morality

Family’s grief over son’s suicide from bullying sparks movement to change school culture

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The suicide of a 12-year-old Mississippi boy who was relentlessly tormented by school bullies is sparking a movement to divert more money to anti-bullying programs.

Cheryl Hudson told WMC Action News her son Andy Leach was teased relentlessly by kids at Southhaven Middle School – mocked as fat, ugly and worthless – and she believes it’s directly to blame for his suicide.

Her other son found Andy’s lifeless body hanging in a room at his father’s house in March.

“One minute I feel like I’m numb. The next minute I break down,” she said. “I can’t fathom another parent having to put their child in the ground the way we just did.”

Hudson channeled the grief of her son’s loss into “Andy’s Voice,” a foundation dedicated to suicide prevention and anti-bullying efforts.

Cheryl and her husband Matthew announced the new mission at a recent rally that drew dozens of folks who celebrated Andy’s life and offered messages of hope, WMC reports.

The audience included DeSoto County District 7 state Rep. Steve Hopkins, who told the news site he plans to introduce a bill called “Andy’s Law” to create a special fund to collect profits from state lotteries to fund anti-bullying programs.

“That money would be one of the sole purposes of helping our schools, resource officers, counseling, training with anti-bullying programs,” Hopkins said. “Everything that’s available to address the situations in our schools today.”

“With the representatives that we have here, with the amount of people that we have here, the noise is getting louder for change in Mississippi and that’s what we want to do,” Matthew Hudson told folks at the rally.

“This is such a big deal, not just in DeSoto County but everywhere,” Cheryl Hudson said, “and we need to start right here in our backyard and grow from there.”

While there are surveys that suggest that bullying in public schools is decreasing, Professor James Hunter of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture reminds us, “We can only care for the young in their particularity.” There are no generalizable abstractions or one-size-fits-all solutions to bullying. Every school culture in its particular moral ecology must be addressed. Hunter continues, “If we are not attentive to and understanding of these contexts, we are not caring for real, live human beings, but rather abstractions that actually don’t exist at all.” These parents are to be celebrated for turning their pain into concrete programs of action.

For more on creating a strong moral ecology in schools, see The Content of Their Character.

For teachers and principals interested in student moral and character formation, information can be found at the UK’s Jubilee Centre website.

 

Private school officials discuss how faith shapes school culture, breeds academic success

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St. Joseph Catholic School Principal Wade Laffey wants parents to know that the private religious school is more than a public school with a religion class.

“The faith and the catholicity of the school just appears throughout the day in the form of prayer, in the form of the type of uniform the students wear, to the morals and behaviors that are expected of the students and families,” Laffey told the Enid News & Eagle.

Laffey and other religious school leaders recently spoke with the news site about the benefits of a school culture steeped in strongly held religious beliefs, including ways it improves student discipline, engages parents, and encourages students to excel in academics.

Lois Nichols of St. Paul’s Lutheran School explained that the school’s focus on the love of God plays an important role, allowing misbehaving students to reflect on what Jesus would do and how their actions impact others.

“Most of the time they step up to the plate and change that behavior … it is very effective,” Nichols said.

At both St. Joseph and St. Paul’s, parents are also expected to invest in their child’s education through volunteer work, such as serving lunch, tutoring students, and helping with fundraising and school events.

“The students see that, they see the sacrifices that their parents are making for them,” Laffey told the News & Eagle. “That just helps to create that much more of an environment where students realize, ‘We must be worth caring about.’”

Small class sizes at many private religious schools also allows educators to provide more attention to each student than in other schools with large classes, Nichols said.

“The nicest thing about it is that each teacher works really hard with each individual student to make sure their needs are met,” he said.

The combination of factors – a school culture centered on religious beliefs, led by adults with a shared set of values, along with small classes that help teachers focus on each student’s needs – produces students who excel in academics and life.

Researchers at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture agree that the holistic approach being adopted by these schools is what makes them uniquely effective in character formation. Values when influential are not generic. Professor James Davison Hunter writes, “No one has ever believed in kindness or honesty without understanding them in the concrete circumstances of a moral culture embedded in a moral community.”  Only the particularity of moral community, such as those that these religious schools provide, can bind empathy with right behavior. This is further explained in the brief monograph, The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, which is itself a shortened version of Hunter’s The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age Without Good or Evil. Creating a moral culture embedded in community is key.

St. Joseph serves students through fifth grade, while St. Paul offers instruction through eighth grade. And it’s when students move on to high school that some of the biggest benefits of a religious education come into focus, Laffey and Nichols said.

“Every other school in town wants the St. Joe’s kids,” Laffey said. “More often than not, they’re placed in honors classes and advanced curriculum.”

“We have kids that score higher above most public schools because of the small classrooms and individualized attention,” Nichols added.

Principals and other education leaders interested in strengthening Roman Catholic teachers in their schools can turn to the National Catholic Education Association for support.

 

Measuring social-emotional learning for ESSA: no takers

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States submitting plans to the U.S. Department of Education to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act are opting not to measure social-emotional learning as part of school performance metrics.

The decision stems in part from the difficulty of measuring important character traits and interpersonal skills like cooperation, respect, and empathy, though groups like The Jubilee Centre are making strides in assessing character education in local schools.

Two years after Congress adopted the Every Student Succeeds Act, not a single state has submitted a plan to comply with the federal law that incorporates social-emotional learning into state measures for school accountability systems.

According to Education Week:

Schools that adopt social-emotional learning seek to nurture students’ development in areas like self-management and responsible decision making alongside traditional academics. Doing so helps to deepen students’ learning experiences and prepares them for interpersonal situations they will later face in the workplace, educators say.

As the U.S. Department of Education works to approve states’ ESSA plans, some of social-emotional learning’s biggest boosters are expressing relief that states are steering clear of trying to measure such personal skills for accountability.

“There is a groundswell of recognition that the academic, social, and emotional development of children are intertwined in all experiences of learning,” Tim Shriver, co-founder of Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), told the news site. “I think that’s booming . . . Someone might say, ‘Why aren’t you holding states accountable for teaching it?’ The answer to that is we are not ready for it yet.”

Current measures of social and emotional development consist mostly of student surveys in which they self-report on their own character traits, which makes it difficult to comply with ESSA regulations that require “meaningful differentiation in school performance” that are “valid, reliable, comparable, and statewide.”

Joseph E. Davis, sociologist as the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia highlighted the difficulty of “Measuring Virtue in the Audit Society” for The Hedgehog Review, a journal on interdisciplinary topics published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

“The very act of creating measures and benchmarks and rating scales can badly distort the nature of the thing being audited, throwing off all sorts of unintended consequences. Far from a merely derived and neutral activity, auditing and performance measurement can construct a system of knowledge and then re-shape the organizational environment to make that system successful. More germane to virtue is the distinct possibility that because the disposition itself is not readily amenable to verifiable, non-subjective measurement, what will be quantified is simply some aspect that is easy to count, often a crude and not very meaningful aspect at that,” Davis wrote.

“This aspect, because verifiable and thus more tractable and ‘real,’ then gets confused with the thing itself. Virtue becomes, as one of the speakers at (a January conference on character at Oriel College, Oxford) argued, ‘what virtue tests test,’” Davis continued.

“I recently heard a social scientist argue that when it comes to measuring morality any measure is better than none, an at-least-we’re-counting-something view . . . But surely, in light of the dynamics of real-world assessment practices, such a facile view is deeply mistaken. Only a very good measure is better than none,” Davis wrote.

And while experts argue that good measures of character and social emotional learning “are not ready for prime time,” as Louisiana State Superintendent John White told Education Week, the Jubilee Centre and others are providing excellent resources for schools to develop their own means of evaluating character education programs on a local level.

The Centre’s “Character Education Evaluation Handbook For Schools,” for example, “is intended to be a source that schools can adapt to their own context” based on “the premise that by using varied forms of self-evaluation teachers can develop a holistic and formative picture of their school’s character-education profile.”

The handbook is broken down into four sections, and takes educators from planning an evaluation, to developing a self-evaluation framework, evaluating curriculum strategies and activities, and eventually how “students’ self-reflection can support the development of character and more specifically practical wisdom.”

The handbook also provides examples of different approaches to student self-reflection on character currently in use by schools, according to The Jubilee Centre website.

“If it’s not illegal or immoral, why not give it a try?”

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“If it’s not illegal or immoral, why not give it a try?” Michael Niehoff contends that this question is one of the keys to creating a culture in which students learn to take risks in order to become respected experts at something.

A lack of appropriate classroom culture is the biggest barrier to successful project-based learning, Niehoff maintains. In such a classroom environment, teachers serve as facilitators of learning while students take possession of their learning and lead the process. “We need to create a practice of always asking our students what they think and what they would prefer if given the option,” he writes.

Grades and test scores have conditioned students to look at failure with disappointment. But Niehoff sees failure as a natural part of the learning process that leads ultimately to success.

At a quick reading, Niehoff’s question might sound like it is trying to push the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Upon reflection, however, he is strengthening the boundaries. Anything that is immoral is off the table; those boundaries provide a broad scope for student curiosity, creativity, and exploration. And Niehoff’s intuition that culture is often overlooked in schools is right on.

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia explores something called habitus, and how culture shapes us through daily experiences. In The Death of Character, he writes: “At the most basic level of experience, habitus operates as a system of dispositions, tendencies, and inclinations that organizes our actions and defines our way of being. Socialized as children into this habitus, we live with an intuitive feeling about the nature of the world around us. Culture, in this way, becomes so deeply embedded into our subjective consciousness that the ways of the world seem ‘natural’ to us.” And that’s what Niehoff is after: he wants it to feel totally natural to students to take risks and accept responsibility for learning.

In this pursuit, Niehoff provides clear boundaries for students’ exploration—”not illegal or immoral,” so that what could sound like inappropriate license is actually well-defined restraint.

Cultivating school culture isn’t limited to the practices that push students toward responsible learning; it extends to everyone in a school culture. EL Schools, for example, seek to live out the motto “We are crew, not passengers.” As a learning community, they’re working to become respected experts at the craft of project-based learning.

Dalai Lama calls for moral education for ‘a more peaceful planet’

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The Dalai Lama believes schools should do more to promote moral education to move the world away from the “violent” and “sad” reality of the 2oth century.

“I think existing modern education is inadequate and it teaches more about materialistic pleasure and values. So when we grow up with modern education we go after power, money, and fame. Education should include moral education as an academic subject,” the Buddhist spiritual leader told more than 27,000 at the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences in India, where he received the 10th KISS Humanitarian Award last month.

The international award, selected by a “high-level jury,” is designed to highlight people who make exceptional contributions in fields that tackle social issues.

The Dalai Lama said the last century was plagued with destruction, war, and mass killings, including deaths from the use of two nuclear weapons. The Nobel Peace Prize winner believes that by cultivating inner peace through moral education is the key to helping today’s youth reverse the trend and create a more peaceful planet in the 21st century.

“In this century . . . killing has become almost normal. This must change,” he said, according to The Times of India. “This century should be a century of peace. World peace can be achieved only through inner peace.”

The Dalai Lama’s invitation to make moral education central to education is worth heeding. Already, schools around the world are struggling to define moral education and how to integrate it into the curriculum.

Yet University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter points out that curriculum is just one piece of a larger moral culture that extends beyond schools and into all aspects of human life.

“This moral culture not only gives us our ethical understanding, it also tells us who we are,” Hunter wrote in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America. “It provides us with an understanding of what it means to be human and what kind of human we should ideally be.”

A moral culture can make this explicit in classes, but it can also be woven into the ethos of a school, as it is in the Great Hearts Academies network of schools in the United States. Rather than making moral education an academic subject to give students a moral compass, this network of classical charter schools relies on its robust academic curriculum to weave moral formation into all of its instruction.

Cassie Mason, a teacher at Great Hearts, reflects, “What amazes me is that they [the students] really see the virtues that we talk about as something beautiful and something to strive for.”

Educators can learn more about Great Hearts’ approach to forming character with its Building Goodness by Building Character video.

“I think character and virtue are really the center of everything we do, because we are called Great Hearts, after all, not great minds,” said student Jack Fresqez. “And we’re encouraged to kind of question our actions, question everything we do, around whether it’s virtuous.”

“It’s not just about producing brilliant kids, but brilliant kids who have the character to deploy that talent for a good that’s greater than themselves,” said Great Hearts founder Daniel Scoggin.

Florida Gov. cuts character education program

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Florida Gov. Rick Scott recently put an end to a two-decade-old Learning for Life character education program by cutting an annual $2.5 million appropriation for the program from the state budget.

The move is already impacting local Boy Scout groups that contracted with the state to help public schools meet a mandate for character education. It also raises troubling questions because Florida’s standards for defining moral character were already low.

The Suwannee River Area Council of Boy Scouts are working to patch a $155,000 budget hole left after Scott, a former Eagle Scout, vetoed the $2.5 million appropriation for Learning for Life. The Council and other Boy Scout troops tailored their citizenship programs to offer lessons on kindness and other character virtues to public schools through the program, and rely heavily on the cash from the state to fund their efforts, the Tallahassee Democrat reports.

“Scott’s focus was not on the Suwannee River Area Council when he made the final decision on the state budget sent to him by the Legislature,” according to the news site. “His eyes were on the bottom line.”

The move means two workers lost their jobs when the Suwannee River Area Council was forced to shut down its Learning for Life program, which it provided to eight Florida counties. The Council may also be forced to merge with another council if it doesn’t come up with about $62,000 by the end of the year.

Like Scott, Republican state Rep. Randy Fine said the decision to cut the Learning for Life funding was not aimed at the Boy Scouts.

“You get all these programs with similar sounding names stacked up against each other,” he said. “Put your name on the appropriation, that’s my advice. Here’s one of the premier educational (entities), people need to know you are involved.”

Scott spokeswoman Lauren Schenone contends the governor “will work with the Boy Scouts to identify their priorities,” though Scott contends that because character education is mandated by the state “districts should use current resources to provide the instruction,” the Democrat reports.

The shift is troubling based on the state’s already low standards for “good moral character.”

CultureFeed recently described the Florida Department of Children and Families’ “Affidavit of Good Moral Character,” a required document that outlines for prospective employees “the moral character requirements” to work with children.

The document requires applicants to “affirm and attest under penalty of perjury” that they “have not been arrested with disposition pending or found guilty of, regardless of adjudication, or entered a plea of nolo contendere or guilty to or have been adjudicated delinquent and the record has not been sealed or expunged for, any offense prohibited under and of the following provisions of Florida Statutes.”

The listed statutes include “sexual misconduct” with patients, the mentally ill, or children; abuse; murder; manslaughter; kidnapping; assault “if the offense was a felony” or “if the victim of offense was a minor”; burglary; theft, drug sales, and other crimes.

“In the case of the State of Florida, where ‘good moral character’ might once have meant being kind, loving, courageous, merciful, and wise—all for the benefit of the children under the person’s care—it now means that one hasn’t forced a child to have sex or committed other heinous crimes,” Zambone wrote.

Considering that definition of “good moral character,” Scott’s decision to ax Learning for Life begs the question: How will they encourage the teaching of character and citizenship in Florida’s schools?

Is non-abuse what “good moral character” means?

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It would seem that our public standards of “good moral character” are too low.

That’s the unavoidable conclusion that comes when you read the “Affidavit of Good Moral Character,” a document produced by the Florida Department of Children and Families. It’s required by the State of Florida that those who want to work with children “affirm and attest under penalty of perjury that [they] meet the moral character requirements for employment . . .”

What are these “moral character requirements”?

That applicants:

. . . have not been arrested with disposition pending or found guilty of, regardless of adjudication, or entered a plea of nolo contender or guilty to or have been adjudicated delinquent and the record has not been sealed or expunged for, any offense prohibited under any of the following provisions of the Florida Statutes . . .

In other words, that they have never been found guilty of or are currently charged with violating Florida laws.

Which laws? Well, first, every possible law relating to “sexual misconduct” with patients, the mentally ill, or children (ranging from rape to voyeurism); abuse; murder; manslaughter; kidnapping; assault “if the offense was a felony” or “if the victim of offense was a minor”; burglary; theft; “fraudulent sale of controlled substances”; and a few other odds and ends.

It’s a moment like this that you begin to realize how perverted our definition of “good moral character” has become. Somehow that term has been used to title a document that would be better called “Affidavit of Legal Conduct.”

It’s a classic example of what the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down.” Moynihan (who was not only a senator but a PhD in History) was using a theory of the pioneering French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim had suggested in 1895 that, first, crime and deviance were normal throughout human history and human society. However, second, there was a limit to the deviance any community can “afford to recognize,” and that communities traditionally exert social control to contain that deviancy. Moynihan suggested that “over the past generation . . . the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.”

In the case of the State of Florida, where “good moral character” might once have meant being kind, loving, courageous, merciful, and wise—all for the benefit of the children under the person’s care—it now means that one hasn’t forced a child to have sex.

Nor is Florida alone in defining character down. The Immigration Learning Center explains to potential U.S. citizens that “good moral character” is what you must maintain during your five years before filing for citizenship. And as in Florida, good moral character is defined as obeying certain laws. They helpfully explain that “people who have been convicted of murder at any time cannot become U.S. citizens”—murder seems to exceed the statue of character limitations that otherwise applies.

After reading such bland, boring legalese, it no longer seems mysterious why everyone is in favor of character, but no one can seem to define it. Florida and the Immigration Learning Center, with the full force of government behind them, define character as simply not breaking the law—including those against the most awful violations in this or any other culture.

And it recalls the words of James Davison Hunter in The Death of Character, published seventeen years ago, but—as such evidence proves—even more relevant today. He begins the book with a “Postmortem” for character, and writes “. . . character in America has not died a natural death. There has been an ironic and unintended complicity among the very people who have taken on the task of being its guardians and promoters.”

Seventeen years later, that complicity continues.

Measuring social-emotional learning for ESSA: no takers

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States submitting plans to the U.S. Department of Education to comply with the Every Student Succeeds Act are opting not to measure social-emotional learning as part of school performance metrics.

The decision stems in part from the difficulty of measuring important character traits and interpersonal skills like cooperation, respect, and empathy, though groups like The Jubilee Centre are making strides in assessing character education in local schools.

Two years after Congress adopted the Every Student Succeeds Act, not a single state has submitted a plan to comply with the federal law that incorporates social-emotional learning into state measures for school accountability systems.

According to Education Week:

Schools that adopt social-emotional learning seek to nurture students’ development in areas like self-management and responsible decision making alongside traditional academics. Doing so helps to deepen students’ learning experiences and prepares them for interpersonal situations they will later face in the workplace, educators say.

As the U.S. Department of Education works to approve states’ ESSA plans, some of social-emotional learning’s biggest boosters are expressing relief that states are steering clear of trying to measure such personal skills for accountability.

“There is a groundswell of recognition that the academic, social, and emotional development of children are intertwined in all experiences of learning,” Tim Shriver, co-founder of Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), told the news site. “I think that’s booming . . . Someone might say, ‘Why aren’t you holding states accountable for teaching it?’ The answer to that is we are not ready for it yet.”

Current measures of social and emotional development consist mostly of student surveys in which they self-report on their own character traits, which makes it difficult to comply with ESSA regulations that require “meaningful differentiation in school performance” that are “valid, reliable, comparable, and statewide.”

Joseph E. Davis, an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, highlighted the difficulty of “Measuring Virtue in the Audit Society” for The Hedgehog Review, a journal on interdisciplinary topics published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

“The very act of creating measures and benchmarks and rating scales can badly distort the nature of the thing being audited, throwing off all sorts of unintended consequences. Far from a merely derived and neutral activity, auditing and performance measurement can construct a system of knowledge and then re-shape the organizational environment to make that system successful. More germane to virtue is the distinct possibility that because the disposition itself is not readily amenable to verifiable, non-subjective measurement, what will be quantified is simply some aspect that is easy to count, often a crude and not very meaningful aspect at that,” Davis wrote.

“This aspect, because verifiable and thus more tractable and ‘real,’ then gets confused with the thing itself. Virtue becomes, as one of the speakers at (a January conference on character at Oriel College, Oxford) argued, ‘what virtue tests test,’” Davis continued.

“I recently heard a social scientist argue that when it comes to measuring morality any measure is better than none, an at-least-we’re-counting-something view . . . But surely, in light of the dynamics of real-world assessment practices, such a facile view is deeply mistaken. Only a very good measure is better than none,” Davis wrote.

And while experts argue that good measures of character and social emotional learning “are not ready for prime time,” as Louisiana State Superintendent John White told Education Week, the Jubilee Centre and others are providing excellent resources for schools to develop their own means of evaluating character education programs on a local level.

The Centre’s “Character Education Evaluation Handbook For Schools,” for example, “is intended to be a source of inspiration that schools should adapt their own context” based on “the premise that by using varied forms of self-evaluation teachers can develop a holistic and formative picture of their school’s character-education profile.”

The handbook is broken down into four sections, and takes educators from planning an evaluation, to developing a self-evaluation framework, evaluating curriculum strategies and activities, and eventually how “students’ self-reflection can support the development of character and more specifically practical wisdom.”

The handbook also provides examples of different approaches to student self-reflection on character currently in use by schools, according to The Jubilee Centre website.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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