interview

Education Researcher Richard Fournier on Character Formation at Rural Public Schools

by

This is a lightly edited transcript of an interview conducted on July 25, 2019, with education researcher Richard Fournier.

Joanna Breault: Today I’m speaking with Richard Fournier, who is the managing director of partnerships at Transforming Education. Previously, Richard was a research and technical assistance associate at the Education Development Center, a project scholar for UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, a high school history teacher, a licensed superintendent in Massachusetts, and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Lasell College. Richard is also currently a doctoral candidate at Boston University. Several years ago, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture launched a major research project in order to better understand the moral formation of high school students. Researchers went into ten different sectors of schools from public schools, both urban and rural, to private schools, both religious and non-religious, to home schools and others. Richard was one of those researchers, and he and his team focused on rural public schools.

Thank you, first of all, for being with us today. We’re really looking forward to chatting with you. I know that you studied six different schools. I wondered if you could give me a quick overview of what makes a school a “rural school.” What characteristics did those schools that you studied share in common?

Richard Fourier: Sure, and thanks for having me. There are lots of different definitions really of what constitutes a rural school, and in some cases, some schools technically aren’t rural in the eyes of the federal government, but they still claim to be rural and identify as being rural. The definitions that I used are really through the National Center of Education Statistics—NCES—and really it goes, generally speaking, it’s really just the distance from an urban area, and so all of my schools were considered rural. There are some rural schools that are considered “fringe,” which are way out there, and some are “remote,” which are also way out there, and some are more considered “towns,” but in general it’s an area that is usually a certain distance from—pretty far away from—an urban area. It’s usually relatively small. More and more in certain states like in Maine, for example, we’re seeing consolidated districts. So you might have a larger school or high school that’s made up of four or five different rural communities all into now one school. And so, geographically it spans the whole US. So you could be looking at something in the deep woods of Maine. You can be looking at something that’s in the Midwest—completely open fields. And as such, the demographics are varied as well. So sometimes you have, in many areas, a homogenous, all-white student population, but in the other parts of the country, you might have Native American students, you might have students with large English language learner population, African American students, and a number of other areas and race and ethnic backgrounds, and lots of variety with social economic background as well.

JB: Okay. So when you were writing about rural schools, I know you wrote about three different spheres of “moral obligation” that you observed in rural public schools. Can you explain what you mean by that term and describe those three different spheres?

RF: Sure. The three that I had identified were global citizenship, religious responsibility, and military service. And I think what I really kind of intended by that, by talking about moral obligation, was simply that one common thread that I saw in all these rural schools was this sense of—I’m generalizing, but among many of the students and staff—the central obligation for those three areas. In particular, military service was a fairly common thread, whether it was actually going into the military or just simply being explicit about showing support for the military. So a lot of these schools, if not all of them, as soon as you walk in the building you see, obviously, the American flag but also either monuments or some kind of memorial or some kind of artifact that celebrates either staff members or former students who had served in the military or things that are currently going on with the military. I’ve seen in my visits lots of ROTC folks that were in there as well, military recruiters. So the communities are generally very supportive, not shy about showing that support, and many of the families and the students are connected to the military. And so even those that aren’t are usually pretty respectful about that.

Many of these communities tended to either be engaged with different religious affiliations or at least pretty supportive of it—to the extent that sometimes it even crossed the sort of “public school boundary,” where there was talk and discussion about it within the school itself.

And then global citizenship: In many ways that was actually a moral obligation on the part of staff. So a lot of teachers felt like just by nature of being in a rural community, where you’re maybe not as connected with diverse resources—a diverse group of folks that you might find the more urban environment and all the things that come with that—that there was a need among staff to be sure to promote this global citizenship idea, so that students maybe didn’t feel so isolated in those particular areas, if that makes sense.

JB: Yeah, so sort of wanting to expand students’ understanding or exposure beyond their small town?

RF: Yeah, exactly. And the internet’s a really great way to do that, but that also means certain social media literacy and guardrails around that that every school faces. But I think a lot of the staff that I talked to felt like it was especially important in those particular areas, because for some kids, it really was hard for them to reach beyond those boundaries, because they’re not in an urban environment, so they can’t walk out of the school and suddenly see lots of different people from different backgrounds. It’s a lot more homogeneous at many of the schools that I was in.

JB: So what were some of the moral ideals that were embraced by the communities that you studied and which of those do you feel like might be more unique to a rural setting?

RF: I’ll list a couple. I’m not sure how unique they are, but there’s a couple. There’s one in particular that might be. Hard work—working hard. This sense of self-reliance—you know, if you make a mistake, it’s on you and you need to fix it. Service, not just service in the military sense, but service to those who are less fortunate. And that kind of goes along with compassion and care for the community at large. And then just generally respect.

So I don’t want to make a claim that any of these are unique only to rural schools, but I will say that I think that aspect around community is definitely very much emphasized in the rural sector. I think there’s, with many the folks that I talked to, there’s a sentiment, a sense, that—particularly around the communities that were a little lower on the SES (the social economic scale)—the sense of, We might not have a lot around this community in terms of wealth or even, in some cases, resources, but we are a community and we’re going to support each other and make sure that we stick together. So the support is there. And as a result, I think I saw a lot of students, who if there’s a food drive for a certain cause—for a family that lost their house in the fire and then has no money, or maybe one of the students or parents came down with cancer or something like that and needs money for hospital services—the communities really rallied.

And again, that’s not to say that doesn’t happen in urban or suburban neighborhoods, but I saw it as just such a sense of pride for a lot of the rural staff and communities there, and I thought that was pretty interesting.

And then, I think the sense of self-reliance which I think sort of stems from this, very much rooted in the rural, blue-collar lens of life, that even, to some extent, maybe that whole “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” mentality—and it certainly isn’t a bad thing—but I saw that sense with a lot of with a lot of the teachers but mostly a lot of the students and the parents especially.

And sometimes those things were so distinct that I wasn’t sure if certain parents were being serious with me when they were talking about certain beliefs about discipline, for example. So very distinct from some of the other areas throughout the country that I’ve worked with.

JB: What you were saying about school, the community, kind of is a segue into another question I had about this idea of “school as family” and the dynamic of pitching in to help. I know you mentioned if somebody gets cancer and food drives. Are there any other examples that stick out to you of what that looks like, the idea of “school as family”?

RF: Yeah, and I think that this kind of goes along with how teachers and administrators can also create sort of a sense of belonging. Sometimes I think it’s intentional, sometimes I don’t, but the bottom line is that because the communities tend to be relatively small, there is a very clear trend of students who have noted seeing their teachers involved in lots of other aspects of their lives—for example, church. They go to church and they see their teacher or their principal. And because it’s a smaller community, many of the students there go to the same churches or the same church. There might be other outside activities. Also there’s a sort of intergenerational aspect to rural communities where often there are several teachers on staff who themselves attended that particular school. Sometimes administrators too. And so often, you’ll have a teacher who’s been in that community their whole lives and they know their students’ parents and maybe even their parents. So as a result, there’s all this intertwined dynamic and relationships, and so I think for many students and teachers, [it] does, for those reasons, feel like a big sort of family. People know each other; they know their pasts, their reputations. And sometimes that’s a good thing and sometimes it’s not, but I think all those things add up to this feeling that it’s really one big family.

JB: I actually had that question: Does that make it difficult for kids and adults, if they make mistakes, to kind of start afresh?

RF: Yeah, I think so. I grew up in Maine and I grew up a couple streets away from Stephen King, the horror author. And Stephen King—I bring this up because he used to write a lot or has written a lot about the dark sides of growing up in a sort of rural community. And one of the dark sides, I think, is the fact that it’s really tough for you or your family to escape a certain reputation. I mean, part of that’s just human nature, but because it’s a small community it’s hard to, as you said, start with a blank slate. And so I’ve talked to some students that really even in the middle school years that—or early high school years—that certainly felt that. I also think you have a lot of educated adults in these buildings who recognize that and try to usurp that in some way and alleviate the stress that can come with those kinds of reputations. So it’s probably a mix, but I do think you see it there a little more than you might in other schools, because you have so many teachers and administrators who’ve been there their whole lives and whose families they know. So that can make it a little difficult.

JB: Is there a positive bent to that in terms of wanting to make good choices because you and your family are known?

RF: Yeah no, absolutely—I think there’s a lot of positive to it. You know, you might be more willing to go out on the limb and put in extra time with a student because you know their family. You might have more context and sympathy or empathy for what they’re going through, because you know their family. And certainly, yeah, you might have some students that really want to live up to higher expectations because they think their family’s reputation or their reputations are on the line. And so yeah, I shouldn’t have just focused on the negative; I do you think there are a lot of positives for that too. But I think that can be tough for students if it’s the other way around,and they have a reputation for being… if their older brothers were troublemakers, and their father was a troublemaker, or mother, and then they’re coming in as an average student, they might have that following them around.

JB: Are there any other ways that that dynamic of everybody knowing everybody, “community as family,” “school as family” relates to character formation in particular?

RF: Well, I think it strengthens whatever moral ideals or obligations exist. I think it just reinforces them on a regular basis, because it’s a lot harder to deviate from those norms if you can’t find a separate group or subgroup of folks who are supportive of that. So for example, if you’re in the rural community and you happen to be a student that does not fit with the regular norms—and it could really look like lots of different things. Maybe we’re talking about a student who just doesn’t want to engage in many of the common activities, whether it’s sports or outdoors activities or whatever—it might be hard for them to find a particular kind of group to be part of. A student who’s gay or part of the LGBTQ community—it might be tough to find support within that community if there aren’t other folks in that community that are talking about those issues, providing support for those issues. And I don’t think it’s always… it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s just this common bias or bigotry in those communities, it’s just that there might not be an outlet for that particular student, because maybe that hasn’t been an explicit before.

And so anyway, the point is I think that everybody knowing everybody just reinforces the norms, for better or worse. I think in a good way though, if everybody knows that “hey, when someone is in trouble, you need to put some extra effort in to help them,” you’re probably going to be following that, because everyone around you is doing the same thing—your teachers, your parents your friends. So I think it can work definitely for positive, and then maybe in some cases for negative as well.

JB: So I remember you mentioning in your chapter that it was common for teachers and administrators to kind of reach beyond their teaching duties to support their students. Can you describe some of the ways that they did that?

RF: Yeah, and I’ve seen this happen in urban communities as well. But again, I think that that idea of it feeling like a large family and everyone knowing each other—or many people knowing each other in the community—in my observations, has led to lots of teachers doing a lot of extra things to make sure students had what they needed. So that might have meant that teachers did more home visits to check in with students who might not have had a lot of money, or maybe their parents were dealing with drug addiction. Counselors in the school and teachers checking up on students literally at their homes down the street, whose parents might be addicted to heroin and they haven’t been showing up at school. You know, people in the school making sure that extra food that’s left over at lunchtime is given to students who aren’t going to have anything to eat that night. Doing things like the food drives and just making people generally aware of those kinds of issues that people are dealing with.

So I think in that sense—again, I do see that in the urban schools as well of course—but I think there’s something a little interesting about the rural communities where maybe because they’re a little smaller, it’s a little bit easier for educators to… it’s a little more in front of their faces, because they might know that person’s family from when they were in school. There’s some deeper-rooted connections there maybe. It’d be something interesting to explore.

JB: Yeah, that is interesting. So along the lines of teachers, another thing that you talked about was kind of the willingness that teachers had to engage on controversial topics, although they were often reluctant to weigh in on what they thought was right and wrong. So why do you think that is? Like where does that reluctance come from, and then if they don’t want to weigh in on moral issues, does that mean they’re not part of shaping student character, or are they doing that in a different way?

RF: Yeah, I mean I think this hits at a larger topic about character development and social-emotional learning and all those areas. I think we have a public school system in our country that prides itself on educators staying away from what I think is usually referred to as “moral education;” instead thinking about content, there’ll be critical thinking skills. But when it comes to issues of morality—in politics, frankly—exposingstudents, especially if you’re teaching civics or history or things like that, to some extent, but not having a common moral foundation for what’s right and what’s wrong.

So what happens is either A. Teachers do express these things, but they could be very different from the teacher down the hall, or B. They try to stay neutral. In both cases though, regardless of those teachers’ intentions, the students are always going to be influenced by the actions and the words of those two teachers. So whether you try to be neutral or not, you’re going to be influencing, to some extent, the way in which the student thinks about the world, sees the world, interacts with the world, and whatever social-emotional skills or mindsets that they have. There’s going to be some range of influence that that teacher has on them.

So I think in the communities for this study, what I was actually referring to in that case was the fact that I talked to a lot of teachers who, especially the ones who weren’t from the community, tend to be a little bit more on the liberal range in our political spectrum. And so especially in the social sciences, but sometimes in the sciences, there are certain topics that came up they knew were going to be hot-button topics for those particular communities, especially the communities that tend to be a little more conservative.

So two issues that come up to mind: One, thinking about current political issues and thinking about other cultures, and domestic and foreign international terrorism. I had one teacher that told me, for example, that he had a group of students that basically just would say things like, If someone is Muslim, they’re definitely a terrorist; there’s no question about that. Now those comments probably just come from that kid’s parents. But the teacher I think felt like it was hard to argue. I think he struggled in how to deal with it because on the one hand, he didn’t want to insult the kid’s parents; on the other hand, he wanted to open the student’s eyes to the possibility that that wasn’t true or isn’t true. But he mentioned to me that he also just felt a little bit outnumbered because he has a community of folks in his particular situation that he felt probably would

disagree with him. The other issue is, in the sciences, talking about evolutionary theory and versus you know… I forget the term but I think it’s something design?

JB: Intelligent design.

RF: Intelligent design. And then other topics that might come up or interfere with students’ specific beliefs when they’re in, again, a more religiously oriented, conservative community. But I also spoke to teachers who are really successful in balancing both of those worlds and approaching it in such a way that students could respect, and in some cases agree, with maybe their parents’ or their community’s beliefs, but also wrap their heads around these new concepts that they were learning in school. But I think all these things are, you know, a little bit difficult for teachers to grapple with at times. Some teachers just didn’t care and were saying, No, I’m going to teach it this way and you know, students can make their own conclusions but I’m not going to avoid these topics because I think that could get some complaints. And other teachers try to play a little more safer.

JB: Do the teachers who are from the communities tend to play it safer? Or is there no correlation?

RF: Just anecdotally, just from my own observations, usually in in a particular community that happened to be more conservative, usually the teachers who had been there are also in alignment with that philosophy. And then there were a couple towns where clearly there were still some very deep-rooted issues around race and racial justice. I mean, they came up a lot. And I wasn’t exploring that aspect too much so I didn’t go into a lot of detail in it, but it was clear to me that while in a place like Cambridge, Massachusetts, you might go into a school where they’re talking about how race might play out in the classroom or various dynamics, in some of these towns, we were still having conversations about lynchings that took place in the early nineteen hundreds; I mean, these are deep-rooted topics that people were sort of aware of, that may or may not be discussed. It was definitely another area that I’d like to explore more if I had the time.

JB: Well, we kind of touched on this a little bit but just one thing that kind of stood out to me as I read your chapter, over and over again, was the importance of athletics in school community, kind of the connection between school and the community beyond the school—that connection a lot of times is forged through athletics. So what does that mean for kids who aren’t athletic or maybe aren’t even interested in sports? Did you observe anything along those lines?

RF: Yeah, I actually expected that, just from pop-culture, stereotypes, movies, I thought that you’re going to find a bunch of students that weren’t involved in sports being like shunned or outcasts. But I really didn’t find that at all. I mean, students actually, these days, with the advent of the internet and all the connections they have in social media, found plenty of other… lots of kids were involved in gaming and have their own little clubs there. Some kids were involved in, maybe not like generic sports, but outdoors-type activities like hunting or fishing or camping or hiking or whatever that they could they could do outside of that. Some students—a lot of students actually—have vocations they were obsessed with, or passionate about I should say, before even graduating. So some kids would go to school and right after that go and do their job as a mechanic, for example. So I mean, I think they could still have that school spirit and that pride without necessarily being involved in sports. I say that, but I also do think like many schools, sports tend to lend itself, athletics can lend itself, to being more seen as popular in the eyes of teachers, administrators, and the community at large. And some of that sentiment definitely still existed with the students, and I think you’d find that in the urban schools as well.

JB: Right. Well this has bene really interesting. Is there anything else that you can think of that you think would be important for the wider community to know about rural schools as we wrap up? Anything else that came to mind?

RF: I think just if anyone is listening to this who hasn’t been in a rural school before, I think just acknowledging that there’s over 12 million students in the US who are attending rural schools. It’s just important to know that that’s occurring and that we need to think more about these students when we think about education policy, which I think tends to be weighing itself more heavily in favor of what’s going on in urban schools. And then secondly that rural schools are having a lot of success in many areas, but they also have unique struggles that we don’t see in urban areas, and so when we think about those education policies, we need to consider that they’re not always the same issues. They might have an issue with teacher retention or teacher hiring but for different reasons than in urban districts. I guess I’d leave with that.

JB: Thank you for your time today. I really appreciate it.

RF: Thank you.

JB: All right. Bye.

Scholars on Schools: Interview with Kathryn Wiens on Prestigious Independent Schools

by

To receive a free copy of the chapter of  The Content of Their Character that corresponds with this interview, please click here and sign up for our Weekly Digest.

 

This interview came about because several years ago, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA conducted a major research project to better understand the moral formation of high school students. Researchers went into ten different sectors of schools, from public schools (both urban and rural) to private schools (both religious and nonreligious). Kathryn Wiens covered prestigious independent schools.

Sociologist Carol Ann MacGregor on Character Formation in Catholic High Schools

by

To receive a free copy of the chapter of  The Content of Their Character that corresponds with this interview, please click here and sign up for our Weekly Digest.

 

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of this interview, which was conducted on December 20, 2018.

Angus McBeath: Today I’m with Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans. Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor researched a sample of Catholic high schools across the United States. That involved intense interviews, visitations, conversations, observations of what she saw in American high schools—American Catholic high schools—in terms of moral formation of young people. I’m going to ask a few questions now, Carol Ann, if I might. You studied, through your research, schools across the United States. Do you recall if there were any surprises that you encountered in your research, in your studies, in your visits? Anything you found in these high schools that you hadn’t expected?

Carol Ann MacGregor: That’s a great question. I think the literature on Catholic education suggested that these were going to be places that were very good at doing this kind of formative work—sort of a faith-based, values-based education; small schools; really caring faculty. The existing research on the topic sort of suggested that the outcomes would be positive.

But I think one of the surprises that I found on the ground is how taken for granted it sort of was. I anticipated going into schools and seeing all of this very direct evidence of this happening, you know—sort of policies and procedures and meetings where people talked about it—but for many of these schools it was much more nuanced; it was sort of baked into their culture. They were having these very positive outcomes, but it wasn’t necessarily that easy to tie it to a specific policy or overt discussion people were having.

AM: So it was in the DNA of the school culture?

CAM: Yes, that’s definitely what it seemed like for many of the schools. Particularly schools who have been around for a long time and sort of had cultivated their approach over decades and generations.

AM: Can you illuminate for us what those positive moral outcomes that you saw being generated as a result of the work of the schools?

CAM: Sure. Well, most Catholic high schools in the United States are very focused on getting students into colleges, but one thing that really stood out when I interviewed students and asked them about, sort of, What do you think your teachers want for you after you graduate? their answer was always twofold: They want me to go to a good college, but more than that, they want me to be a good person. Or, My goal here is not just to be—to go get a good job, but to treat people well throughout the course of my life.

So there was a clear message to students—or students were taking away—that there was more to education and more to living a good life than just going to college and getting a job.

AM: Okay. Now would you say that you detected a sense of altruism in the students—that they not just wanted to be a good person, but they wanted to do good to others?

CAM: Yes, definitely. You could see that in both informal and formal ways. Sort of on the informal side, many people describe this school—and this would be administrators, teachers, and students—as “like a family,” and people were very caring and selfless towards their peers; they’ve got lots of good examples of that in the study. And then in more formal ways, many students in these schools were involved in serving their local community through various types of outreach, depending on the sort of city that they were located [in].

AM: Thank you. Many principals and teachers struggle with attempting to eliminate, reduce, the incidence of bullying in schools, and after school, as well, and online bullying and Facebook bullying and social media bullying and so on, because it’s so hard and detrimental for students. Did you detect in any of these Catholic schools a sense that there was a bullying problem? Or is that something they had dealt with, you think, successfully?

CAM: There was definitely a range, but we had a question in our interview protocol that asked about this, so we did hear about this from most of the folks we interviewed, and some schools were really thinking about this: not so much about the piece that happens on school grounds, that most schools had some pretty well-established policies about what was acceptable and what was not acceptable and strategies for monitoring it. It was the after-hours and the social media aspect of it where schools were thinking through how to do that.

So some schools had actually sort of extended their scope of surveillance, if you will, to anything that a student did. So there were some schools who would give in-school disciplinary actions, like a detention or suspension, for things that happened on social media outside of the school context because they felt that was against their code of character or code of ethics—you know, it’s named different things in different places. So I think it’s an issue for all educators, but for the most part, the Catholic school administrators I spoke to were dealing with it off-site, not on-site.

AM: OK, thank you for that clarification. Now you’ve noted in your chapter in the book The Content of Their Character—available through Amazon.com—you noted that Catholic school teachers and Catholic staff tended to believe that what they were offering students was superior to what was found in other types of schools. That is something you noted in your chapter in the book. Tell me about how that works.

CAM: Yeah, so many of the teachers that I spoke with felt very strongly that what they were doing was their vocation, that it wasn’t just a job—that if it was just a job they could go get a job in the local public school that would pay them more for doing similar kinds of work. But they thought that what they did every day was very special in terms of shaping young people’s views of the world and the trajectory of their lives in a lot of ways. And so when asked kind of, What’s the difference between public school and a Catholic school?…they always had some kind of sense that what they were doing there…was a lot of what happened at public school—but a little bit extra. So, great at college prep just like a top public school, but you know, also focusing on other aspects of education beyond just straightforward academic achievement.

AM: OK, thank you. From your view, what was the position of most of the schools you studied on moral authority on social issues?

CAM: This was really interesting. You know, knowing official church teaching on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, I was curious about how the schools approached those issues. In many cases, I would say, the general approach was an acceptance of respectful dissent. So most educators felt like it was acceptable for a student to say or to hold a position that was different than official church teaching, but they viewed it as a teachable moment. If a student was going to hold one of those views or share a view that was different than official church teaching, they should do so in an educated and respectful way. So they should have evidence to support their claims, they should convey their position in a way that was respectful of other views, and they should make a really concerted effort to at least understand what the other position was, in addition to their own.

AM: And students didn’t feel any reluctance to voice a position that was different than church doctrine?

CAM: No, not at most of the schools that I went to. You know, there were a lot of students who were agnostic on the issues, of course, but in particular, in attitudes towards homosexuality, the students I spoke to were very tolerant and often gave me examples of times where, you know, they had spoken up in class or tried to create a club at their school, and in those instances they felt like they were met with conversation with their school teachers and administrators.

AM: Thank you. Did you note in the schools whether there were any teachers or principals dealing with issues around plagiarism and cheating? Was that discussed at all with you?

CAM: Yes, definitely. You know these schools were all really caught up in the race to get students into top colleges with scholarship money…. I think a thing that I heard from parents a lot is that they were making a financial sacrifice to send their child to Catholic high school for lots of reasons, but among them [was] the idea that going to a really great school like this might help them get scholarship money to go to one of the better colleges of the United States. So a really intense academic culture at most of these places, so there was a sort of policy and discussion of cheating. Every school that I went to just said, you know, It’s zero on the test, or, It’s zero on the assignment, and so it’s not that it never happened, but there were very clear understandings of the consequences when it did.

AM: Okay, so students knew where they stood clearly.

CAM: Yes, yes.

AM: Thank you. Now, many parents send their children to Catholic schools in the belief that there’s stricter discipline in Catholic schools perhaps than in the public schools—conjecture perhaps. Do you think that’s supportable—that view that I can get better discipline if I go to a Catholic school?

CAM: The students would often talk about, Well it’s just a little bit more structure; I have friends who go to public school, and you know it’s much more structured here, or, My friends at public school get away with all kinds of stuff that I can’t get away with. And so, you know, there were lots of things—I spoke a little of this before—where Catholic students were subject to discipline even for things that they did off campus. So if they were wearing their school’s uniform on a public bus and someone observed them engaging inappropriately, that was a very serious infraction. At one school there was a party on the weekend, and it got back to the school that there had been some underage drinking at this party, and the school suspended the student for that behavior even though it wasn’t on school grounds, it was at the party.

So there definitely is some truth to that idea that Catholic schools take discipline very seriously. On the flip side, I would say most schools told me that there were very few serious disciplinary incidents, so relatively few incidents of things like fighting or drugs—those were once-every-couple-of-years kind of situations in most schools. The predominant form of infraction was uniform violations, which is something that the students like to talk a lot about and had some strong opinions about, whether there should be such enforcement over the particulars of their uniform.

AM: Did you get a sense of how urgent the Catholic schools were that you studied about engaging students to become truly committed to civic engagement and truly committed to civic understanding, and civic participation, and citizenship awareness?

CAM: So it’s kind of a mixed situation…. In terms of volunteering, that part of civic engagement, all of the schools I visited were quite strong in this area. They varied a little bit on whether it was required or whether it was just a commonplace activity. But they were all very involved in having their students be very involved in their local communities. On citizenship and voting, a little bit less so, and what I heard from the schools was mostly, it was a little harder to get students who couldn’t vote really engaged in the process. So they used to see, or they often saw, some interest amongst seniors and among people taking AP Government, but for many students, it was more of an abstraction.

But you know, they did cover it in the curriculum. Often, they tried to bring it in in terms of student government—you know, sort of having kind of a local school election and trying to encourage that to really mirror the political process. But volunteering is the real star of civic engagement at the high school level.

AM: Thank you. In many schools, teachers and principals argue that No Child Left Behind legislation and Race to the Top legislation require them to focus almost exclusively on strengthening student achievement as measured by standardized test scores, and therefore they must sacrifice taking time to strengthen student moral formation. Do you see this dichotomy in the schools you study? Did you see this yin and yang? This struggle between, I’ve got to get our scores up, I have to get students into good colleges, and I don’t really have time to really focus—we really don’t have time to really focus—on moral formation? Do you think that struggle was present in the schools you studied or not?

CAM: A little bit, but I would say less so than in the public school context. So the schools definitely had a lot of freedom to choose their curriculum in a lot of respects, and so for most teachers and administrators, I definitely heard that they wanted to emphasize balance—that they felt like academics, extracurriculars, and sports, and the spiritual side of their school were equally valuable, and they wanted students to be engaged in all three of those things, not just the academic piece. One place that was kind of an exception to this, though, is many, many of the schools were part of the AP Advanced Placement curriculum, and…I spoke to teachers who were engaged in AP or IB, International Baccalaureate work. There the curriculum is much more prescribed, and you really do have to get through a lot of material. So there, you know, it wasn’t that the teachers or principals felt that the academics were more important than the other aspects, but they really did have a kind of set of things they needed to get to.

AM: Well, that’s true, I think, in so many schools. I was going to ask you whether you observed this, for example. So, in many schools and many, many school districts in many states, there is a real desire on the part of educators and the part of legislators, state legislators in particular, to reduce the numbers of students who are being suspended or expelled from schools,…and there’s some belief that there’s a disproportionate number of students of color suspended or expelled from schools. And so what’s being done instead of a suspension is not letting students off the hook, but engaging in restorative justice practices. Restorative justice practices mean that the student who offended meets with the student who was offended against with adult mentors and there is a restitution made on the part of the offender to make things better and right for the person who was offended against. And I wondered if you noted that restorative justice was a thing they’d do rather than suspensions.

CAM: Yeah, a few principals spoke of this as their approach. There weren’t—expulsion was incredibly rare at the schools that I visited. Most principals indicated that they only had one or two expulsions a year at max, so just really not a common occurrence. And most schools were doing some sort of in-school suspension, a few were doing restorative justice, but they all definitely seem to be aware of this issue that nobody wins when a student is just…at home, not really engaging with the community or the person that was harmed, and falling behind on their academic work.

AM: Thank you. So I wondered based on your observations of these schools, and those were intense observations, whether you have any thoughts on things you might have noted that I haven’t asked you about today.

CAM: That’s a great question too. One thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about as I consider what my own next project might be, and because I work at a Catholic university, is sort of, What is the lasting impact of going to a Catholic high school?… How does that experience look five, 10, 15, 20 years out? And how does a Catholic student who went to a Catholic high school and a Catholic college look different than someone who went to a Catholic high school and a public college? Or all those sorts of different things.

So I don’t know that I would have been able to—I definitely wouldn’t have been able to—observe just at that one moment in time. But I do think an important thing to think about for all of us interested in moral formation is sort of what happens years out…. How can we make sure that we’re not just looking at what happens during those critical years, but we look at how those critical years shape people’s lives?

AM: Thank you. I just wondered if you observed…differences in terms of preparation of teachers for Catholic schools than there would be for teachers for other kinds of schools.

CAM: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t think so, in the traditional sense. I mean, they have the same degrees from prestigious colleges and universities in education, the same credentials on paper—often, a little bit more likely to have gone to a Catholic college than a public college, but, you know, all great schools. So I don’t think [so] in terms of the formal preparation.

But informally, I think one thing that I noticed quite a bit is that Catholic schools hire back a lot of their own alumni, so when I was speaking with teachers, they’d often tell me, Oh, you know, I actually went here as a student. And there’s something to that in terms of the sort of institutional memory and continuity of the vision, and so it’s almost as though in terms of preparation, some teachers had a jump start because they were very intimately acquainted with their place of work well before they got there.

AM: Thank you. If people watching this interview or reading the transcript of this interview were interested in a full look at the work you did in observing the Catholic schools, that can be done by going to Amazon.com and purchasing The Content of Their Character….Carol Ann has certainly—she wrote the chapter on the Catholic schools in this book, which is available to educators. I want to thank you today for participating in this interview. I appreciate very much your insights, and I wish you well in your future endeavors.

CAM: Thanks very much.

On School Grounds: Transcript of Interview with Carol Ann MacGregor on Catholic High Schools

by

To receive a free copy of the chapter of  The Content of Their Character that corresponds with this interview, please click here and sign up for our Weekly Digest.

—

This is a lightly edited transcript of an interview conducted on December 20, 2018 with sociologist Carol Ann MacGregor. Dr. MacGregor is Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans. She contributed the chapter on Catholic high schools to The Content of Their Character, a major research project launched by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in order to better understand the moral formation of high school students. The interview was conducted by CultureFeed Expert Angus McBeath.

Angus McBeath: Today I’m with Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University in New Orleans. Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor researched a sample of Catholic high schools across the United States. That involved intense interviews, visitations, conversations, observations of what she saw in American high schools—American Catholic high schools—in terms of moral formation of young people. I’m going to ask a few questions now, Carol Ann, if I might. You studied, through your research, schools across the United States. Do you recall if there were any surprises that you encountered in your research, in your studies, in your visits? Anything you found in these high schools that you hadn’t expected?

Carol Ann MacGregor: That’s a great question. I think the literature on Catholic education suggested that these were going to be places that were very good at doing this kind of formative work—sort of a faith-based, values-based education; small schools; really caring faculty. The existing research on the topic sort of suggested that the outcomes would be positive.

But I think one of the surprises that I found on the ground is how taken for granted it sort of was. I anticipated going into schools and seeing all of this very direct evidence of this happening, you know—sort of policies and procedures and meetings where people talked about it—but for many of these schools it was much more nuanced; it was sort of baked into their culture. They were having these very positive outcomes, but it wasn’t necessarily that easy to tie it to a specific policy or overt discussion people were having.

AM: So it was in the DNA of the school culture?

CAM: Yes, that’s definitely what it seemed like for many of the schools. Particularly schools who have been around for a long time and sort of had cultivated their approach over decades and generations.

AM: Can you illuminate for us what those positive moral outcomes that you saw being generated as a result of the work of the schools?

CAM: Sure. Well, most Catholic high schools in the United States are very focused on getting students into colleges, but one thing that really stood out when I interviewed students and asked them about, sort of, What do you think your teachers want for you after you graduate? their answer was always twofold: They want me to go to a good college, but more than that, they want me to be a good person. Or, My goal here is not just to be—to go get a good job, but to treat people well throughout the course of my life.

So there was a clear message to students—or students were taking away—that there was more to education and more to living a good life than just going to college and getting a job.

AM: Okay. Now would you say that you detected a sense of altruism in the students—that they not just wanted to be a good person, but they wanted to do good to others?

CAM: Yes, definitely. You could see that in both informal and formal ways. Sort of on the informal side, many people describe this school—and this would be administrators, teachers, and students—as “like a family,” and people were very caring and selfless towards their peers; they’ve got lots of good examples of that in the study. And then in more formal ways, many students in these schools were involved in serving their local community through various types of outreach, depending on the sort of city that they were located [in].

AM: Thank you. Many principals and teachers struggle with attempting to eliminate, reduce, the incidence of bullying in schools, and after school, as well, and online bullying and Facebook bullying and social media bullying and so on, because it’s so hard and detrimental for students. Did you detect in any of these Catholic schools a sense that there was a bullying problem? Or is that something they had dealt with, you think, successfully?

CAM: There was definitely a range, but we had a question in our interview protocol that asked about this, so we did hear about this from most of the folks we interviewed, and some schools were really thinking about this: not so much about the piece that happens on school grounds; that, most schools had some pretty well-established policies about what was acceptable and what was not acceptable and strategies for monitoring it. It was the after-hours and the social media aspect of it where schools were thinking through how to do that.

So some schools had actually sort of extended their scope of surveillance, if you will, to anything that a student did. So there were some schools who would give in-school disciplinary actions, like a detention or suspension, for things that happened on social media outside of the school context because they felt that was against their code of character or code of ethics—you know, it’s named different things in different places. So I think it’s an issue for all educators, but for the most part, the Catholic school administrators I spoke to were dealing with it off-site, not on-site.

AM: OK, thank you for that clarification. Now you’ve noted in your chapter in the book The Content of Their Character—available through Amazon.com—you noted that Catholic school teachers and Catholic staff tended to believe that what they were offering students was superior to what was found in other types of schools. That is something you noted in your chapter in the book. Tell me about how that works.

CAM: Yeah, so many of the teachers that I spoke with felt very strongly that what they were doing was their vocation, that it wasn’t just a job—that if it was just a job they could go get a job in the local public school that would pay them more for doing similar kinds of work. But they thought that what they did every day was very special in terms of shaping young people’s views of the world and the trajectory of their lives in a lot of ways. And so when asked kind of, What’s the difference between public school and a Catholic school?…they always had some kind of sense that what they were doing there…was a lot of what happened at public school—but a little bit extra. So, great at college prep just like a top public school, but you know, also focusing on other aspects of education beyond just straightforward academic achievement.

AM: OK, thank you. From your view, what was the position of most of the schools you studied on moral authority on social issues?

CAM: This was really interesting. You know, knowing official church teaching on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, I was curious about how the schools approached those issues. In many cases, I would say, the general approach was an acceptance of respectful dissent. So most educators felt like it was acceptable for a student to say or to hold a position that was different than official church teaching, but they viewed it as a teachable moment. If a student was going to hold one of those views or share a view that was different than official church teaching, they should do so in an educated and respectful way. So they should have evidence to support their claims, they should convey their position in a way that was respectful of other views, and they should make a really concerted effort to at least understand what the other position was, in addition to their own.

AM: And students didn’t feel any reluctance to voice a position that was different than church doctrine?

CAM: No, not at most of the schools that I went to. You know, there were a lot of students who were agnostic on the issues, of course, but in particular, in attitudes towards homosexuality, the students I spoke to were very tolerant and often gave me examples of times where, you know, they had spoken up in class or tried to create a club at their school, and in those instances they felt like they were met with conversation with their school teachers and administrators.

AM: Thank you. Did you note in the schools whether there were any teachers or principals dealing with issues around plagiarism and cheating? Was that discussed at all with you?

CAM: Yes, definitely. You know these schools were all really caught up in the race to get students into top colleges with scholarship money…. I think a thing that I heard from parents a lot is that they were making a financial sacrifice to send their child to Catholic high school for lots of reasons, but among them [was] the idea that going to a really great school like this might help them get scholarship money to go to one of the better colleges of the United States. So a really intense academic culture at most of these places, so there was a sort of policy and discussion of cheating. Every school that I went to just said, you know, It’s zero on the test, or, It’s zero on the assignment, and so it’s not that it never happened, but there were very clear understandings of the consequences when it did.

AM: Okay, so students knew where they stood clearly.

CAM: Yes, yes.

AM: Thank you. Now, many parents send their children to Catholic schools in the belief that there’s stricter discipline in Catholic schools perhaps than in the public schools—conjecture perhaps. Do you think that’s supportable—that view that I can get better discipline if I go to a Catholic school?

CAM: The students would often talk about, Well it’s just a little bit more structure; I have friends who go to public school, and you know it’s much more structured here, or, My friends at public school get away with all kinds of stuff that I can’t get away with. And so, you know, there were lots of things—I spoke a little of this before—where Catholic students were subject to discipline even for things that they did off campus. So if they were wearing their school’s uniform on a public bus and someone observed them engaging inappropriately, that was a very serious infraction. At one school there was a party on the weekend, and it got back to the school that there had been some underage drinking at this party, and the school suspended the student for that behavior even though it wasn’t on school grounds, it was at the party.

So there definitely is some truth to that idea that Catholic schools take discipline very seriously. On the flip side, I would say most schools told me that there were very few serious disciplinary incidents, so relatively few incidents of things like fighting or drugs—those were once-every-couple-of-years kind of situations in most schools. The predominant form of infraction was uniform violations, which is something that the students like to talk a lot about and had some strong opinions about, whether there should be such enforcement over the particulars of their uniform.

AM: Did you get a sense of how urgent the Catholic schools were that you studied about engaging students to become truly committed to civic engagement and truly committed to civic understanding, and civic participation, and citizenship awareness?

CAM: So it’s kind of a mixed situation…. In terms of volunteering, that part of civic engagement, all of the schools I visited were quite strong in this area. They varied a little bit on whether it was required or whether it was just a commonplace activity. But they were all very involved in having their students be very involved in their local communities. On citizenship and voting, a little bit less so, and what I heard from the schools was mostly, it was a little harder to get students who couldn’t vote really engaged in the process. So they used to see, or they often saw, some interest amongst seniors and among people taking AP Government, but for many students, it was more of an abstraction.

But you know, they did cover it in the curriculum. Often, they tried to bring it in in terms of student government—you know, sort of having kind of a local school election and trying to encourage that to really mirror the political process. But volunteering is the real star of civic engagement at the high school level.

AM: Thank you. In many schools, teachers and principals argue that No Child Left Behind legislation and Race to the Top legislation require them to focus almost exclusively on strengthening student achievement as measured by standardized test scores, and therefore they must sacrifice taking time to strengthen student moral formation. Do you see this dichotomy in the schools you study? Did you see this yin and yang? This struggle between, I’ve got to get our scores up, I have to get students into good colleges, and I don’t really have time to really focus—we really don’t have time to really focus—on moral formation? Do you think that struggle was present in the schools you studied or not?

CAM: A little bit, but I would say less so than in the public school context. So the schools definitely had a lot of freedom to choose their curriculum in a lot of respects, and so for most teachers and administrators, I definitely heard that they wanted to emphasize balance—that they felt like academics, extracurriculars, and sports, and the spiritual side of their school were equally valuable, and they wanted students to be engaged in all three of those things, not just the academic piece. One place that was kind of an exception to this, though, is many, many of the schools were part of the AP Advanced Placement curriculum, and…I spoke to teachers who were engaged in AP or IB, International Baccalaureate work. There the curriculum is much more prescribed, and you really do have to get through a lot of material. So there, you know, it wasn’t that the teachers or principals felt that the academics were more important than the other aspects, but they really did have a kind of set of things they needed to get to.

AM: Well, that’s true, I think, in so many schools. I was going to ask you whether you observed this, for example. So, in many schools and many, many school districts in many states, there is a real desire on the part of educators and the part of legislators, state legislators in particular, to reduce the numbers of students who are being suspended or expelled from schools,…and there’s some belief that there’s a disproportionate number of students of color suspended or expelled from schools. And so what’s being done instead of a suspension is not letting students off the hook, but engaging in restorative justice practices. Restorative justice practices mean that the student who offended meets with the student who was offended against with adult mentors and there is a restitution made on the part of the offender to make things better and right for the person who was offended against. And I wondered if you noted that restorative justice was a thing they’d do rather than suspensions.

CAM: Yeah, a few principals spoke of this as their approach. There weren’t—expulsion was incredibly rare at the schools that I visited. Most principals indicated that they only had one or two expulsions a year at max, so just really not a common occurrence. And most schools were doing some sort of in-school suspension, a few were doing restorative justice, but they all definitely seem to be aware of this issue that nobody wins when a student is just…at home, not really engaging with the community or the person that was harmed, and falling behind on their academic work.

AM: Thank you. So I wondered based on your observations of these schools, and those were intense observations, whether you have any thoughts on things you might have noted that I haven’t asked you about today.

CAM: That’s a great question too. One thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about as I consider what my own next project might be, and because I work at a Catholic university, is sort of, What is the lasting impact of going to a Catholic high school?… How does that experience look five, 10, 15, 20 years out? And how does a Catholic student who went to a Catholic high school and a Catholic college look different than someone who went to a Catholic high school and a public college? Or all those sorts of different things.

So I don’t know that I would have been able to—I definitely wouldn’t have been able to—observe just at that one moment in time. But I do think an important thing to think about for all of us interested in moral formation is sort of what happens years out…. How can we make sure that we’re not just looking at what happens during those critical years, but we look at how those critical years shape people’s lives?

AM: Thank you. I just wondered if you observed…differences in terms of preparation of teachers for Catholic schools than there would be for teachers for other kinds of schools.

CAM: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t think so, in the traditional sense. I mean, they have the same degrees from prestigious colleges and universities in education, the same credentials on paper—often, a little bit more likely to have gone to a Catholic College than a public college, but, you know, all great schools. So I don’t think [so] in terms of the formal preparation.

But informally, I think one thing that I noticed quite a bit is that Catholic schools hire back a lot of their own alumni, so when I was speaking with teachers, they’d often tell me, Oh, you know, I actually went here as a student. And there’s something to that in terms of the sort of institutional memory and continuity of the vision, and so it’s almost as though in terms of preparation, some teachers had a jump start because they were very intimately acquainted with their place of work well before they got there.

AM: Thank you. If people watching this interview or reading the transcript of this interview were interested in a full look at the work you did in observing the Catholic schools, that can be done by going to Amazon.com and purchasing The Content of Their Character…. Carol Ann has certainly—she wrote the chapter on the Catholic schools in this book, which is available to educators. I want to thank you today for participating in this interview. I appreciate very much your insights, and I wish you well in your future endeavors.

CAM: Thanks very much.

Sociologist Charles Glenn on Character Formation in Islamic High Schools

by

To receive a free copy of the chapter of  The Content of Their Character that corresponds with this interview, please click here and sign up for our Weekly Digest.

—

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of this interview, which was conducted on April 30, 2019.

Joanna Breault: You mention—and then you later answer—some concerns that some Americans may have about the effect of Islamic schooling. Can you talk a little bit about what those concerns might be that you observed or heard about, and then what your conclusions were about whether they were justified or not?

Charles Glenn: Well, I suspect the reason James Hunter asked me to take on the Islamic schools was that I have done a good deal about the issue of Muslim immigrants and their children in Western Europe, where there is a great deal of concern, much more so than in the US. This is in part because of the nature of the Islamic minority in Western Europe being much more working-class, much more uneducated, more inclined to be involved in criminal activities and so forth—in contrast with the United States, where the great majority of Muslim immigrants are in the professions. They’re actually more highly educated than the average American is, so it’s a very different dynamic.

Nevertheless, I’ve been looking and continue to be involved with those issues in another context, where there’s a lot of concern that Islamic schools may be encouraging kids to reject the societies in which they’re growing up and to possibly engage in…violent jihadist activities. This next week indeed I’ll be speaking in Paris at the Sorbonne about this issue in the European context. This is ongoing.

So we found a very different pattern in the American situation. The kids were very much determined to be part of American society. They had many negative judgments about aspects of American culture, as indeed I do, as indeed I hope my children do. It’s not as though everything about American culture is admirable. But that did not lead to their not wanting to be part of the American process. They were very concerned, many of them, to be the kind of examples which would transform American attitudes. Again and again, kids said, “I want to be a doctor, I want to be this or that so that people will say, ‘Gee, you know, what I thought about Muslims isn’t true—they’re really helpful, they’re really good people!’”

So the kids also very much valued the community service projects, which each of the schools had, often doing it jointly with kids from Catholic or evangelical or Jewish schools, doing projects around their communities—again, partly in order to change attitudes. So we found a lot that was really encouraging in terms of the ways in which these kids were engaging with the context that they found themselves in, without surrendering to it completely. You know, they were often, for example, not listening to American teenage music because they felt that that was not consistent with their beliefs, but [they were] very much engaged.

JB: You mentioned other religious schools, and that was something that I found really interesting in your research—the attitude toward, you mentioned particularly, Christian schools. Can you can you talk about that a little bit?

CG: A number of the parents told us that until they happened to move to an area where there was an Islamic school, that they had their kids in Catholic schools because they were looking for an alternative which wasn’t dominated by the kind of youth culture which many of the parents felt would be very damaging for their kids. In this same way in France, by the way, where, as you may know, the French government has banned the hijab, the headscarf, on girls in schools—in the state schools—many of those girls have gone to Catholic schools, where again they’re allowed to wear the hijab. So they find themselves more accepted in Catholic schools than they do in the regular state schools.

JB: Very interesting. And so for parents who are choosing Islamic schools for their kids, how would you summarize their intention behind that choice?

CG: Well, it was mixed, and this causes a real challenge for the staff, particularly the headmasters of the schools. For some of the parents, it was clearly a desire to keep them sheltered from the influences of the wider society, and therefore they wanted a very heavily religion-based education. Other parents are very concerned to get their kids into Princeton, and they wanted a lot of SAT courses and all the rest. And in fact, the schools often boasted about the fact that one of their graduates had just gone to Harvard or that their graduates were going to selective schools.

So the headmasters had to really balance between often somewhat conflicting expectations. There was a tension often between the students and what seemed to be culturally determined—that is, was it the Islam of Morocco or Syria or Bangladesh?—while they were concerned that they would be following what you might call a universal Islam or international Islam, purified of those cultural hangings-on. For the parents, that was often distressing because they wanted their children to be following the kinds of customs that they had brought with them from the old country, while the kids were in fact saying, “No, we are practicing a more authentic Islam because it isn’t so connected with all those customs.”

JB: That’s interesting—so, a real division between the idea of pure Islam and the idea of Islam that’s sort of impacted by the customs that the parents brought from their former countries.

CG: Yes, indeed even as evangelical parents and kids—I’m an evangelical myself—evangelical parents and kids may have the same kinds of things, as do Catholic parents and kids. And my current research is about Orthodox Jewish schools in Europe, and again the sign of tensions which appear there. Are you practicing Judaism in the way it was done in Eastern Europe or are you practicing Judaism that is based upon what is in the Bible? Those kinds of tensions are natural between generations.

JB: Interesting. So in terms of character formation, how did the Islamic schools that you studied go about developing personal and civic virtues in their kids, in their students?

CG: Well, there were really two things that seemed most crucial. One was the example of the staff of the schools. The kids often mentioned that, and the staff often mentioned that—that they felt a very strong obligation to be the examples of how to live in this society.

That included, by the way, the staff who are not Muslim. A number of the schools had staff—in fact, I think all of the schools had staff—who are non-Muslims, who were hired because their school needed somebody who could teach calculus, or whatever it was, and had no handy Muslim available to do that. It was particularly interesting talking to those staff about how they sort of navigated the situation of trying to be examples for these kids, even though they did not share the religious basis of the model. So that was a very important aspect.

Another very important aspect surprised us a little. It was the Islamic Studies classes. Now that’s different from the Quran classes, in which the kids were studying Quran and studying Arabic. Islamic Studies classes were classes—and I sat in on some of those—in which the kids were talking with the teacher about how Islam should play out in their lives. Like all teenagers, they have an enormous number of questions about how they ought to be thinking about themselves, how they ought to be feeling about other people, boy-girl relationships, which were a very fraught issue because the schools generally—although the boys and girls were together in classes—they were not supposed to be interacting socially. Often that’s very hard for 15- and 16-year-old kids. So in those classes they felt they were free to discuss the kinds of issues that they were really dealing with, and I found fascinating that a number of them contrasted this with their experience previously attending public schools, in which they said it wasn’t possible to discuss those kinds of issues, because the teachers were afraid somebody might be offended. If you raised the issue of—oh I don’t know, I won’t even go into examples, but the kinds of things that kids are often concerned about—teachers were not so open as the teachers in the Islamic Studies classes. That I found an astonishing finding. Very interesting! So those classes brought together their faith and their lives.

JB: That’s great. Did you observe some conversation that went on between students and teachers outside of the classroom, or were those discussions mostly within the classroom?

CG: Well, we didn’t get any transcripts, of course, of conversations outside the classroom. But we got half a million words of transcripts, and then two of my doctoral students went on to do their dissertations; one of them has completed hers, and she’s now a professor actually in Turkey. And one is just completing his.

And so we got a lot more interviews as well, but those were always in more formal settings. We did see interactions in the hallways and those kinds of things, and it was clear that there was a good deal of affection between the staff and the kids. In part I think that’s explained by the fact that these are fairly small schools with maybe 200 high school students. Often they were schools that started in kindergarten and went through high school, so they might have 400 students, but only a relatively small number in high school. And so by the time kids get into high school and they’ve often been with the same teachers for a number of years, they form really, really solid relationships.

JB: That’s wonderful to hear. One thing that stood out to me was the idea that “post-secondary life”—I’m quoting now from your work—“post-secondary life in America would present a host of challenges to living as a faithful Muslim”—that that was something that you heard pretty regularly from staff and students. I wondered specifically what kinds of challenges were expected and then how those students were being taught to overcome those challenges.

CG: Well, actually, the challenges which we anticipated were greater than the ones we actually found. I was surprised how often the kids seemed very confident about their ability to navigate. One area, though, where they were often nervous was how they would handle being in a college setting where they weren’t with all other Muslim kids…how they would handle the social relationships with there being situations where young men and women are hugging in the hallways and so forth. How they would handle those relationships was an area of actually more concerned for them than let’s say—as I might have anticipated—whether they would encounter hostility from the wider society and those kinds of things. We didn’t hear that so much; it was “will I be able to fit in?” One of the things which several of the schools did, which I thought was very wise, was to have the seniors take one or two of their courses at a local community college so that they began to be in that sort of a setting while still with the support system of going back to their regular school. And the kids reported that that was a very positive thing—scary at times, but very positive, that it gave them the confidence that in fact they could handle the situation.

JB: That sounds like a smart approach; that’s good. And then you also mentioned… were you going to say something else?

CG: One of the most amusing things which many of the kids said—one of the boys said he was working really hard on persuading his parents it would be all right if he became a lawyer, because they expected to become a doctor like all the other kids in the school, because it’s true—I mean, my eye doctor is Pakistani—you know, a high proportion of medical folks now around the US are Muslim immigrants. So the kids were feeling “well yeah, it’s not necessary that I be a doctor, I could maybe be a journalist or I could be other kinds of things” and they were kind of experimenting with that idea, but clearly they were still getting a message from home that was really expected was “off to medical school!”

JB: One thing that you mentioned was anxiety that Muslim parents have about online recruitment of their children into terrorism, and that Muslim schools may be in the position to counteract this. Can you explain that dynamic?

CG: Yes, in two ways. One is that there’s a lot of research now on jihadists both in the US and in Europe—where of course there have been a lot more. Overwhelmingly, they’re not individuals who had a solid Islamic education. The man who just yesterday or the day before was arrested in Los Angeles for plotting a terrorist attack is someone who only became a Muslim recently. These are not folks who grew up within a solid Muslim environment with sound Islamic teaching. They are often folks who learned about Islam in prison where there’s a very strong effort to reach out to prisoners. The man who killed Theo van Gogh on the street in Amsterdam a number of years ago, I remember I was at that street corner only a day or two later, had been a drug dealer. He wasn’t following the Islamic code at all. But apparently many jihadists are individuals whose lives have been kind of a mess and they feel that by becoming a jihadist they will somehow redeem themselves; they will become suddenly a hero.

So, the other half then of this is that the schools worked very hard about that. In fact, one kid told me that at every single assembly—they had assembly at least once a week and usually more than once a week—the head of the school would talk about how they must not learn about Islam on the web, that they would get misleading messages… “don’t get into that.” One of the schools very much regretted the fact that one of their graduates had in fact been entrapped in a scheme like that. He hadn’t done anything, but he had been in touch jihadists and so forth, and the police had gotten after him and so forth, and they were deeply, deeply embarrassed and concerned about that. So I think that one of the things which I’ve speculated about, I think more on the European experience I’ve had than the American experience, is that often being in a public school where you’re one of a very small minority of Muslim kids and you feel you’re being singled out and so forth, it’s more likely to lead to alienation and hostility then being in a school where you feel supported and warmly welcomed. That doesn’t mean that in a Catholic school, or indeed in a public school, you can’t create an environment where Muslim kids are supported and warmly welcomed—I think you can. But too often these kids reported that when they were in the public school that, in fact, they felt as though they were very much marginalized, particularly the girls, because the girls were in hijabs which made them really stand out, and girls are much more cliquish than boys are generally in high school. While the boys would generally get into basketball or whatever and they were sort of hanging out with non-Muslim boys, the girls reported much more that they had been sort of isolated. So I think one of the positive things about these [Islamic] schools is the ability to create a solidly supportive environment in which kids are able to develop character.

Now let me say that this just as true of Catholic and evangelical schools—I’m sure it’s true of Jewish schools, though until now I haven’t really studied Jewish schools—but there’s a lot of evidence that kids who have been at a school where the staff are unambiguously willing to talk about their convictions and to live according to their convictions, that this has a very powerful influence in developing character. Aristotle famously said, “We don’t develop character by being taught the character; we develop it by imitating those we love.” So give kids experienced teachers who they come to really care about, who exhibit character, the kids themselves will acquire it.

Often teachers at public schools—and let me stress that I have seven children and I sent them all to the Boston Public Schools so I’m not against the public schools, indeed I was a state official responsible for urban education in Massachusetts for 20 years so I’m heavily into the public schools—but often it’s very hard for public schools to have that kind of coherence and consistency, in part because, at least in urban districts, they really can’t choose their staff. Their staff are assigned to the schools on the basis of seniority, under union contracts and so forth, so it’s very hard to create a coherent staff where they all share the same vision of what it is to be a flourishing human being. In an Islamic school or a Catholic or indeed a Montessori School or a Steiner/Waldorf School, they are able to have staff who share the vision that animates the school; those staff in turn are models of character for kids and that’s what counts, if that’s to develop.

JB: That’s well said. So would you have any advice then maybe for a public school teacher who has the desire to model character and impact their students in that way, and yet is in that public school environment?

CG: Well, many of course do, and I have to say that the public schools that do that most successfully are the charter schools and the magnet schools which again have a clearly distinctive mission which allows them to put together a staff who share that mission. It’s harder if you’re an individual teacher and the other teachers in the school don’t share your way of thinking about what it is to be a decent human being, because you feel as though your work is constantly being undermined in effect. But you know, in a number of the schools which my children went to in Boston, because of a strong leader, because of teachers working together and really sharing a vision for this, my kids did acquire a solid sense of what it is to be a decent human being.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

Facebook Twitter Linkedin