Dewey's Theories of Morals and Character Education Programs

There is nothing like a little John Dewey to make me dust off my dictionary for a vocabulary review! At first read, Dewey's Democracy in Education is a little off-putting, unless terms like "inchoate, nascent activities" are part of your everyday vocabulary. Teaching middle school all these years seems to have dulled my vocabulary down a bit. However, he brings up many interesting points about shaping the character of youth. The first of these ideas led me to look into what character education should look like in schools and in the larger community.

First, when talking about the "inner and outer", Dewey brings up the discrepancy of internal and external motivations.  This is still a topic that people debate today in education.  Should classrooms run on reward systems? Do they really work? This led me to think about the consequences of that system.  What do students do when the reward is no longer present? To me reward systems seem a little Pavlovian in nature. Train kids to receive a reward, but when the reward is removed, the old behaviors return.  So the question becomes: How can we teach students to do what is right simply because it is the right thing to do?  Dewey goes on to say that a person whose mind is not yet made up on a give course of action will hesitate and consider the action.  In that act of hesitation and consideration, the person's morals and attitudes will be questioned and brought forth.  This is when we can really learn about and test our own beliefs.  All of this made me think of character education in classrooms. 

Character education is something that happens all day long as far as I am concerned.  I think that Dewey's ideas support this.  When we introduce students to conflict and ideas in literature, social studies, science... we are forcing them to challenge who they are, what they believe, and what is "right".   Exposing children to a wide variety of real life situations is key in developing their character in responding to situations, but there is a lot more to a working character education program than just integrating lessons into the curriculum.  For true character education, the entire school community has to be involved in the process.  From parents and educators having input into which specific values are being taught, to modeling positive behaviors in all areas of the day including extra-curricular activities, every stakeholder must be on the same page reinforcing the same messages. 

I read an article from the Ethics Resource Center called FAQ about Character Education  that details what character education is as well as some considerations for a successful program. All aspects of these considerations point to having as many people as possible in the students' lives involved and working together to reinforce an agreed upon set of values.  Everything in this article makes logical sense. It also seems to flow with Dewey's ideas. So where do schools go wrong? 

From my perspective, students experience a disconnect in a few areas.  Some schools "teach" character education from a disconnected point of view- isolated lessons are ineffective. In addition, getting "buy-in" from all school personnel is difficult.  I hate to say it, but from my own experience, some staff will say "yes, we will all do this", but then do not always model appropriate behaviors and reactions themselves and will not really implement the program with fidelity.  This creates a climate of "do as I say, not as I do", which no student will learn anything positive from.  Some schools do not attempt to involve parents at all in the decisions of which values to emphasize and how to support them at home.  For schools with large cultural diversity, this can cause all sorts of problems if the values taught conflict with the students' home cultures. In addition, there is often a disconnect between values taught and the larger community influence. Students see one thing in the larger media and are taught another in schools and home.  Who is there explaining to them and helping them bridge the gap?     

Given the importance of creating moral humans, schools and the larger community certainly have a responsibility to work together to achieve this goal.  What will happen if we don't?

Are Year-Round Schools The Answer?

Based on my last discussion, I started thinking about how students could gain more access to school. If they need to be less influenced by possible negative neighborhood effects, then does that mean students need to be in school all year? What is the role of the family in all this? I read an article called Families Must Be a Part of the Solution in Closing the Achievement Gap by Sharon Darling.  She says that a 1988 study by Sum and Berlin show two causes for the Achievement Gap. One factor is the education level of the mother. The more education the mother has, the more education her children are likely to have. This even holds true for mothers who go back to school later in life.  The other factor is summer vacation. The Sum and Berlin study says that advantaged and disadvantaged students learn at the same rate during the year. However, disadvantaged students regress over the summer while other students do not. This causes them to fall behind their peers.  Normally, this would all lead me to believe that students need to be in school all summer so they do not fall behind.  Interestingly enough, Darling cites another study by VonHippel in 2007 that shows students in year round schools do not learn more than their peers in 9 month schools.  This study states that students in year round schools increase learning in the summer, but not the rest of the year.  It all balances out in the end.  The solution posed by this article was not to enroll students in school year round, but to involve families in the process.  Darling pointed to a study by Yarnell, Lanbson, and Pfannenstiel in 2007 that looked at 900 Native American students.  Teachers trained their families in literacy skills to support students outside of school.  After training the families, students' scores rose dramatically.  It also decreased the amount of referrals for special education services by 50%.  Darling implies that if this type of program can work with the Native American population studied, where there was an 80% unemployment rate among the families of students, there could be dramatic results for other low SES groups as well. Another article I read, A Statewide Evaluation of Academic Achievement in Year-Round Schools by Bradley J. McMillen, supports what the Darling article concluded about achievement in year round schools.  This study looked at 345,000 students in the North Carolina school system in grades 3-8.  In this study as well, there was no real gain in achievement for students in year round schools compared to peers in nine month schools. 

This made me think that many parents would be willing to help their kids if they really knew what to do and why it was important.  Schools should be focusing on ways to train parents and community members to help students outside of school.  I think that not only would this help the students learn in the time outside of school, but it would help empower parents to be more involved in their kids' educations.  Obviously, not all parents need this kind of support, but there are plenty of struggling areas out there with people who would be willing to help, but may not know how.  

Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success

The article Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success outlines six factors that point to potential educational problems, which are conveniently ignored by the federal No Child Left Behind mandate. They are: prenatal non-genetic factors, inadequate medical care, food insecurity, environmental pollutants, family relations and stress, and neighborhood characteristics.  One of the things I found interesting about this is that the NCLB law assumes that all school achievement can be directly attributed to the school. For example, a low achieving school is low achieving because it is a "bad" school.  This article tells us that academic achievement may not be something entirely up to the school.  The article states that students spend about 1,150 waking hours per year in school and 4,700 waking hours per year in their neighborhood.  This tells us that in some places the negative effect of the neighborhood can greatly impact the students, even more so than any positive influence the school environment can provide.  

I see these children in my classroom every day. I usually don't know much about the prenatal and other medical care of my students, but I see those with not enough to eat.  I see the impact of family issues when they come up.  Most striking to me in the reading was the impact of the environment on the students. The neighborhood I work in is home to a dying steel industry. There is an empty lot that is across from the school that is an enormous slag heap. (Slag is a steel production waste product. ) Elsewhere nearby are factories spewing smoke, commercial barges floating the nearby waterways, and the expressway buzzing above. It does not surprise me that over half of my students have asthma. This causes them to miss school more often, which can cause them to fall behind. I don't even want to get into other neighborhood influences of drugs, gangs, and violence.  

Another alarming fact I found in 2005 a NCES report gave some dire statistics for African-American and Latino students.  49% of black and 48% of latino students were eligible for the federal free/reduced lunch.  The federal free/reduced lunch statistics are the typical reporting measures for classifying a school as "high-poverty".  So, for so-called "minority" students, the situation is dire- about half of them live in poverty and are forecasted for potentially low educational achievement.  Can't we do better than this? Doesn't our government have a responsibility here? This is where many people point to charter schools and other alternative schools to help solve the problem of educational achievement. Pull out the best, most promising students and give them a chance at a quality education, right? But what happens to those left behind in the faltering neighborhood schools? The Poverty and Potential article suggests the same thing that happens when upwardly mobile families move out of a disadvantaged neighborhood.  It creates a drain on role-models for the whole community.  This perpetuates the environment and keeps the cycle going.  

What is to be done about this? The article suggests that increasing the school contact time for students is about the only direct method to influence students. This means giving access to pre-school programs, after school programs, and summer programs.  Is this enough? Probably not. It seems that we not only have to increase school access time, but also increase the quality of life in the neighborhood, and in the entire world too. I hope that in the very near future we can begin to address these factors in education.  For too long we have been making the assumption that all students come to school every day ready, willing, and able to learn when we know that this is simply not the case. That African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" that Hilary Clinton made popular some years back is distinctly and literally true. To help children learn, the entire community needs to pitch in. It is about time we look to our communities in a new way- for schools to change, the whole community needs to change.