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Back to School: Building good character through just a trait a week
Wednesday, August 25, 1999 By Mackenzie Carpenter, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
He is standing in the middle of a roomful of teachers, looking every inch the mild-mannered school bureaucrat -- short-sleeved shirt, pocket protector, thick wire-rimmed glasses.
But when he speaks, he is all fire and brimstone, arms pumping furiously up and down, a revivalist preacher exhorting his flock to make students UNDERSTAND and INTERNALIZE and ACTUALIZE the meaning of GOOD CHARACTER, so that it is in their HEARTS and SOULS.
"For if we don't, we will have failed," he says darkly, his arms falling limply to his sides.
This is Rodolfo Bernardo, apostle for the idea that good character can be taught to schoolchildren, week by week, by the simple repetition and discussion of certain words and "traits," such as loyalty, respect, kindness and courtesy.
While not everyone buys his ideas, Bernardo's struggling elementary school outside of Dayton, Ohio, did well under his exhortations in the early 1990s, doubling its test scores and reducing discipline problems. Bernardo was profiled on National Public Radio, praised in the pages of The Wall Street Journal and invited to the White House to discuss his work.
Yesterday, Bernardo, a native of the Philippines who came to the United States in 1969, delivered his message to Pittsburgh School District teachers and administrators.
Now working for a West Palm Beach, Fla.-based company called High Road Global Character Development Inc., he led the first of a series of training sessions as the school district expanded existing character education programs from four to 15 schools. Participating elementary schools will be Arlington, Belmar, Clayton, Crescent, Fulton, Greenfield, Lemington, Horace Mann, Mifflin, Northview, Regent Square, Sunnyside, Schaeffer and Woolslair.
Actually, the district has had a character education program in place since 1990. It was developed by Pittsburgh-based Heartwood Institute to instill moral attributes in children through the use of literature. The two programs will be "complementary," said Pat Crawford, the district's spokeswoman.
This is the fourth article in an eight-part PG series examining a range of educational issues.
Previous articles:
Part I: A shortage of principals.
Part II: Non-Catholic families are finding Catholic schools a blessing
Part III: Ninth grade proves to be a pivotal year for youths
Bernardo's program, which will be provided free until private funding can be secured, will focus on 36 "traits of the week," an evolution from the original "word of the week" concept piloted by Bernardo in Dayton.
"I love it -- - the way it's set up as a program involving the parents and the community," said Cheryl McLaughlin, a development adviser at Greenfield Elementary School who attended yesterday's training sessions.
Other teachers, at Bernardo's urging, called out suggestions for reinforcement: an ongoing drama production on that week's trait, or posting banners on school buses so the public could see what the students would be talking about that week.
But there are skeptics as well as enthusiasts.
Some education experts say these programs are merely behavior modification designed to make students more obedient and compliant -- not to foster more intangible qualities such as empathy or social conscience.
"What goes by the name of character education nowadays is, for the most part, a collection of exhortations and extrinsic inducements designed to make children work harder and do what they're told," said Alfie Kohn, a Massachusetts-based educator and author of numerous books on how children learn. Some of the concepts also promote a conservative political agenda, he claimed.
"Even when other values are also promoted -- caring or fairness, say -- the preferred method of instruction is tantamount to indoctrination. The point is to drill students in specific behaviors rather than to engage them in deep, critical reflection about certain ways of being."
Bernardo won't directly answer Kohn's criticisms, which he's heard before. Kohn's criticism of his "word of the week" approach at one education symposium in California "was hitting below the belt, and I won't stoop so low to answer him," he said.
But John Minkler, an official at the Character Education Clearinghouse in California, knows them both and says they represent opposite ends of a wide spectrum. In fact, there are more than 100 different character education programs operating in schools nationally, ranging from "plaques on the wall and coffee mugs" to Bernardo's "word of the week" approach, to child-centered programs such as the Child Development Project out of Oakland, Calif., in which teachers use counseling and class meetings to address problems and de-emphasize rewards and punishments.
Character education is an age-old concept in pedagogy and law -- some states have had policies mandating the teaching of good character dating to the 1920s and '30s. With court rulings in the 1960s prohibiting prayer in schools and battles over "values," teacher enthusiasm for the subject waned until the 1980s.
Then, character education was rediscovered by business leaders -- notably Sanford McDonnell, chairman emeritus of McDonnell Douglas Corp.
"America will not be strong if we graduate young people who are brilliant but dishonest," McDonnell told audiences.
Today, character education has become big business. There's the "Character Counts!" initiative featuring actor Tom Selleck as its spokesman, and the Josephson Institute's program, in which children are told, among other things, to design a label for a box of "Consideration Cereal" and list its ingredients.
Global Character Development's 36 "traits of the week" are punctuality, cooperation, consideration, tolerance, promptness, readiness, responsibility, respectfulness, dependability, patriotism, citizenship, loyalty, self-control, politeness, courage, truthfulness, initiative, self-reliance, perseverance, honesty, cleanliness, kindness, generosity, thankfulness, goodwill, patience, joyfulness, sportsmanship, courtesy, fairness, helpfulness, bravery, cheerfulness, thrift/economy, law abiding and orderliness.
Today, 16 states have written policies calling for some form of character education -- with some interesting differences, too. In California, good character includes teaching "kindness toward domestic pets and the humane treatment of living creatures." In Alabama, teachers are directed to spend "not less than 10 minutes of instruction per day" on 30 character traits plus the Pledge of Allegiance. In Georgia, pupils will be exhorted to include "respect for the creator" in their quests for civic and moral virtue.
In Pennsylvania, however, it is unlikely that any such statewide policy will ever be implemented, given the bruising battle over "Outcomes Based Education" in the earlier part of this decade and the general suspicion among fundamentalist religious groups that teaching values in school is better left to parents.
"We have a very conservative Legislature when it comes to values in education," said Crawford. "There's no push to make it standardized."
Still, character education has made substantial inroads in local suburban school districts. Mt. Lebanon's former deputy superintendent, Henry Huffner, is a nationally known expert in the field and has established his own program at California University of Pennsylvania. Other programs exist in Bethel Park, Woodland Hills, Deer Lakes, West Allegheny and elsewhere.
And Pennsylvania was among nine states that received $2.3 million in federal grants in May for developing such programs.
With that kind of money available, more schools are expected to hop on the character education bandwagon. And that's what troubles Kohn.
These programs, he said, "fail to help children engage with ethical ideas or develop a sense of commitment to others that can only come about when children are taken seriously as active participants in their own learning."
"Just as you can't shove a mathematical principle down a kid's throat and expect her to understand quantitative principles, you can't force an adult-defined notion of honesty or fairness or courage down a child's throat and expect that child to become a better person."
Bernardo makes no secret of his contempt for Kohn's approach, which is closely related, he said, to the now-maligned "values clarification" movement of the 1960s. That, he said, "was all about, 'as long as this is good for me, it is good.' "
Certainly, some of Bernardo's approaches to building civic virtue might give some '60s liberals pause: "Give the 'Polite Police' the task of catching others being respectful," says one lesson plan; in another, children are urged to be "respectful spies," to notice and comment every time they see someone showing respect.
But Bernardo notes that his teaching plans do call for discussion and reflection about character traits, as well as outright action. In one fifth-grade lesson plan on responsibility, teachers are encouraged to get children to "agree to help a class of younger children this week with their lunches or finding their buses."
And while critics say that such "traits" as punctuality are about behavior, not character, Bernardo disagrees.
"If you are supposed to be at work at 8 a.m., and you arrive every day at 8:05, that is your character," he said.
The road to Pittsburgh has not been entirely smooth for Bernardo. Last year, he had a falling out with William D'Onofrio, his former business partner and a Glassport resident who initially brought Bernardo's "word of the week" program to Pittsburgh in 1997. Yesterday D'Onofrio, who runs his own character education program, said he was unceremoniously dropped in favor of Bernardo because of "politics," but declined to elaborate.
"It was sad, to take us and push us aside after two years," he said, adding that his attorneys would carefully scrutinize Bernardo's material for evidence of copyright infringement. In all, D'Onofrio was paid $20,000 for his efforts -- money that came out of Title I funding, school officials said. But Bernardo said he never received any of that money, a charge that D'Onofrio denies.
D'Onofrio isn't the only one feeling wounded. Eleanore Childs, who founded the Heartwood Institute, said she is troubled by the addition of yet another program, especially one whose concepts rely heavily on marketing techniques.
"Why do we need two?" she asked, noting that her 10-year program has received excellent reviews by local teachers.
Veronica Edwards, coordinator of Bernardo's program for the city schools, declined to answer questions about the Heartwood program. But other school officials have complained about its cost -- about $30 per student compared with "word of the week's" $20 per student.
Initially, foundations paid for Heartwood but in recent years the schools have had to foot the bill themselves, leading perhaps to a declining interest, said Rebecca Hamilton, a school support specialist for the district.
"What I like about Heartwood is that it retains the complexity of what character is about," she said. "It's not just a simple matter of being polite today, or responsible about easy things. Character education is about the toughest parts of your life, when the water is muddy, and how children deal with complex situations on the deepest level rather than superficial concepts."
Heartwood has yielded consistently high ratings from teachers and students, and initial data from four schools that participated in the "word of the week" program -- Mann, Woolslair, Schaeffer and Regent Square -- for the past two years shows measurable, double-digit increases in the satisfaction rate by parents and staffers about discipline and safety, both in and outside of school.
The "word of the week" program got mixed reviews from students. At Mann, for example, more students actually felt more unsafe in and out of the schools after the character education program was instituted. At Regent Square, however, there was a 21 percent increase in satisfaction rates about the safety inside schools.
Perhaps the most unsettling data, however, came under the category of students rating how they "treat one another."
In two of the four schools, Mann and Regent Square, the satisfaction rate was higher than the district average, which at 41 percent wasn't that high to begin with.
But at Woolslair and Schaeffer elementary schools, student satisfaction with how they treat one another went up only slightly, hovering in the 30 percent range -- even after two years of weekly doses of generosity, kindness, tolerance and sportsmanship.
That hasn't gone unnoticed by school officials.
"Those numbers are alarming," said Jack Garrow, who analyzed the data for the district. "Improving them has to be our top priority."
Tomorrow: Flash, magic and MTV-type productions. What has science education come to?
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