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Tech elites don’t let their little darlings use screens

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A new book highlights the negative effects of social media among students, and its authors point to years of warning signs from Silicon Valley parents who strictly regulate their children’s exposure.

Research from the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture shows technology use is an issue that concerns all types of parents, though many feel powerless to control it.

Educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles, authors of Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber, examine how technology giants like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs addressed screen time with their kids.

From Business Insider:

In 2007, Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft, implemented a cap on screen time when his daughter started developing an unhealthy attachment to a video game. He also didn’t let his kids get cell phones until they turned 14. (Today, the average age for a child getting their first phone is 10.)

Jobs, who was the CEO of Apple until his death in 2012, revealed in a 2011 New York Times interview that he prohibited his kids from using the newly-released iPad. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” Jobs told reporter Nick Bilton.

Clement and Miles contend Silicon Valley parents understand the addictive nature of personal devices and social media better than most because they created that world.

“It’s interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use an electronic devise like iPads,” they wrote, “Steve Jobs’s kids would be some of the only kids opted out.”

The desire of some Silicon Valley parents to cut back on technology is also spawning specialty low-tech schools like the Waldorf School, where teachers use chalkboards and students use pencils. At Waldorf, educators focus on character virtues rather than coding skills, Business Insider reports.

But Silicon Valley parents aren’t the only ones who want more control over their children’s time online.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s “Culture of American Families” report found “parents believe media technologies’ effects on children are not good—manners, treatment of others, stilted imaginations, relaxed norms, virtual realities—but they are not sure if they can control it.”

“Although parents attempt to find ways to monitor and control these influences, the general feeling is one of defeat. Parents, importantly, seem resigned to these changes and somewhat hopeless in the face of them,” according to the report. “The extensive reach of media technologies limits parental influence, and parents feel their ability to impose limits on media technologies is beyond their reach.”

Silicon Valley parents obviously refuse to admit defeat and take actions to impose control over their children’s education and development.

EducationNext and Getting Smart offer other perspectives for parents to consider how they handle their child’s device use at school and at home.

How Montana Catholic school students build character through community service

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Serving others is a way of life at Montana’s Missoula Catholic Schools.

In kindergarten, students collect food during the week and help to sort it at a local food bank. Fourth-graders are hosting a sock drive to clothe area homeless. Others are helping the elderly with landscaping, repainting community signs, and clearing overgrown trails.

“They love doing stuff to help people in the community outside the school,” teacher Katie Wardsiani told the Missoulian, “to be part of that makes my heart feel so big.”

The tradition of serving the community is a bedrock of Catholic social teachings that dates back decades at Missoula Catholic Schools, which has modernized the practice to focus on personal development and structure for students to give back.

All students at Loyola Sacred Heart high school, for example, must complete a quota of community-service hours each year with a goal of working toward something bigger. By graduation, each student is expected to design, plan, and implement their own 40-hour “Senior Vision Project” aimed at improving the quality of life for others.

Senior adviser and teacher Dave Klein told the Missoulian, charity work wasn’t as structured when he attended Catholic schools, but the intent is for students to take ownership of their work and continue on after high school.

“It was more of a compulsory thing. There wasn’t an ownership. It was an obligation you did then, but didn’t do after that. It was something you checked off,” Klein said of past practices. “We hope our students will own it, feel empowered by it, feel proud of it.”

That seemed to be the situation with 17-year-old Luke Bledsoe, who cleared brush and branches along miles of the Lewis and Clark Trail in Idaho to make it more accessible.

“My goal was to try to let elderly people see the beautiful spots,” Bledsoe said, adding that his 85-year-old grandfather made the trek with him after he cleared out the overgrown trails. “He had been a district ranger and had probably never seen those spots before because it was so thick and hard to trudge through.”

Another senior, Kylie Esh, organized a workshop for elementary students to explore conscience. Speakers attended to help youngsters contemplate the role of silence in reconciliation, decision-making, and other topics of morality and faith.

“I wanted to better the faith of these kids,” Esh said. “A lot of schools do a senior project, but it’s about a topic. Giving back to the community is important.”

Other students like 17-year-old Kenna Guenther built on their previous service work for their Senior Vision Project. Guenther spent the summer helping elderly Missoula residents with landscaping and other chores, and the experience inspired her to help them document their family trees and offer wisdom to their grandchildren.

“It’s personal. It just is a lot more meaningful,” Guenther said of her work with the elderly. “They were happy and very positive people. It made me think about what I want to be like when I’m older.”

Guenther said the idea for her senior project stemmed from similarities she shared with those she helped over the summer, the Missoulian reports.

“I live really far from my family and they live really far from their families, so I’m going to interview them and make a family tree. And just anything they want their grandkids to know about them and life,” she said. “I’ll make it into a nice book for them around Christmas time.”

Catholic Schools researcher Carol Ann MacGregor presented the report Varieties of Moral Formation: Selected Preliminary Findings from a Landmark Research Study to the U.S. Department of Non-Public Education in 2016, which pointed out how ongoing disagreement among Catholic educators centers on whether compulsory community service as an element of schooling undermines its volunteer nature.

“Some (teachers) suggested that it would not be ‘service’ or ‘volunteering’ if it were required, while others argued that students needed the added structure,” MacGregor wrote.

Other schools have the same vision for formative community service.

The “portrait of a graduate” prepared by the Jesuit Schools Network provides a helpful starting place for educators to consider how community service—whether compulsory, voluntary, or some combination—can cultivate the strong character virtues students will carry with them throughout their lives.

Moral discipline is a 21st-century skill

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CNN’s Fareed Zakaria thinks students in today’s world of information overload must develop “intellectual discipline” to say “no” to the lure of social media in order to “go deep” and “actually read books.”

Zakaria discussed his perspective as part of a panel on “Education in the Post-Truth World” during the 2017 World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), which drew thousands of educators from more than 100 countries to Doha, Qatar, in November.

“I say this to my kids all the time, you can graze all these headlines and tweets and blog posts you like—at the end of the day the way you develop real knowledge about a subject still remains that you have to go deep; still remains that you have to actually read books; still remains that you have to talk to experts, travel to countries,” he said.

Zakaria compared the plethora of modern technologies to his experience growing up in India in the 1970s, when there was only one black and white television channel available that nobody watched.

The situation forced Zakaria to spend much of his time reading, and that led to a promising career. But today’s youth face a much different situation that will require them to learn how to tune out to focus in and sort fact from fiction.

“If I had a supercomputer in my pocket called an iPhone that could stream all the entertainment in the world, all the TV shows, I don’t think I would’ve read that much but I don’t think I would’ve had the career that I have,” he said. “I don’t know where that takes you.

“Children are going to have to learn something I didn’t have to learn as much which is discipline, intellectual discipline—the ability to say no,” Zakaria added.

“The world my children are growing up in is exactly the opposite, an explosion of choice, an explosion of options, an explosion of opportunity.”

Knowing how to say no and using “intellectual discipline” to “actually read books” is becoming increasingly important as many teens look to social media and other questionable sites to gather information.

Quartz points out that a 2016 Stanford University study shows the majority of students from middle school through the undergraduate level access news through social media sites like Twitter and Snapchat, and most can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s propaganda.

Zakaria’s comments also echo the same argument University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter applies to character education.

“Moral discipline, in many respects, is the capacity to say ‘no’; its function, to inhibit and constrain personal appetites on behalf of a greater good. This idea of a greater good points to a second element, moral attachment,” Hunter wrote in The Death of Character. “It reflects the affirmation of our commitments to a larger community, the embrace of an ideal that attracts us, draws us, animates us, inspires us.”

“Without strong moral attachment to the good, we won’t know when to say no.”

Educators looking to develop students’ moral attachment to the good and intellectual discipline to say no can find guidance at the The Jubilee Centre’s “Teaching Character Through Subjects” page.

The series was developed in England to “create an innovative resource for building character within 14 subjects across the school curriculum.”

Parents, teachers frustrated with online ‘parent portal’

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A Colorado school district is ditching parent-teacher conferences in favor of an online “parent portal,” and the decision is not going over well with teachers or parents.

The Adams 14 school district in Commerce City, north of Denver, is under pressure from the state to improve academics after years of poor performance, and school officials told Chalkbeat that a new Infinite Campus website will allow them to spend more time on instruction through updates to parents online.

Many of the Adams district’s roughly 7,500 students are English language learners and the vast majority come from low-income families. School officials did not announce the cancellation of parent-teacher conferences, though some schools used a “parent engagement day” in August to sign parents up for Infinite Campus accounts and to show them how to use it.

The website, which is also accessible through a smart phone app, allows parents to review weekly grades and information on specific assignments and attendance. The information, district spokeswoman Janelle Asmus contends, is “more robust than what they were able to get through a parent-teacher conference.”

“We believe this is going to be better over time,” she said.

But many parents and teachers who spoke with Chalkbeat cited problems with the program, and said it doesn’t provide the same level of feedback as traditional parent-teacher conferences, especially for parents with limited English.

“Teachers would tell me at conferences what I needed to help my son with, they would tell me how he was behaving and everything they did in class, like what they were studying,” parent Carolina Rosales, mother of two elementary students, told the news site. “The portal might tell me he failed an assignment, but what does that tell me?”

Elementary school teacher Jodi Connelly, a union representative, said that with the absence of parent teacher conferences, many parents want to speak with her before or after school instead. The situation both cuts into her time and poses problems for some parents who don’t speak English well. Those parents are typically offered interpreters at conferences.

“They want to have that conversation with a teacher, but it doesn’t replace the actual conference,” Connelly said. “My Spanish is OK, but not great, so I have to take time to find someone to have a phone call with me.”

Union president Barb McDowell said teachers are now using their unpaid time off to talk with parents, and the union is pushing to reinstate the parent-teacher conferences.

“All the teachers are really frustrated,” McDowell said. “We want to meet with parents. We send texts. We call. We try to have conversations. But at the same time, teachers know if they start doing it, it’ll just be expected of them.”

District officials could not provide data on attendance rates at parent-teacher conferences, but McDowell contends most families in her middle school classroom attended last year. She conceded that attendance tends to drop off for high-schoolers. Chalkbeat noted that other districts in the area use Infinite Campus, but continue to schedule traditional conferences.

The Adams 14 district is reportedly working to improve parent engagement as part of its plan to change the school’s legacy of poor academics, through more visits by teachers and a series of “engagement” days, but at least one expert believes the elimination of the parent conferences seemingly contradicts the district’s efforts.

“Generally speaking, everyone believes parents need an opportunity to meet with their child’s teacher,” Steven Sheldon, education researcher at Johns Hopkins University, told Chalkbeat. “I personally find this policy decision troubling. I feel like it is creating greater distance between the schools and the families that they’re serving and they’re really putting the onus on parents to get all the information.”

Sheldon noted research that shows online parent portals often disadvantage families with poor or no access to the internet, compounding inequities between affluent students and their peers.

Guadalupe Castro, parent of an Adams City High School student, said she set up an account with Infinite Campus, but it’s only in English and difficult to use. She said she’s continued to push without success to meet with her child’s teachers because the online system isn’t enough.

“I don’t understand it,” she said. “There’s a language barrier, so for me it’s more comfortable to talk in person. My thought is that it was the only space we really used to find out how our kids were doing. And most of all, for me it was about building that trust with the teacher so that I could collaborate with them and they could get to know me and know that I’m accessible to support them.”

The elimination of parent-teacher conferences in the Adams district also plays into a broader trend observed by University of Virginia education professor Diane Hoffman in 2013.

“Norms of parenting in many communities in the United States have moved away from what were commonly accepted and valued practices of diffuse authority and communal discipline—the expectation that other mothers, for instance, would make sure everyone’s kids behaved well at the bus stop,” Hoffman wrote for The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

The loss of diffuse authority and communal discipline makes parent-teacher conferences all the more important by providing valuable face time for parents and teachers to discuss a child’s academic progress and developing character.

The National Education Association offers resources for educators who want to get more out of those conversations, or to increase parental turnout, including a creative idea from Wisconsin business teacher Julie Woletz that has students begging their parents to attend.

When our heroes falter: lessons from 3 UCLA athletes

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The recent arrest of three University of California Los Angeles players in China for shoplifting, and their subsequent return to the United States, provides valuable lessons on character, humility, and taking responsibility as role models.

In October, President Trump intervened to facilitate the release of three UCLA freshman basketball players who were caught shoplifting at several stores during a trip to China for an exhibition game.

The players—LiAngelo Ball, Jalen Hill, and Cody Riley—were suspended indefinitely from the basketball team once they arrived home, and they held a press conference in mid-November to own up to their misdeeds, which could have resulted in up to 10 years in a Chinese jail, NPR reports.

Each player at the press conference admitted to stealing, apologized for their actions, and pleaded for forgiveness in what’s become an embarrassing international incident for the university and the United States.

“I take full responsibility for the mistake I have made, shoplifting,” Riley said. “I know that this goes beyond me letting my school down, but I let the entire country down.”

“I take full responsibility for my actions, and I’m sorry,” said Ball, younger brother of Los Angeles Laker Lonzo Ball.

Jalen Hill told reporters “what I did was stupid, there’s just no other way to put it.”

The students also recognized the impact of their actions on their family, friends, teammates, university, and the United States.

“I apologize to my teammates, my coaches, and my family because of how much negative attention that I put on them that they do not deserve,” Hill said.

All three students stressed that the stealing is not their origin or destiny, and vowed to learn from the experience so it doesn’t happen again.

“I’d also like everyone to know that this does not define who I am,” Ball said. “My family raised me better than that and I’m going to make myself a better person from here on out.”

While these young men are not necessarily role models for most children, as parents don’t want their kids to become shoplifters, they are role models for some, a fact that Riley addressed in a message to his younger brother at the press briefing.

“To my younger brother, Ben, this is not the example that I want to set for you,” he said. “But from here on out, I promise I will be the best role model I can be . . .  for you to look up to.”

Taking responsibility is tough, but the players’ comments show their willingness to own up to their action, to ask for forgiveness, and to enter the slow process of rebuilding trust. Children who watch their athletic heroes humble themselves learn this is the only way to grow. People who can publicly admit their failures, seek the forgiveness of those they’ve wronged, and actively seek to change are the only ones worthy of emulation.

In the book The Death of Character, University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote that the most essential feature of character “is the inner capacity for restraint—an ability to inhibit oneself in one’s passions, desires, and habits within the boundaries of a moral order.”

In this case, the student athletes failed by shoplifting.

But Hunter notes that “character is, in explicit ways, the embodiment of the ideals of a moral order . . . ” and the contrition and apology offered by the students illustrate their submission to a moral order they’ve violated.

This is the world we live in: one with fallible heroes who grow only by humility and taking responsibility.

Coaches looking to build strong character in students can find resources in University of Virginia’s basketball program, which coach Tony Bennett built on Five Pillars: Humility, Passion, Unity, Servanthood, and Thankfulness.

Motivation or bribery? On paying kids to show up, do better

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Research into the practice of paying students to perform at school is showing mixed results, and it’s highlighting problems with an approach that relies on rewards after more than a decade in practice.

Education Week recently highlighted efforts by some schools to incentivize student attendance or performance through a variety of means, from cash to cars. The practice first gained traction following the federal No Child Left Behind Act passed by Congress in 2001, and the resulting research in both the U.S. and internationally shows results depend a lot on how programs are designed.

One of the biggest studies involved Harvard University economist Roland Fryer, who led a series of experiments through the mid-2000s that paid out over $6 million to more than 18,000 low-income students in Chicago, Dallas, New York City, and the District of Columbia in hopes of improving test scores.

According to Ed Week:

The major takeaway from Fryer’s research is that inducements are more likely to work if a program incentivizes things students feel they can control. In technical terms, that means rewarding inputs instead of outputs, said Jeffrey Livingston, an associate professor of economics at Bentley University. Students don’t necessarily know how to improve their test scores, so even if they’re motivated to try harder, that doesn’t mean they can actually do better.

“If the incentive is tied to the performance on the test, the effects are small if there at all,” said Livingston. “But if you tie it to the preparation for the test, the studying, like incentivizing reading a book or doing practice tests . . . that tends to have much bigger effects.”

In other places, similar efforts also met mixed results, though some school officials contend it’s had a generally positive effect.

The Union R-XI School District in Missouri offered students up to $100 for perfect attendance at summer school, Tennessee’s Shelby County schools offered Memphis Grizzlies tickets to students with good attendance, and the famed Success Academy charter school network has also offered small prizes like Nerf guns for good behavior.

“I think rallying around something that’s such a positive, fun way to improve attendance helps change the culture of the school,” Megan Berceau, intervention specialist at the Granite school district in Utah, told Ed Week.

Berceau said incentives like allowing students to ride non-motorized scooters to class as a reward for good attendance has kept some of them motivated.

Others, including Raytown, MO, Superintendent Allan Markley said incentives that offer something students truly want is the key. In Raytown, school officials raffled off two cars to students with top attendance.

“A lot of kids are working to support their family, a lot of them are homeless. What can we do to entice kids to come to school? They are dealing with a lot and coming to school may not be their number one priority,” Markley said. “So, what does every 16-year-old dream of? Something with four wheels, maybe?”

Incentives haven’t worked as well in many other districts, however.

Parents complained in 2015 when a New Jersey school district announced plans to award gift cards to students who showed up to take state standardized tests, for example.

Tulane University education researcher Douglas Harris contends many parents and educators oppose the incentives because they seemingly contradict the purpose of education.

“If your goal is to instill a love of learning, paying students to read books doesn’t really do that,” he told Ed Week. “It doesn’t reflect the view of teaching and learning that most educators support. They don’t want it to be transactional.”

Incentivizing youngsters to encourage good behavior using bribes, consequences, or surveillance is nothing new, and the programs in place at many schools simply formalize a process that’s been used by parents for years.

But there’s a difference between bribing students into good behavior and motivating them to do what’s right for its own sake. Parents and educators successfully instill responsible behavior when students do what’s right without incentives. The ultimate goal is to cultivate a moral autonomy that allows them to make those decisions on their own.

James Davison Hunter wrote in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America that “ . . . character education programs can work . . . when people react to the idea of acting in certain ways the way most Americans react to the idea of eating grubs.

“The right and wrong things to do should be as instinctive and as obvious as we feel food taboos to be, when the first answer to why we will do this is just ‘Well, because.’”

To develop “good sense” in students about doing right and wrong, the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues offers a lesson framework for teachers, administrators, and parents.

How to teach gratitude through journaling

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A Syracuse, NY, middle school is helping to focus students on the things that truly matter.

“Having a bed to sleep in,” wrote Lincoln Middle School 7th-grader Jesse Swank in his school-provided gratitude journal.

“Having my glasses,” another entry read.

Swank is among about 500 Lincoln students who received the specially bound gratitude journals in October after a chance encounter by principal LaJuan White sparked a community-wide fundraising campaign to make it happen, Syracuse.com reports.

The idea came last summer after White had a long night helping a student and stopped in to the local Original Grain for a breakfast smoothie. While there, she noticed a “gratitude journal” on display at the downtown restaurant that encouraged customers to take a moment to chronicle what they are grateful for.

White jotted down a note and it lifted her spirits, so she tasked English teacher Marleah Tkacz with tracking down the makers of the journal, Grateful Peoples, to bring the concept to Lincoln classrooms.

Tkacz contacted Grateful Peoples founder Teddy Droseros, and he offered to sell the school journals at roughly half price—$8.00 each. White, Tkacz, and others at Lincoln then launched a fundraising drive to get journals into the hands of every student, and Original Grain was among the first to help out.

The restaurant concocted a special “gratitude smoothie” with proceeds to help the cause, and other businesses in the area quickly followed suit.

“It sounded really cool to me,” said Eric Hinman, one of Original Grain’s owners.

Urban Life held a charity spin class, and O Yoga hosted a yoga class for employees of the local marketing firm Terakeet, which raised $350. Hinman also contacted Paul Messina, owner of Apizza Regionale, to expand on the fundraising.

Messina brought several Lincoln students to his restaurant to create special “gratitude pies” that also raised $1,300 toward the project. Others from the Lincoln school neighborhood donated money as well, including one unnamed woman who dropped off a $500 check.

“It just speaks to the whole idea of gratitude,” White told Syracuse.com. “It took on a life of its own.”

Within weeks the community raised about $5,000, and Droseros rented a car, loaded it with 550 journals, and delivered them from New York City to the upstate school in person.

“It was one of the best experiences of my life,” he said. “I’m really inspired by the people in Syracuse.”

“It was really a community effort,” Droseros said.

Each gratitude journal, White said, belongs to a specific student.

“It has your name on it,” White said. “It’s very personal.”

Droseros said he created the gratitude journals and put them in public places about a year ago to encourage people to give thanks. The effort eventually turned into a nonprofit, one he hopes will now involve more collaboration with schools.

Lincoln students told Syracuse.com mornings have evolved from a hectic ordeal last school year into several minutes of quiet time to reflect on what’s most important.

“This year,” Swank, the 7th-grader, said, “it’s more peaceful and calm.”

The daily reflection is critically important because it helps students to focus their attention on gratitude, a virtue that “has enormous moral significance,” according to philosopher Laurence Thomas.

Thomas explained in The Hedgehog Review, a publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, that it’s through gratitude that humans acknowledge the significance of each other to form basic social connections.

“When a person acts in good will towards another, then she or he is acknowledging that the other has moral value,” he wrote. “Gratitude is a natural response to being so treated.”

Educators and parents can begin engaging students in cultivating appreciation and gratitude with a curriculum guide from the Jubilee Centre at the University of Birmingham.

Kids say kindness is not their parents’ priority

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Highlights magazine recently released its “The State of the Kid 2017” report, which focuses on “caring, compassion and empathy in the next generation.”

This year’s theme for the annual survey is kindness, and Highlights asked over 2,000 boys and girls ages 6–12 from all over the country about their perception of the world today.

When posed with the question, “What do you think is most important to your parents, that you’re happy, do well in school, or are kind?” the response was eye-opening.

Forty-four percent of students said their parents most want them to be happy, and 33 percent said doing well in school was the top priority. Only 23 percent pointed to being kind.

The results prompted Harvard University’s Making Caring Common Project to weigh in on the situation, to spotlight the apparent disconnect between what students perceive and what parents say they want, and to offer advice for parents looking to raise compassionate kids.

The Making Caring Common initiative pointed to the “Culture of American Families” report by the Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. The study documented parents’ explicit commitment to moral character.

“The overwhelming majority of American parents (96 percent) say ‘strong moral character’ is very important, if not essential to their children’s future,” according to the Institute report.

The Highlights survey, as well as a 2014 survey of kids by the Making Caring Common Project, both illustrate a persistent “rhetoric/reality gap” that’s distorting the message to students. Much like the State of the Kid report, the 2014 survey found 81 percent of students believed their parents prioritize happiness or achievement over kindness.

From the Making Caring Common Project:

Why does this “rhetoric/reality gap” matter? When parents’ daily messages about achievement and happiness drown out their messages about concern for others, children tend not to prioritize caring and fairness in relation to their self-concerns. They’re more likely to be preoccupied with their own needs than others’ needs. When caring is not a priority, there is also a lower bar for many forms of harmful behavior, including cruelty, disrespect, dishonesty, and cheating. Not only that, the focus on happiness, and the focus on achievement in many affluent communities, doesn’t appear to increase either children’s achievement or their happiness.

The State of the Kid report shows the “rhetoric/reality gap” likely stems at least in part from the example parents set for their children. Many students told Highlights they’ve witnessed their parents or other adults acting unkindly or saying mean things, most commonly while in the car, on the phone, or watching television.

Nearly half of students said the experience made them uncomfortable, while a total of 93% reported some sort of negative reaction to adults behaving badly.

The gap between what parents want for their children, and what children perceive in practice, should serve as a call to change.

The Making Caring Common Project offers parenting tips to help focus on kindness. Teachers can share the advice with families at parent-teacher conferences structured to discuss character formation first, ahead of academic performance.

Parents and educators can also use the Project’s quiz “Are You Teaching Your Child to Be a Good Person?”

Storytelling event in Wichita lures children with the call of stories

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Wichita Griots, a 12-member group of storytellers, recently hosted the 35th annual National Association of Black Storytellers Festival, drawing national attention to its efforts to develop character and promote literacy through their craft.

Jean Pouncil-Burton, who founded Wichita Griots nearly a decade ago after retiring from a career as a librarian, told The Wichita Eagle the group visits local schools and other organizations to tell stories, teach character, and promote literacy.

“We tell a number of stories from folk tales to ghost stories to historical stories,” she said. “We inform, educate, inspire, motivate, uplift, and heal with our stories.”

The local group is one of 15 affiliates of the National Association of Black Storytellers, which held its annual festival at the Wichita Marriott for the first time on Nov. 8. The five-day event kicked off with a concert featuring local talent and activities that included performances by Wahoto, a children’s group; a drum line from the Bunker Performing Arts Magnet Elementary School; and a local choir called ARISE, the Eagle reports.

The events, built around the theme “The African American Story: From Chains to Wings,” continued with a series of concerts performances, dances, workshops, and contests through Nov. 12.

The festivities featured several “master storytellers,” as well as renowned drummers like Jeremie Meadows, a Georgia high schooler, and Kunama Mtendaji, a Missouri percussionist who specializes in drumming and dance from Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast. In addition to the festival at the Marriott, Wichita Griots also guided festival participants on a tour of the city’s black history sites, including The Kansas African American Museum, the site of the Dockum Sit-In, and the Ulrich Museum of Art.

Melody McCray-Miller told the Eagle one of the most popular events is the tall tales contest, which encourages adults and youngsters to craft outlandish yarns.

“They’ll get in a mood and a groove and they’ll tell some stories,” she said.

Immersing oneself in stories, and learning to tell those stories, is an essential part of developing a moral compass and good character.

Robert Coles, Pulitzer Prize-winning psychiatrist and author of The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, notes that “Novels and stories are renderings of life; they cannot only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course.”

Stories also affirm our belonging in a community, reinforcing the strength of that community. According to Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture founder James Davison Hunter in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, “The story implicit in the word character is one that is shared. It is never a story just for the isolated individual. The narrative integrates the self into communal purposes binding dissimilar others to common ends.”

The storytellers festival provided both an opportunity for master storytellers to guide a younger generation to stay the course of good character, and encouraged youngsters to craft their own stories that will undoubtedly draw others along the same path.

How to address chronic student absenteeism in schools

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Schools across the country are struggling with chronic student absenteeism, and more are now using absences as a measure of school culture in accountability reports to the U.S. Department of Education.

Education researchers believe the solution to addressing the problem requires simple steps to involve parents and the community, and are encouraging schools to move away from punitive punishments that have failed in the past.

Available data shows more than 7 million students miss at least 15 school days per year, and in nearly 10,000 schools at least 30 percent of students are chronically absent, which is typically defined as missing 10 percent or more of the school year, Education Week reports.

In the past, the measure served as an indicator that something is wrong with a student or school, and often foreshadowed future academic struggles including students being held back or failing to graduate high school.

Now, many states are ramping up efforts to address the problem by including student absences in yearly federal reports required through the Every Student Succeeds Act. The law requires states to report chronic absenteeism, but roughly three-quarters of states are including the metric as a measure of school quality in an attempt to improve academic outcomes, according to the news site.

“First and foremost, you have to show up to learn,” Angelo Gonzales, director of the nonprofit Mission: Graduate told the Albuquerque Journal. “It is also about engagement. We want kids to be present and deeply engaged in their learning.”

In Albuquerque Public Schools, for example, roughly 25 percent of high school students are habitually truant. It’s a similar story nationwide.

In Oregon, the percentage of chronically absent students statewide increased from 17.4 percent a few years ago to nearly 20 percent last year, The Daily Astorian reports.

In Oregon’s Seaside School District, 24 percent of students missed at least 10 percent of the school year, and other districts like Knappa and Jewell schools were close behind with chronic absentee rates eclipsing 20 percent.

“We know that students who attend school regularly have more opportunity to learn, so tracking chronic absenteeism is critical,” acting state Deputy Superintendent Colt Gill told the news site. “There is a direct link between high instances of chronic absenteeism and low graduation rates. This is why chronic absenteeism is one of our school accountability measures in our Oregon Plan for the Every Student Succeeds Act and why Gov. (Kate) Brown and the Legislature have invested in programs to address the issue.”

In Oregon, the state invested $7.4 million over the next two years to improve attendance and graduation rates. Other states including North Carolina are also considering absenteeism as a metric for ESSA plans.

A recent study by the N.C. Early Childhood Foundation reveals the problem often starts early in students’ academic careers. In North Carolina, one in eight elementary school students miss 15 days or more of school, Duke University professor Philip Cook and Georgetown University’s Phyllis Jordan wrote in a recent editorial for the Charlotte Observer.

But Jordan and Cook point out that solutions for getting students to come to class regularly aren’t exactly rocket science.

In one school, administrators gave teachers of first-and second-grade students prepaid cell phones to keep regular contact with parents, and encouraged educators to visit students and their parents at home at the beginning of the year.

According to Jordan and Cook:

The results of the experiment in one North Carolina school district were positive: Student absenteeism dropped by an average of 10 percent, and parents were twice as likely to contact teachers—whether through texts or calls—as parents in other classrooms.

A report from the nonprofit Attendance Works titled “Portraits of Change” highlights other relatively simple models deployed elsewhere to cut down on chronic absenteeism.

“Cleveland, for example, brought its chronic absence rate down from 35 percent to 29 percent in a year by enlisting a wide array of education and community partners. Cleveland’s attendance campaign included phone banking and outreach, incentives, professional development for teachers, and mentoring for students struggling with attendance. Long Beach, Calif., engaged the entire community, including its health professionals, in its campaign to cut absenteeism across the board,” Education Week reports.

“New Britain, Conn., deployed additional outreach workers to help cut kindergarten chronic absenteeism in half within two years. When attendance climbed in those New Britain kindergarten classrooms, so did the scores on literacy tests.”

“Chronic absenteeism, more than any academic indicator, is something parents, teachers, and the community can improve if they use data to target action and address barriers to getting to school,” Education Week reports. “Fortunately, public data will be more available than ever before for scrutiny. And the inclusion of the metric in state accountability plans brings an added urgency to getting more kids to school every day.”

The common theme of several successful efforts have focused on positive encouragement, rather than past practices such as fines, suspensions or jail time for parents of chronically absent students.

Importantly, the  most successful strategies for getting students to class require involving parents and the community as a whole in the problem-solving process. As James Davison Hunter of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture writes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, “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.”

By involving family culture, school administrators are able to create a stronger school culture. Bringing parents, teachers, administrators, and community leaders together is critical for other important initiatives, such as student character education programs.