ethics

Eva Moskowitz on “Why schools should teach moral character”

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Success Academy is well known for outstanding academic achievement: With 15,500 students, our network of 46 charter schools is the size of the seventh largest school district in New York State and had the highest percentages of students passing last year’s state math and reading exams. Last year, we received the prestigious Broad Prize for the “greatest academic performance and improvement while reducing achievement gaps among low-income students and students of color.” Four of our schools have earned National Blue Ribbons.

But we believe our students’ academic accomplishments are nothing if they do not also possess strong moral character. So in addition to teaching our scholars to be good readers, writers, mathematicians, and scientists, we believe they need to be people of high moral character who are self-reflective about their actions.

Teaching moral character scares many educators. That’s commonly because of a belief in relativism, an appropriate concern not to impose ideas by simple authority on a diverse student body. True, our school community is diverse. Our families, scholars, teachers, and staff do all not share the same values. And as educators we must be careful not to impose our own political or religious values on students. Yet I think we can all agree that schools can and should teach students honesty and kindness.

Ethics and good character are a part of our daily instruction. We do not have a character development curriculum because we don’t believe learning right from wrong is something that happens from 11:05–11:55 twice a week.  Rather, we have core values, and we teach them at the beginning of the year so that all new students know our north star—and we re-teach them throughout the year, since it’s easy to forget the what and the why.

At Success Academy, we mostly worry not about the kids, but the grownups. Ethics start with adults and filter to children. Respect for others and proper behavior are not just taught, but expected, modeled, and rewarded at Success Academy.

We spend much time on articulating and reinforcing what it means to be an ethical educator.  Our core beliefs include academic integrity, of course, but also center on respecting children and treating them with kindness and consistency.

We believe it is unethical to tell students reflexively they are doing a “great job” when in fact their work is poor. We believe it is unethical to pretend to valorize thinking but actually valorize procedures. We believe that, as educators, we must give students as much independence as possible, but not so much that their mistakes are fatal.

We expect our scholars to prize integrity and to make smart, ethical decisions. We know and fear the irreparable consequences that can result from one lapse in good judgment. But we also expect moral lapses and gaps. When we find them, we stop and address them with radical candor.

This has been one of the most important ingredients to our success. It is impossible to imagine our current academic excellence without this emphasis on high moral character.

 

OECD’s Schleicher: Ethics for an Age of Acceleration

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Andreas Schleicher is Director for Education and Skills, and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

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This is the age of acceleration, a speeding-up of human experience through the impact of disruptive forces on every aspect of our lives.

It is also a time of political contestation. For the last 72 years, the wider international community has prioritized balancing the needs and interests of individuals, communities, and nations in an equitable framework based on open borders, free markets, and a sustainable future. But where the disruptive forces of these changes have brought a sense of dislocation, political forces have emerged that offer closed borders, protection of traditional jobs, and the promise to put the interests of today’s generation over those of future generations.

How should countries equip young people to understand, engage with, and shape this changing world?

In this accelerated, politicized age, we can no longer teach people for a lifetime. In this age, education needs to help students cultivate a reliable compass and other navigational tools with which they may find their own way through an increasingly complex and volatile world.

Future jobs will pair computer intelligence with human knowledge, skills, character qualities, and values. It will be our capacity for innovation, our awareness, our ethical judgement and our sense of responsibility that will equip us to harness machines to shape the world for the better.

This is the main conclusion drawn by OECD countries working on Education 2030, a new framework for curriculum design. Not surprisingly, then, schools must increasingly recognize the need for fostering ethics, character, and citizenship. They must also develop in their students a range of social and emotional skills, such as empathy, compassion, mindfulness, purposefulness, responsibility, collaboration, and self-regulation.

At the center of the Education 2030 framework, OECD countries have placed creating new value, dealing with tensions and dilemmas, and developing responsibility as desired competencies. What do these mean? And how are they connected to ethics, and to social and emotional skills?

Young people’s agency to shape the future will partly hinge on their capacity to create new value. Creating new value is a transformative competency. It refers to the processes of creating, making, bringing into being, and formulating. It imagines outcomes from these processes that are innovative, fresh, original, and contribute something of intrinsic positive worth. It suggests entrepreneurship in the broadest sense—being ready to venture, to try, without the crippling anxiety of failure. The constructs, attributes, and virtues that underpin this competency are imagination, inquisitiveness, persistence, collaboration, and self-discipline.

Dealing with tensions, dilemmas, and trade-offs will also be necessary for young people in the age to come. In a structurally imbalanced world it is necessary for them to reconcile diverse perspectives and interests in local settings that sometimes have global implications. Striking the balance between competing demands—of equity and freedom, autonomy and community, innovation and continuity, and efficiency and democratic process—will rarely lead to a simple choice or even a single solution. Individuals will need to think in a more integrated way that avoids premature conclusions and attends to interconnections. The constructs, attributes, and virtues that underpin the competence include empathy, adaptability, and trust.

The third transformative competency—developing responsibility—is a prerequisite of the other two. Dealing with novelty, change, diversity, and ambiguity assumes that individuals can “think for themselves” with a robust moral compass. Both creativity and problem-solving require the capacity to consider the future consequences of one’s actions, to evaluate risk and reward, and to accept accountability for the products of one’s work.

These, in turn, require a sense of responsibility, and also moral and intellectual maturity.  With these, people can reflect upon and evaluate their actions in the light of their experiences, their personal  and societal goals, what they have been taught and told, and what is right or wrong.

Ethics is the thoughtful perception of what is right or wrong, good or bad, in a specific situation. It asks questions related to norms, values, meanings, and limits. Central to this competency is the concept of self-regulation, in the spheres of personal, interpersonal, and social responsibility. It rests on constructs, attributes, and virtues of self-control, self-efficacy, responsibility, problem-solving, and adaptability.

The challenge for educators is not to defer these dimensions to new school subjects, but to embed them in everything that is taught and learned at school. Supporting countries in this effort is the goal of the OECD Education 2030 project.

 

GA cheating scandal highlights importance of character education

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Dozens of students at Gwinnett County, Georgia’s Dacula High School were busted for cheating after school officials discovered answers to countywide final exams posted to social media in late May.

School officials issued a statement to Fox 5:

Dacula High School addressed a cheating issue during the last week of school. It appears that answers to final exams were posted on social media and used by students. School leaders became aware of the social media postings and were able to actively review exams for potential cheating.

Based on a preponderance of evidence, it appears that approximately 80 Dacula students used the answers posted when taking their finals. The school has addressed the issue with the students, providing them with appropriate discipline consequences. As the exams involved were for 10th grade language arts, chemistry, and world history, no seniors were involved and this did not affect graduation.

Officials would not elaborate on the disciplinary action against students, but said they believe the answers likely came from a student at a different school who already took the tests. It remains unclear whether students at other schools used the answers.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture examined cheating in 10 types of American high schools as part of a broader look at character and citizenship summarized in “The Content of Their Character.”

Analyzing cheating in rural schools, education researcher Richard Fournier noted:

… While teachers might be fully able to articulate the moral ideals behind their disciplinary decisions, their explanations typically varied, which presumably sent mixed moral messages to students. Similarly, although teachers, students and parents offered similar examples of bad student behavior – cheating, bullying, selfishness, etc. – they either were unsure or gave different answers when pressed for insight into why these things were bad or how students should be disciplined. (Page 67)

Students often face temptations to cheat in school, and too many of them give in to it. Without a solid reason why students should put honesty ahead of their personal gratification, they struggle to resist the temptation to cheat.

But teachers have numerous opportunities every day, in every class, with every student, for every subject to infuse discussions about integrity, and the motivations for behaving honestly.

The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues offers ways to start the conversation with the guide “The Virtue of Truthfulness,” which encourages educators to prompt students to think about “the benefits of acting out” truthfulness.

“Acting truthfully guarantees social relations: we are who we say we are. This enables stability; it also enables us to think through how and where we need to improve as people,” the guide points out. “Truthful people grow in virtue much quicker than those who struggle to be truthful about who they really are.

“It’s also worth thinking through what human relationships would look like were they to be based on presenting ourselves in a false light: hypocrisy, deceit, lying and the breaking of promises would all dissolve social bonds.”

 

Love & Rigor Underlie Strong Culture and Character

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A few days into our first year at Rocky Mountain Prep, I was walking through our office when one of our founding parents Sarah, pulled me aside. “You’ll never guess what my kindergartener told me over dinner last night,” Sarah shared. “We were halfway through dinner when she declared, ‘Mom, spinach isn’t my favorite, but I’m going to persevere.’ ”

Since that moment almost seven years ago, I am reminded daily of the power of our PEAK values – Perseverance, Excellence, Adventure, and Kindness – and the importance of supporting the character development of our students. Rocky Mountain Prep (RMP) is often recognized for our strong academic results: Our founding campus, RMP Creekside, was recently nominated as one of the three best elementary schools in the state as a Colorado Succeeds Prize finalist. For many of our parents, though, what they value the most about our program is our commitment to these PEAK values and how we encourage students to align their actions at school to both our community’s values and to their family’s and their personal values. This is one of the reasons our RMP: Southwest campus had the strongest parent satisfaction of any public school in Denver.

I’ve learned that two things help our PEAK values come to life for our scholars: leading with love and daily reflection.

Every great teacher I know builds a loving classroom culture to create what social science seems to rediscover all the time. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs demonstrates the basic importance of both safety and belonging. Recently, Google discovered that the highest performing teams have strong psychological safety amongst the team members.

At RMP, in order to meet these needs, our teachers lead with love. We honor each student by learning what makes them unique, what they love, their backgrounds and stories. We ensure that every adult in our building knows our scholars’ names, and gives a big smile, high-five, hug or handshake when they meet in the classroom or hallways. Leading with love also means we challenge our scholars. When you love somebody, you hold them to high expectations.

Within the loving, safe environment at our schools, we create frequent opportunities for our students to reflect on how their behaviors align to our PEAK values. For example, to begin and end each day, our scholars have a community circle in their classrooms where they reflect on how they lived out our values, and where they could have done better. Last week, I heard a scholar demonstrate this with one of his teammates, sharing, “McKiya showed a lot of stamina and perseverance during our math mystery work by not getting frustrated when we got stuck and trying a bunch of new strategies.”

In addition to its effect on our scholar’s lives, this culture of love and reflection has impacted me as school leader directly. Three years ago at one of our campuses, five minutes into breakfast, a second-grader went over to his teacher and whispered, “Phil [name changed] isn’t showing kindness or excellence this morning. He told me he brought a weapon to school in his lunchbox.” The teacher immediately searched his backpack, found a knife, and was able to diffuse a potential nightmare scenario for our community.

While I can’t ever know if that student intended to cause harm, I do know that our culture of love and reflection is integral to our students’ achievement and growth as good, moral people.

Missouri teen refocuses on character in high school to earn appointment to U.S. Air Force Academy

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Republic High School senior Noah Johnson described himself as a lost “troublemaker” in middle school, but he’s transformed his character over the last five years to forge a different path.

“Before high school, I was not the best student. In eighth grade, I decided to turn my life around,” Johnson told the Springfield News-Leader. “I realized I had potential to do things, to go places, if I just tried. I came to the high school with the mindset that I needed to start fresh.”

This transformation began with a decision, was surrounded by encouragement, and focused on a goal. Noah is seen as stepping into a larger story and this is crucial for character development. James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, writes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, “Implicit in the word character is a story. It is a story about living for a purpose that is greater than the self. Though this purpose resides deeply within, its origins are outside the self, and so it beckons one forward, channeling one’s passions to mostly quiet acts of devotion, heroism, sacrifice, and achievement.”

The Missouri teen joined the Republic High School Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), and focused on his studies. His humble dedication earned him recognition as outstanding first-year cadet.

“After that, we knew the potential was there,” Lt. Col. Patrick Sanders, head of the Republic ROTC, told the news site.

“I’d give him a job to do as a sophomore and he’d need a little guidance. His junior year, he’d just do it. By the time he was a senior, he didn’t even need to be told,” Sanders said. “You name it, he’s grown in all the areas — maturity, leadership, behavior. It’s huge growth.”

Johnson’s grades improved, as well, and he earned a 32 out of 36 on his ACT. He also played snare in the marching band. When it came time to apply for colleges, he set his sights on the U.S. Air Force Academy, knowing only one in 12 applicants receive an appointment, and even fewer from small rural public schools.

“That seemed like a challenge and I’m up for a challenge,” Johnson said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to try for there.'”

The Academy reviewed Johnson’s grades, activities, fitness, leadership and character, as well as nominations he received from U.S. Rep. Billy Long and U.S. Sensators Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill as the senior waited to hear back, the News-Leader reports.

Johnson’s family and counselors encouraged him to apply to other schools, as well, and he earned full-ride scholarships to several. But his family’s history of military service and interest in aviation made the Academy his top pick.

“If you want to be a pilot, one of the first things you look at is the Air Force,” he said. “The prestige of going to the academy interested me.”

A year after starting the application process – five years after refocusing his life – Johnson received word that he was selected for an appointment, a value of more than $400,000 that includes tuition, room and board, medical, and a monthly stipend, according to the news site.

“I never had any doubt in him,” Sanders said. “He started excelling later, in his high school career, and now he’s the top dog.”

When teachers and principals think about how to motivate students who could do more with their lives than just pass time in school without accomplishing much there are lesson plans at the UK’s The Jubilee Centre.  These lessons plans focus on flourishing from the margins and can be found here.

 

Study shows character education effective with both youngsters and high schoolers

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A new study suggests character education programs can be effective, and even more so, in high school than with younger students.

William Jeynes, Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, said during a recent presentation at Oxford University that his analysis of 52 different character education studies involving more than 225,000 students shows character education has the biggest impact on high schoolers.

“The results are particularly intriguing, because the sparse number of character education school programs that there are, emphasize ‘getting them when they’re young,’” Jeynes said, according to the Religion News Service. “However, these results suggest that not only does character education have quite robust effects on student behavior and academic outcomes overall, but it also has an especially potent impact in high school.”

Jaynes contends that while his analysis “goes against the tide of 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,” he said. “If there is ever a time in which they need moral guidance, this is the time period.”

Jaynes also discussed how character education  has become eroded in American schools, and offered his take on how to pursue character education in a world that shuns religious references in schools.

“In the aftermath of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that removed the Bible and voluntary prayer from the public schools, an unintended consequence of their actions was the defacto removal of character education as well,” he said. “This is because when schools taught love, forgiveness, or the ‘golden rule,’ all it would take is one parent to complain that such teaching was Christianity to cause schools to retreat from teaching related to character. “Naturally, although love and forgiveness are an integral part of Christianity, one can demonstrate each quality without being a Christian.”

“The character education that is appropriate in our contemporary society is one that emphasizes the values that virtually all people value, unless they are in prison or a sociopath,” Jaynes said. “These include honesty, sincerity, responsibility, love, and respect. We do not have to go into the real controversial issues.”

James Davison Hunter in his book on moral education, The Death of Character, reminds us “Instead of forcing commonality in our moral discourse at the expense of particularity, one discovers commanlity through particularity…. We will most certainly discover other moral agreements about integrity, fairness, altruism, responsibility, respect, valor—agreements too numerous to mention. But these agreements will be found within moral diversity not in spite of it.”[1] Thus maintaining space for different moral communities to flourish side-by-side is conducive to character formation.

[1] Hunter, James Davison. The Death of Character (Basic, 2000), p. 230.

The UK’s Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues has developed extensive curriculum for secondary school teachers to teach character. The virtue of justice could be applied to examples of evil and injustice that are found throughout history. The Jubilee Centre’s lesson on justice would be a reliable place for educators to begin.

U.S. Navy renews focus on character development

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The U.S. Navy is updating its leadership programs at the Naval War College with a keen focus on character and competence which may have been prompted after a series of embarrassing ship collisions last year.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson announced the changes at the Rhode Island school in early April, when he announced the formation of a new College of Leadership and Ethics to weave lessons on character, self-awareness, leadership and ethics into the curriculum, according to U.S. Naval Institute News.

Trainees at the College of Leadership and Ethics will receive 10 days of devoted class time in each core class, as well as additional military faculty to boost the role of what was formally the Navy Leadership and Ethics Center.

Richardson told the news site the Navy is also working to ensure sailors, both subordinates and those in leadership, get feedback from others about their performance and character development through the service’s assessment system.

“We’re in the final stages of a revision to our FITREPS (officer fitness reports) system, our evaluation system. So in an ideal closed-loop environment you would say at the beginning, this is what we value, this is what we think is important. We’re going to teach you those things (through schools, on-the-job training and self-learning). So that’s how we move you along this road in competence and character,” Richardson said.

Researchers at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture believe that there are five ways that “thick” moral communities can best be formed.  They identify the following in the Institute’s latest publication, The Content of Their Character—1) authoritative sources, 2) formal instruction, 3) informal “catching,” 4) routine practices, and 5) surrounding social support—one might want to add evaluation. You become what you measure. Here the Navy is adding character to their FITREP evaluations and thereby highlighting the Navy’s aspiration of a “good person.” This steps makes character real and an essential part of the school’s culture.

The Institute for Advanced Studies’ latest book, The Content of Their Character provides findings of the Institute’s research into ten sectors of K-12 high school across America regarding moral and citizenship formation of high school students.  The sectors studied were as follows:  urban public high schools, rural public high schools, charters, evangelical schools, Catholic schools, Jewish and Muslim schools, prestigious independent schools, alternative pedagogy schools and homeschooling.

Admiral Richardson said two fatal ship collisions with commercial vessels last year did not prompt the changes, but did provide examples of why leadership and ethics are important.

“When you think about where our commanding officers and leaders fall short, there’s just been too many instances where those shortcomings have had to do with ethical types of issues, in addition to the competence thing. So it’s clearly an area where we needed to make sure we were emphasizing,” he said.

“Perhaps the ultimate expression of trust and confidence is to give that commanding officer that ship and that crew and expect them to go over the horizon on their own and come back stronger than when they left in every respect, both from a warfighting competence standpoint but also I want them to bring our teams back stronger in character,” Richardson continued. “And so there was certainly an element of the [post-collision] investigations that said, hey, we need to really make sure that in each of our communities – and this one focused on the surface community – that our careers, our education, our career path is really focused on developing competent, confident commanding officers with the competence of character.”

Teachers and principals wanting to strengthen moral and citizenship formation in their students will find information and strategies to do so at the UK’s Jubilee Centre.

Eva Moskowitz on “Why schools should teach moral character”

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Success Academy is well known for outstanding academic achievement: With 15,500 students, our network of 46 charter schools is the size of the seventh largest school district in New York State and had the highest percentages of students passing last year’s state math and reading exams. Last year, we received the prestigious Broad Prize for the “greatest academic performance and improvement while reducing achievement gaps among low-income students and students of color.” Four of our schools have earned National Blue Ribbons.

But we believe our students’ academic accomplishments are nothing if they do not also possess strong moral character. So in addition to teaching our scholars to be good readers, writers, mathematicians, and scientists, we believe they need to be people of high moral character who are self-reflective about their actions.

Teaching moral character scares many educators. That’s commonly because of a belief in relativism, an appropriate concern not to impose ideas by simple authority on a diverse student body. True, our school community is diverse. Our families, scholars, teachers, and staff do all not share the same values. And as educators we must be careful not to impose our own political or religious values on students. Yet I think we can all agree that schools can and should teach students honesty and kindness.

Ethics and good character are a part of our daily instruction. We do not have a character development curriculum because we don’t believe learning right from wrong is something that happens from 11:05–11:55 twice a week.  Rather, we have core values, and we teach them at the beginning of the year so that all new students know our north star—and we re-teach them throughout the year, since it’s easy to forget the what and the why.

At Success Academy, we mostly worry not about the kids, but the grownups. Ethics start with adults and filter to children. Respect for others and proper behavior are not just taught, but expected, modeled, and rewarded at Success Academy.

We spend much time on articulating and reinforcing what it means to be an ethical educator.  Our core beliefs include academic integrity, of course, but also center on respecting children and treating them with kindness and consistency.

We believe it is unethical to tell students reflexively they are doing a “great job” when in fact their work is poor. We believe it is unethical to pretend to valorize thinking but actually valorize procedures. We believe that, as educators, we must give students as much independence as possible, but not so much that their mistakes are fatal.

We expect our scholars to prize integrity and to make smart, ethical decisions. We know and fear the irreparable consequences that can result from one lapse in good judgment. But we also expect moral lapses and gaps. When we find them, we stop and address them with radical candor.

This has been one of the most important ingredients to our success. It is impossible to imagine our current academic excellence without this emphasis on high moral character.

 

OECD’s Schleicher: Ethics for an Age of Acceleration

by

This is the age of acceleration, a speeding-up of human experience through the impact of disruptive forces on every aspect of our lives.

It is also a time of political contestation. For the last 72 years, the wider international community has prioritized balancing the needs and interests of individuals, communities, and nations in an equitable framework based on open borders, free markets, and a sustainable future. But where the disruptive forces of these changes have brought a sense of dislocation, political forces have emerged that offer closed borders, protection of traditional jobs, and the promise to put the interests of today’s generation over those of future generations.

How should countries equip young people to understand, engage with, and shape this changing world?

In this accelerated, politicized age, we can no longer teach people for a lifetime. In this age, education needs to help students cultivate a reliable compass and other navigational tools with which they may find their own way through an increasingly complex and volatile world.

Future jobs will pair computer intelligence with human knowledge, skills, character qualities, and values. It will be our capacity for innovation, our awareness, our ethical judgement and our sense of responsibility that will equip us to harness machines to shape the world for the better.

This is the main conclusion drawn by OECD countries working on Education 2030, a new framework for curriculum design. Not surprisingly, then, schools must increasingly recognize the need for fostering ethics, character, and citizenship. They must also develop in their students a range of social and emotional skills, such as empathy, compassion, mindfulness, purposefulness, responsibility, collaboration, and self-regulation.

At the center of the Education 2030 framework, OECD countries have placed creating new value, dealing with tensions and dilemmas, and developing responsibility as desired competencies. What do these mean? And how are they connected to ethics, and to social and emotional skills?

Young people’s agency to shape the future will partly hinge on their capacity to create new value. Creating new value is a transformative competency. It refers to the processes of creating, making, bringing into being, and formulating. It imagines outcomes from these processes that are innovative, fresh, original, and contribute something of intrinsic positive worth. It suggests entrepreneurship in the broadest sense—being ready to venture, to try, without the crippling anxiety of failure. The constructs, attributes, and virtues that underpin this competency are imagination, inquisitiveness, persistence, collaboration, and self-discipline.

Dealing with tensions, dilemmas, and trade-offs will also be necessary for young people in the age to come. In a structurally imbalanced world it is necessary for them to reconcile diverse perspectives and interests in local settings that sometimes have global implications. Striking the balance between competing demands—of equity and freedom, autonomy and community, innovation and continuity, and efficiency and democratic process—will rarely lead to a simple choice or even a single solution. Individuals will need to think in a more integrated way that avoids premature conclusions and attends to interconnections. The constructs, attributes, and virtues that underpin the competence include empathy, adaptability, and trust.

The third transformative competency—developing responsibility—is a prerequisite of the other two. Dealing with novelty, change, diversity, and ambiguity assumes that individuals can “think for themselves” with a robust moral compass. Both creativity and problem-solving require the capacity to consider the future consequences of one’s actions, to evaluate risk and reward, and to accept accountability for the products of one’s work.

These, in turn, require a sense of responsibility, and also moral and intellectual maturity.  With these, people can reflect upon and evaluate their actions in the light of their experiences, their personal  and societal goals, what they have been taught and told, and what is right or wrong.

Ethics is the thoughtful perception of what is right or wrong, good or bad, in a specific situation. It asks questions related to norms, values, meanings, and limits. Central to this competency is the concept of self-regulation, in the spheres of personal, interpersonal, and social responsibility. It rests on constructs, attributes, and virtues of self-control, self-efficacy, responsibility, problem-solving, and adaptability.

The challenge for educators is not to defer these dimensions to new school subjects, but to embed them in everything that is taught and learned at school. Supporting countries in this effort is the goal of the OECD Education 2030 project.

 

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.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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