact on a wide variety of psychosocial outcomes, including sexual behavior, problem-solving skills, relationships and attachment to school.
Benninga, Berkowitz, Kuehn, and Smith (2006) studied the relationship between character education and academic performance across a multiyear period in 120 academically successful schools, and found positive relationships between the extent of character education and numerous academic indicators. As a result, the authors concluded that good schools (1) Ensure a clean and secure physical environment, (2) Promote and model fairness, equity, caring and respect, (3) Have students contribute in meaningful ways, and (4) Promote a caring community and positive social relationships.
Marshall, Caldwell, and Foster (2011) showed that integrated character education in Kindergarten through fifth grade resulted in an improved school environment, increased student prosocial and moral behavior, and increased reading and math test scores. In addition, schools became more caring communities, discipline referrals dropped significantly—particularly in areas related to bullying behavior—and test scores in moderately achieving schools increased nearly 50%.
Additional positive results have been found within the closely related field of social emotional learning. Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, and Schellinger (2011) performed a meta-analysis of 213 school-based K-12 programs, and found that social emotional learning participants demonstrated significant improvement in social and emotional skills, attitudes, behavior and academic performance.
There is also an extensive and growing body of research showing the overall importance of K-12 school climate on a variety of measures related to school safety, bullying and violence prevention. Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2009) recommends school climate reform as a data driven strategy that promotes healthy relationships, school connectedness, and dropout prevention.
As stated, numerous social emotional and character development programs have shown significant research-based results, and several programs exist that promote positive school culture and climate. However, per previous assertions, character education and positive school culture and climate cannot simply be added to school curricula or created in isolation, with sole reliance on singular programmatic solutions. In fact, several negative research conclusions (U.S. Department of Education, 2010; Lapsley & Yeager, in press) highlight once again the need for a multifaceted approach to comprehensive, character-based reform (Sojourner, 2012).
Ultimately, schools with a positive school culture focus on building caring relationships that foster ethical behavior and excellent performance. At a time in which school safety is of paramount importance to school personnel and community members—and underscored by tragic news events—positive culture also reduces the risk of violence and better enables young people to cope with violence when it happens. These schools give children concrete strategies to use, and they create an environment of trust among all members of the community. They make it less likely that a child will become so troubled and so isolated that he will decide to take the lives of others or himself. They also make it more likely that young people will report to adults when they suspect their peers will engage in violent behavior. Students in these schools are better able to cope with adversity when it comes their way. With such support, children internalize positive values and choose to promote good in the world rather than surrendering to internal negative conflict and pressures, and lashing out against it.
The Next Stage: Families and Communities
As Lapsley (this issue) observes when he speaks of the critical need for adolescents to form emotionally close family ties and positive social relationships with teachers, and when Murray (this issue) laments the unraveling of our civic culture via the collapse of the idealized American family and community, we also recognize the enormous nature of this multifaceted character education challenge. While it may seem trite to refer to this as an issue faced by the entire child-raising “village,” we nevertheless acknowledge the need to reach young people everywhere, expanding beyond the classroom to make a significant impact on children through their families and communities. Schools must remain a focal point for these efforts, but a renewed, broader vision must include all arenas that impact youth education and development: homes, faith communities, youth organizations, sports teams, concert halls and dance studios, summer camps, and places of employment.
In his book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, Paul Tough (2012) framed the challenge this way:
The character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which children grow up. That means the rest of us— society as a whole—can do an enormous amount to influence their development in children. We now know a great deal about what kind of interventions will help children develop those strengths and skills, starting at birth and going all the way to college. Parents are an excellent vehicle for these interventions, but they aren’t the only vehicle. Transformative help also comes regularly from social workers, teachers, clergy members, pediatricians, and neighbors. We can argue about whether these interventions should be provided by government or nonprofit organizations or religious institutions or a combination of all three. But what we can’t argue anymore is that there’s nothing we can do. (p.196)
And thus CEP’s response to the “What should I do?” parent question posed to Levine (2012) is that we remain committed to sharing best educational practices, recognizing schools of character, and bringing together passionate, like-minded organizations dedicated to developing ethical and performance values in our youth.
There are numerous organizations that are committed to developing young people of good character, and our website (www.character.org) provides contact information and descriptions for many that are active in character education, social emotional learning, civic education, and service learning, as well as several organizations that advocate for character education policy at the state and national level. In addition, we also seek to reach out to parent and community groups—providing them resources and motivation to reclaim their role as the primary character educators of their children.
We invite all character-minded entities, families, community organizations, educators, sports coaches, health professionals, scholars, and others who touch the lives of the young to acknowledge the need to establish authentic and caring relationships with our youth. Together, we can utilize these relationships to develop and implement comprehensive strategies that will help our children and our citizens build good character, a positive future, and a better world. Indeed, achieving this essential goal will not just take a village. It will take the rest of us, as well.
