The subject of controversy and confusion in the last several decades, character education is making a resurgence in public schools. This movement is built on a growing consensus in favor of teaching a set of traditional or "core" ethical values in a more direct way.
Experts tracking this trend say the character education movement is growing in response to pressure placed on schools both to reduce student antisocial behavior—including drug use and violence—and to produce more respectful and responsible citizens.
The reawakening is occurring "because people are banging on the schoolhouse door," says Kevin Ryan, director of the Boston University Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character. "The invitation is coming from outside. Parents and policymakers are disturbed by a total inability of our culture to pass on its values."
Thomas Lickona, an author and professor of education at the State University of New York at Cortland, sees the motivating force as a "growing national sense of moral crisis and what people speak of as a steady moral decline." Some of the causes being discussed are the breakdown of the family, the failure of adults to exercise moral leadership, and the abandonment of ethics at all levels.
Society is now turning back to schools to transmit positive moral values. Gallup Polls provide one indication of the growing support for school-based values education: polls in each of the last several years show that parents strongly agree that schools need to provide instruction on morals and moral behavior.
But even with broadening public support, some schools may be reluctant to adopt an explicit values curriculum, partly because of the checkered past of values education and fear of creating conflict with religious or ethnic groups over whose values to teach.
Many character education advocates have picked their way through these mine-fields by rejecting the controversial "values clarification" approach introduced in the 1960s, which was criticized for creating "values-free" classrooms. These advocates have consciously embraced a set of "core" or "universal" values that focus on developing character. "The question is no longer whose values but what values to teach," says Patrick McCarthy, executive vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Center, which provides schools with character education programs and teacher training.
More and more, educators and others who work with young people are agreeing on the need to teach universal values such as honesty, kindness, respect, and responsibility. The core values "are the glue of our societal life," says Ryan. "Not to nurture them is certainly to endanger society as well as a school community."
Proponents of programs that transmit such core values say that they have generally encountered little resistance to their efforts, and, furthermore, are reporting some positive effects on student behavior and achievement.
Core Values Emphasized
Through the years, schools have varied their approach to teaching values. From an emphasis on the teacher as sole moral authority in the classroom, many schools moved in the 1960s to approaches that focused on developing students' personal reasoning processes related to moral judgments. The two most widely used of these approaches were the "values clarification" and the "cognitive-developmental" approaches.
The cognitive-developmental approach used student discussions of moral dilemmas to develop their moral judgment. Values clarification tried to help students identify their own beliefs about moral values, with the teacher raising moral questions but avoiding saying what was right or wrong. Neither approach could be proven to influence students' real-life behavior.
Over the last several years, experts in the field have focused on building consensus around "core" values taught to students in a systematic way. The recent creation of two national groups devoted to character education is helping to fuel this movement.
Thirty representatives of education and youth groups last summer adopted "six pillars of character" as part of the Aspen Declaration on Character Education. And the Character Education Partnership is helping to link academic leaders and practitioners in the field (see p. 1).
The Aspen agreement, the result of a conference in Aspen, Colo., is designed to replace the values clarification approach with programs that advocate respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, caring, justice and fairness, and civic virtue and citizenship. The declaration states that such values "transcend cultural, religious, and socioeconomic differences."
Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, which organized the Aspen conference that produced the declaration, says, "I think it's only the beginning. It's a clear, coherent statement that character education is important and is supported by diverse segments of the community."
Character education is not a way of getting sex education or other controversial issues taught in schools, Josephson says. Rather, it is a way of helping ensure that when students have to make decisions about controversial issues, "they make decisions in a manner that is consistent with these six ethical principles."
Follow-up activities to the declaration include creating a national clearinghouse of information on all aspects of character education and developing evaluation instruments to better measure the behavioral impact of character education programs.
Lickona, author of Educating for Character, says the efforts of national groups are proof that key groups and educational leaders have made the jump to adopting the core values approach. Still, there is much more work to be done at the grassroots level to build awareness for teaching values, he adds.
Program Alternatives
Although the national attention being paid to values education may be relatively new, teachers in literally thousands of classrooms have used values education programs in one form or another, some for more than a decade. As with most curriculums, schools have a variety of programs from which to choose—all with specific advantages and disadvantages. What follows is a sample of each of the different types of programs:
Comprehensive schoolwide programs. The Child Development Project (CDP) is an elementary school program based on four widely shared values: fairness, helpfulness, care and respect for others, and personal responsibility. It blends cooperative learning, literature-based language arts, and a discipline approach that doesn't rely on a system of rewards and punishments in an effort to create "caring communities."
Established in 1980, CDP is considered the most well-researched values education program in the country. A rigorous eight-year evaluation of a pilot project in elementary schools in San Ramon, Calif., showed that students behave more helpfully and cooperatively after going through the program. They are better able to resolve problems in ways that take all parties' needs into account, and they feel less lonely and less socially anxious. Students also score significantly better on a measure of higher-order reading comprehension.
After being replicated initially in two schools in Hayward, Calif., six school districts nationwide have made the commitment to implement the program for three or more years: Dade County, Fla.; Jefferson County, Ky.; White Plains, N.Y.; and San Francisco, Salinas, and Cupertino in California.
Eric Schaps, director of CDP, describes it as a "very ambitious program that attempts to change moment-to-moment, in deep ways, what happens in the classroom. It's not an add-on program."
The comprehensive nature of the program is also its main challenge, Schaps says. "We're not getting controversy over the program. But the real challenge is achieving implementation. For teachers, it's a roller coaster ride—it's emotional and draining, but it's also a time for renewal." He concedes that the effects of programs of CDP's magnitude are very difficult and very expensive to measure.
Stand-alone curriculums supported by schoolwide applications. The stand-alone character education program offered by the Thomas Jefferson Center, based in Pasadena, Calif., has been used in more than 47,000 classrooms, reaching as many as 1.4 million students. The center's materials have been used in New York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Los Angeles.
Typically, on the elementary level, teachers using the program introduce a value, such as courage, with a few short classroom lessons, which are constantly reinforced throughout the school. Teachers issue "caught being good" certificates to students who exhibit the ethical behavior highlighted for a particular day or week. McCarthy says when certificates are displayed at the place where something positive happened, it sends a very strong, positive visual message.
In contrast to CDP, McCarthy says the center's program "doesn't spend time going after the big picture" of school restructuring. But he maintains that a great deal can be accomplished with schoolwide programs that stress core values.
He points to an independent study of the Jefferson program in 25 elementary and junior high schools in Los Angeles. Researchers documented a 25 percent drop in major discipline problems, a 16 percent drop in student suspensions, an 18 percent drop in absenteeism, and a 40 percent drop in tardiness.
Still, wide adoption of the program has been hindered in Los Angeles by the high turnover of teachers and administrators and the time and resources teachers need to implement the program.
Another source of curriculum materials is the Character Education Institute in San Antonio, Tex. Its materials, which have been used in more than 50,000 classrooms in more than 40 states, are also based on a set of core values. They can be integrated into the curriculum or can stand alone.
"If you really want to see a difference, you really need to have the whole school involved," says Young Jay Mulkey, the institute's president. Teachers who have used the materials report increases in school attendance and improved student behavior and relationships with other students, he adds.
Teacher training programs. The future direction for character education for other educators lies in better teacher training, some experts believe. The Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University has been involved, for example, in campus workshops that bring New Hampshire teachers together to discuss great literature and interpret the key ethical concepts that bind American society.
The need is critical because values discussions are often left out of teacher education programs, says Ryan, the center's director. "The whole area of values has been dealt out of the conversation of teachers," he adds.
Josephson believes that "we're just entering a whole new generation of curriculum development." The greatest challenge, he believes, is to develop materials for students in the upper grades, where schools are dealing with more serious behaviors. "In the next five years, we're literally going to see hundreds of individual experiments created," he says.
However, McCarthy reports that his center has found teachers often become frustrated creating their own curriculum materials. Without support from administrators for a systematic approach, the program tends to die.
Lickona also argues for a more systematic approach, which requires schools to "look at everything they do through a moral lens." Once educators accept that all relationships teach lessons about morality, everything becomes character education. And when efforts are focused in a more systematic way, Lickona maintains, they will "ultimately bear greater fruit."
Resources
Resources
Character Education Institute; 8918 Tesoro Drive; San Antonio, TX 78217; (800) 284-0499
Developmental Studies Center; Child Development Project; 111 Deerwood Place, Suite 165; San Ramon, CA 94583; (415) 838-7633
Ethics Resource Center; 1120 G St., N.W., Suite 200; Washington, DC 20005; (202) 434-8465
Jefferson Center for Character Education; 202 S. Lake Ave., Suite 240; Pasadena, CA 91101; (818) 792-8130
Josephson Institute of Ethics; 310 Washington Blvd., Suite 104; Marina Del Rey, CA 90292; (310) 306-1868