Month: December 2017

Anti-bullying music video gives message of love

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Fifth-graders at South Davis Elementary School are rising to “Rachel’s Challenge” by spreading an anti-bullying message through music.

Rachel’s Challenge is a national nonprofit group that works to reduce violence in schools through character education. South Davis and Oak Park elementary schools are participating in the program, and South Davis’ Bullying Prevention Coordinating Committee recently came up with a special way to rally around the issue.

The school’s 5th-grade class created a lip-sync music video to Andy Grammer’s “Give Love” that was posted to YouTube featured by WKBW news.

The song’s lyrics send a powerful message that resonates with students and melds with the school’s anti-bullying efforts.

I give love to all of my people
All of my people need love, I give some
I give love to all of my people
All of my people need love, I give some
I give love to all of my people
All of my people need love, I give some
‘Cause in the end, the love we take’s
Got nothing on the love we make
So give love
So give love
So give love

The aim of the video was to foster a positive and respectful climate and culture at South Davis, one of several efforts by school officials to combat bullying, a school spokesperson told WKBW.

“Each time a student completes an act of kindness in the school, at home or in the community, they receive a link to be added to the paper chain hanging in the hallways of South Davis Elementary,” the spokesperson said.

The dozens of kids who participated in the music video, which featured students and staff dancing and singing to “Give Love” in a fast-paced trip through the elementary, were clearly engaged in making their school a better place.

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, wrote about the importance of creating an environment built on strong connections between adults and students for effective character education.

Hunter wrote in The Tragedy of Moral Education:

Moral education can work where the community, and schools and other institutions within it, share a moral culture that is integrated and mutually reinforcing; where the social networks of adult authority are strong, unified, and consistent in articulating moral ideals and their attending virtues; and where adults maintain a ‘caring watchfulness’ over all aspects of a young person’s maturation.

South Davis Elementary’s video project is one example of a school working to establish that kind of watchful community for its students.

Educators who want to build up school culture can find out more about Rachel’s Challenge on the organization’s website.

The group is named in honor of Rachel Scott—the first student killed in the 1999 Columbine High School shooting—and offers a variety of programs for elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as a college program and professional development.

Low-income renters love their landlord

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Georgia landlord Margaret Stagmeier has found an “education model with a housing solution,” suggesting that community is essential to the success of students.

Stagmeier purchased Willow Branch Apartments in DeKalb County in 1996 and has vowed to keep rent low for her mostly immigrant residents, who pay $618 per month—less than subsidized housing, Education Dive reports.

But there are other perks to living at the apartment complex adjacent to Indian Creek Elementary School. With rent comes a free after-school program for students in grades K–5, which is making a significant positive impact on the roughly 80 children who participate.

“Just like kids would go to the pool, they go to the after-school program,” Stagmeier said.

Students file into the apartment complex’s former leasing office after school on weekdays to work on homework, or practice for the Georgia Milestones assessments using an electronic Study Buddy device, according to the news site.

Program manager Allie Reeser provides juice and chips, reads books with students, and helps them with their studies. And while the effort is helping to improve academic performance and neighborhood stability, Stagmeier said there’s other practical benefits to her business, as well.

Left to their own devices, kids would break sprinkler heads or litter the apartment grounds with trash, but with the after-school program students are studying and focused on their homework instead.

Stagmeier spends $3,000 to run the program, but saves three times that amount on maintenance, she said.

The landlord also pointed to the strong connections between student achievement, neighborhood safety, and smart business.

“It’s hard to get investors to invest in blight,” she told Education Dive. “And if you have a blighted apartment community, there’s a 100 percent chance you have a failing school.”

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, wrote about the connections between school and community and the implications for character education in The Death of Character.

“In a milieu where the school, youth organizations, and the larger community share a moral culture that is integrated and mutually reinforcing; where the social networks of adult authority are strong, unified, and consistent in articulating moral ideas and their attending virtues; and where adults maintain a ‘caring watchfulness’ over all aspects of a young person’s maturation, moral education can be effective,” Hunter wrote.

By truly caring for her residents, Stagmeier is building trust with families, providing stability for students, and modeling the kind of care and concern that make tenants love their neighborhood and their landlord.

Stagmeier also offers support through her Star-C non-profit for real estate investors and landlords who want to start similar after-school programs for their residents.

Focus on character in high school, when decisions have consequences

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Character education is of fundamental importance; however, it can be harder to agree on the time in a child’s life when it can have the greatest impact.

Arguments in education have gone back and forth on this question, and a recent meta-study presented at Oxford University has aimed to provide some clarity to the discussion, reports Religion News Service.

The Religion News Service reported that, “[C]ombining the results of 52 studies of character education, including over 225,000 students indicated that character education had the greatest impact on youth, when it took place in high school.”

The meta-study was conducted by William Jeynes, Professor of Education at California State University, Long Beach, and Senior Fellow with The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton (New Jersey).

Jeynes noted that, “The results are particularly intriguing, because the sparse number of character education school programs that there are, emphasize ‘getting them when they’re young.”

In some ways, the results of the meta-study do seem to defy conventional logic. We know that childrens’ minds are exceptionally malleable at a young age. Therefore, wouldn’t it make sense that this is the time to focus on the development of their character?

Jeynes responds to this point, “Although these results go against the tide of the current thought that character instruction should primarily take place when pupils are young, upon further examination, they really do make sense. Students begin the process of making some of the most important decisions of their lives when they are in high school. If there is ever a time in which they need moral guidance, this is the time period.”

The important decisions that Jeynes references can have reverberations throughout a student’s lifespan. As our young adults make critical choices regarding life, career, and community, they should be making these decisions with a firm sense of the ideals to which they will give themselves, and to which they will submit.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia has also argued that adolescence is a period of fundamental importance. During this time, young people actively embrace a vision of “the good.”

As James Davison Hunter, the Institute’s Executive Director and founder, details in The Death of Character, “[C]haracter is shaped not by a cowering acquiescence to rules imposed externally but as a conscious, directed obedience to truths authoritatively received and affirmed.”

Hunter’s distinction between “rules imposed externally” and “truth’s authoritatively received” is useful to keep in mind when considering the potential causes of Jeynes’s findings.

It is realistic to expect that a young child is only capable of understanding character education as rules that they must obey. We know that rules can only govern human behavior to a certain extent; they are not binding on the soul in the same manner as character.

However, a high-school student is intellectually capable of grappling with the “Why”inherent in moral education. If they are able to ascertain the reason for submitting one’s self to timeless truths, they could be more likely to internally receive them, as Hunter describes.

High school teachers should not feel that they are without resources to form their students’ character. The Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues, for example, offers a unit on Joan of Arc that engages students in literary and historical study of inspiring heroes for teenagers.

The use of such lessons can begin to orient high school students towards ideals that will enrich their lives for years to come.

South Bronx students take responsibility for peer mediation

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Community School for Social Justice founder Sue-Ann Rosch discussed how administrators at the South Bronx school help students take responsibility for their actions with peer mediation during an Education Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture this spring.

“. . . Peer meditations are led by two students from the peer mediation class, and by the social worker who teaches that class, and sometimes it’s just led by the two students without the adults if we feel they have the capacity to do that,” Rosch said, adding that the student mediators also conduct a crucial follow up with their peers to make sure issues are resolved.

The Community School for Social Justice publishes its restorative justice policies and practices on its website, in full transparency for the school and community, and as a resource for others looking to implement their own restorative justice practices.

Performance vs. politics in Chicago schools

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Chicago Public Schools administrators are sending students a message: Performance and accountability mean nothing; it’s political perception that really matters.

In September, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel touted the district’s graduation rate and student test scores as something the state should be proud of.

“These are statistics, I would hope the state of Illinois would actually see the success of what’s happening in Chicago, and, rather than run it down, hold it up,” Emanuel said, according to the Chicago Sun Times. “Be proud of it.”

A recent analysis of 2016 data by the Chicago City Wire shows the Windy City mayor is full of hot air.

The news service compared end-of-year tests known as Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) with the district’s reported graduation rate to illustrate each schools’ “graduation fraud index.”

Essentially, a lot more students are graduating than are passing the test, proving that the diplomas Emanuel is so proud of are basically worthless. The PARCC tests are designed to determine if students are “ready for the next level,” and it’s clear many are not.

Clark Academy Preparatory Magnet High School, for example, reports a 93.1% graduation rate, while only 4.1% of students at the school meet or exceed expectations on PARCC tests—leading to a “graduation fraud index” of -89, City Wire reports.

Marine Leadership Academy at Ames’ graduation rate is 100%, but only 11.6% passed the PARRC test, giving the school a -88.5 “graduation fraud index.”

Every single high school in the city, with the exceptions of Northside College Preparatory High School and Chicago Virtual Charter School, graduate at a higher percentage of students than those that pass the PARRC test.

The bottom line: “data shows a staggering difference between the rate of students deemed ‘ready for the next level’ by state standards and those graduating from high school,” according to the news site.

The fact that Chicago Public Schools are graduating students who fail annual exams is an institutional and cultural breakdown that threatens students’ character development.

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, explained the implications of such breakdowns in his book The Death of Character.

“By looking carefully at the ways in which we mediate moral understanding to children, we may learn much about the kind of society we live in and will pass on to future generations,” Hunter wrote.

Adults demonstrate their moral character or lack of character through their actions, and students quickly learn whether adults will say or do whatever is expedient. It’s a crisis not just because of the moral failure of adults, but also because of the consequences for the students those adults are supposed to serve.

Educators in Chicago and elsewhere can benefit from a lesson in “professional virtue” from the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues to understand what it really means to model strong character for the next generation.

Superintendent protests by giving teachers identical scores

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A retired Idaho school superintendent has been reprimanded for giving all teachers in his district identical evaluation scores, but the former superintendent denies wrongdoing.

On Nov. 29, Idaho Education News, citing Idaho’s Professional Standards Commission review panel, reported that Republican State Rep. Ryan Kerby violated the law and ethics rules when he submitted inaccurate teacher evaluation data as superintendent of the New Plymouth School District. The panel ordered that a written reprimand be placed in Kerby’s educator certification file.

Kerby, as superintendent, opposed tying teacher pay to evaluations. “I tell you right now, if I had the whole thing to do over, I wouldn’t do anything different,” Kerby said.

In June 2015, Idaho Education News reported that Kerby had deliberately awarded identical overall scores on 2014-15 teacher evaluations. “Our school district . . . did not figure the state needs to know all that individual teacher data,” Kerby told Idaho Education News in 2015. “We feel the state should be concerned with whether kids are learning, not if Mrs. Smith got proficient, or unsatisfactory, or basic.”

But is Kerby’s nullification of the evaluation process a good example to the students? Is it the prerogative of a teacher, for whatever reason, to give identical grades to students regardless of performance?

James Davison Hunter argued in The Death of Character: “There is a body of evidence that shows that moral education has its most enduring effects on young people when they inhabit a social world that coherently incarnates a moral culture defined by a clear and intelligible understanding of public and private good . . . Needless to say, communities with this level of social and cultural integration and stability are scarce in America today.”

Against this backdrop, students need guidance to build the kind of character that can resist temptations to break the rules. The Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues calls this “professional virtue” and offers a template for teachers to help students intentionally build this virtue.

 

Club teaches boys to lead in positive ways

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Administrators at Illinois’ Quincy Junior High School are working with 6th-grade boys to give them the “skills to make a man valuable and character to make a man invaluable,” The Herald Whig reports.

“They’re men in the making—and what they learn now, along with how they act, can help them move into the future confident and capable,” according to the news site.

QJHS Principal Dan Sparrow explained how the idea to help guide the school’s boys into adulthood began when he noticed assistant principal Rick Owsley and “a couple of kids during lunch . . . outside weeding, picking up things.”

“He saw an opportunity that they kind of wanted to give back to the school, taking some pride in it,” Sparrow said.

In December, several 6th-grade boys met up with Owsley to launch the school’s first Men in the Making Club, which teaches life skills and character virtues highlighted in the best-selling book Manual to Manhood.

Students were required to get written permission from their parents to attend, during advisory periods or lunch, and discuss the issues they face as they grow into men.

“Moving from boys to become men is hard,” Sparrow said. “With that comes responsibility.”

Sixth-grader Chase Lawrence said he signed up because “it sounded like fun, interesting and a great time.”

“Plus, people can talk to us, help us,” he said.

Students who join receive a gift box with a book and T-shirt, which Sparrow asks the boys to wear on Fridays to show their pride. Lunchtime discussions center on issues like respect, and building a “social-emotional bank account” to use at school.

“How do you get respect? It’s not given. You’ve got to what?” Sparrow asked students.

“Earn it,” the boys said, according to the Herald Whig.

Sparrow said he wants the students to understand that the way they project themselves—whether they do their homework, how they treat teachers and classmates—impacts their character, and their ability to lead.

“People are going to look at what we do, how we behave, how we act, the things we say,” Sparrow said. “The biggest part of that’s trust. You’ve got to have the trust of people, then you will earn the respect.”

Sparrow said the goal is to build strong character in students that will ultimately draw others into the club and its positive mindset.

“Sometimes students lead in positive ways. Sometimes they lead in negative ways. If we convince the negative leaders to lead in positive ways . . . when we start doing this together, start growing this, then we truly can make junior high what we all want it to be,” Sparrow said.

The QJHS Men in the Making Club fills a critical role in character formation and moral education.

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, wrote in The Death of Character that morality “is received by the individual, internalized into subjective consciousness, and thus experienced as the basic ordering of categories of life.”

Sparrow is providing the vision of responsibility for young men at his school through intentional practice and regular guidance.

Jonathan Catherman, educator and author of Manual to Manhood, offers a framework for building clubs, as well as a guide to get started.

Reconciliation over suspension in Alberta schools

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Canadian schools are combating student discipline problems with restorative justice circles.

In Fort Saskatchewan, social worker Tammy Palmondon uses “peace keeping circles” to prevent problems between students before they arise. Elementary students sit in a circle and listen to each other to help solve minor problems, a process that gives each child a voice and fosters trusting relationships and empathy, she told Global News.

“It’s about feeling closer to everyone in the classroom because one of the principles of restorative practice is that you are building empathy and compassion for other people. Because when you get to know somebody’s story then you can’t act towards them in a negative manner,” Palmondon said.

The circles—a central element of restorative justice practices—are also in play in Alberta schools, which use the discussions in lieu of suspension or expulsion. The restorative approach to student discipline is also becoming more popular in the United States because it’s based on repairing relationships between students, staff, and parents, and not on punitive consequences or zero tolerance policies.

“The idea of holding a conference where they can be directly accountable to the people that they harmed, they learn something. They learn how their actions impact others,” Caroline Gosling, a former Edmonton principal who now works as a restorative justice practitioner.

Gosling and her colleagues met for the 11th Annual Restorative Justice Conference in Calgary in November to advise teachers on how to implement restorative justice practices. Gosling contends that helping students work through their problems is a better solution than forcing them out of school for days or weeks.

“In my experience, suspensions don’t really teach anything. At best they are a three day holiday and at worst, we are sometimes sending kids back to a situation that is unsafe,” she said, according to Global News. “They don’t learn anything and nothing changes when they come back.”

Gosling said her experience as a principal proves “it works.”

“I’ve always worked in schools where suspending children wasn’t an option because it wasn’t safe,” she said. “And so this was the go-to option for resolving conflict and I saw huge changes in kids’ behavior.”

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, lamented the inaccurate notion of individuals as isolated and not socially connnected in his book, The Death of Character.

“Unencumbered by prior obligations, commitments, and relationships, the [false conception is that a] person is capable of creating, out of no other resources than his or her mind and emotions, the ethical and moral justification to which he or she is committed,” Hunter wrote.

Educators use the circles to force students to hear the pain and offenses they’ve caused others, and help students to find the desire to change and to reconcile with those they’ve harmed.

Fort Saskatchewan’s Palmondon said he recently resolved a conflict between three boys in a circle that involved their parents, teachers, and principal, who all provided context on how the issues impacted others.

“Everybody learned more about the perspective of the other person that they didn’t realize before and the impact,” she said. “They thought it was just between me and him but really there were three people involved and beyond that the parents were affected and so was the whole school.”

The Edmonton Youth Justice Committee Society “contributes to safer communities by providing support to young persons who accept responsibility for their actions and make amends.”

Educators can also consider tips from Fania Davis, co-founder of the Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, about implementing restorative justice practices in schools.

Catholic school poll: approval of character at local level

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A national survey on character in which a West Roxbury, Massachusetts, Catholic school participated found that respondents have far more confidence in the integrity of local leaders than national ones, a lesson that the school is using to teach its students about character, despite the polarized national political landscape.

Catholic Memorial School President Peter Folan recently penned an editorial for Wicked Local Roslindale to explain how the all-boys school is engaging students in character education by launching the Research Institute for Politics and Public Policy, and what they’re learning from the experience.

Folan wrote that Catholic Memorial started the Institute because “as educators and parents, we have an obligation to help children find perspective and engage in important dialogue about real-world problems.”

“Our goal,” he wrote, “was to provide our students with the skills needed to search for truth.”

That search began with Catholic Memorial students and faculty putting together a national survey about character that was distributed through a Suffolk University/USA Today poll. Some of the results were predictable, with most respondents (64%) reporting an unfavorable view of the U.S. Congress and current national discourse.

Other findings, however, were far more promising.

Folan wrote:

In the midst of the discord, a silver lining emerged, as the national data presented positive approval of the character and integrity of local elected officials (61 percent), local clergy (65 percent), and local police (82 percent). These statistics sparked great debate and dialogue in our mathematics, history, and theology classes.

The CM poll also highlighted an 85 percent approval rating of the character and integrity of members of one’s local community, while members of the national community garnered only 55 percent approval. Our students also discovered in their analysis a stark difference regarding views on police, who held an almost 82 percent approval rating locally compared to a recent Gallup Poll that found that just 57 percent of Americans have confidence in the police.

The data is significant because it confirms the foundation of Catholic Memorial’s educational mantra: that “having integrity and character matters,” according to Folan.

It also confirms that students, educators and other leaders “have an obligation to shape the future, and it starts on the local level,” he wrote.

“We must act locally to support the good work done within our communities,” Folan wrote. “There is no doubt that we must strive for constant improvement at both the local and national level. We must also never forget that the work we do in our individual spheres does make a difference. Progress happens one step at a time and starts within our local neighborhoods.”

Folan’s sentiment echoes research from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

James Davison Hunter, a sociologist and Executive Director of the Institute, wrote in The Death of Character that “character outside of a lived community, the entanglements of complex social relationships, and their shared story, is impossible.”

Within Catholic Memorial’s small lived community, students are learning the importance of having integrity and other character virtues in their personal and community relationships by looking up to local leaders.

The school’s website describes how administrators work to actively form character in young men through challenging and rewarding academic projects, and how the lasting relationships students forge at the school helps them to “articulate and define their aspirations, their hopes, and their dreams.”

Maryland schools combat fights with conversations

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Six student fights this school year, and three in the last week, prompted Wilde Lake High School Principal Rick Wilson to start a conversation with parents.

In the early December letter to parents, Wilson discussed “a very visible fight” a few days prior and explained how many of the recent altercations spawned from conflicts in the community, often involving students from other schools, The Baltimore Sun reports.

He asked parents to have a conversation with their kids.

“I kindly ask that you take some time . . . to speak with your children and remind them that the adults in their lives are here to provide for their safety and to guide them through difficult situations,” Wilson said in the letter. “We have trained personnel throughout the building if he or she feels the need to talk to a trusted adult.”

The call for communication reflects the Howard County school district’s shifting approach to student discipline and other school issues that’s moving away from punishments toward “restorative justice” practices focused on repairing relationships.

According to the Sun:

To prevent recurring acts of violence, Kevin Gilbert, director of diversity, equity and inclusion, said his office is working to expand relationship-building skills, known as restorative justice practices, and train staff at more schools. These practices teach students how to create and maintain healthy relationships with their peers, focusing on social and emotional development.

Since 2012, 34 schools have been in the process of implementing restorative practices, mostly at the middle and high school level. The process to fully implement and change culture in all county schools could take three to five years, Gilbert said.

Behavioral support specialist Rosanne Wilson explained how it works.

“A lot of times, schools want training on the discipline part of restorative practices [and] want to know how to facilitate a circle that brings the victim and the offender together, so that both can tell their story,” she said. “Then, they come up with a means for some kind of an agreement to say this is how we’re going to move forward so that this doesn’t happen again.”

The district is working with the Howard County Education Association teachers union and the Community Justice for Youth Institute in Chicago to train educators on restorative practices like talking circles, which allow students to resolve conflicts through discussions to prevent or resolve incidents.

“The emphasis in the training was on how the implementation of peace circles can build trust, promote social and emotional well-being and facilitate harmonious relationships,” said HCEA President Colleen Morris. “Just like teaching academic subjects requires planning, preparation and knowledge of students, peace circle implementation relies on well-trained facilitators to insure a safe learning environment is created.”

District spokesman Brian Bassett noted “The most effective way to prevent a physical altercation before it happens is through conversation.”

Joseph E. Davis, scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and publisher of The Hedgehog Review, quotes Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sherry Turkle on the critical importance of conversation:

But it is in this type of conversation—where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another—that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

Howard County schools are trying to rebuild this sort of conversation through restorative circles in which students deal honestly with each other and repair the damage caused by a slight or a fight.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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