I had the great fortune of being raised by a loving family. They instilled in me certain values that shaped me into the person I am today. None of the adults in my family had much of a formal education though. My grandfather, for example, came to our country at the age of 10 with about a fifth grade education. He was a water boy on the railroad and later became a shoemaker.

My father never graduated from high school either. He fixed wrecked cars for a living and eventually owned his own shop–“Mazzola’s Body Shop.” It never had running water or central heat. During the winter, he burned coal in a pot-belly stove to warm the place up. I loved hanging out at his shop, and I learned a lot, too. Most people don’t know it, but I’ve painted cars, changed engines, installed transmissions, and I still service my own vehicles. In fact, I’m doing a brake job on my son’s car this weekend.

Oh. I forgot to mention why my dad never graduated from high school. He quit at the start of his senior year to go fight in World War II with his older brothers. You see, service to the nation was just one of the values stressed in our family. Since that was the case, it was an easy decision for me to enlist in the Air Force when I got older, even though it was very unpopular at the time.

Although I planned on doing my hitch and then moving on, I ended up spending more than 25 years in uniform. I did so because I loved being part of something meaningful, I loved working with honorable men and women, and I loved the fact that my organization stressed many of the same values I learned at home: Integrity, Service and Excellence.

Every year in November we celebrate Veterans Day. This year, encourage your students to reach out to veterans in your community. Besides having them thank the vets for their service, have them ask about the core values the vets lived by and how those values impacted their personal character. And, after Veterans Day, have the students share what they learned. I think you’ll find this can be a powerful character-building experience…and that’s what all good character educators look for!

Thanks for all you do to develop young men and women of good character for our world.

According to Interim Superintendent Erroll B. Davis Jr., Atlanta Public Schools will work toward achieving “a culture of integrity” as well as a “more open and transparent culture” among its schools, administrators, and teachers.  Too little, too late?  Certainly not. It’s a monumental step in the right direction, and CEP would like to offer information and resources to help the Atlanta Public Schools however possible.  Character educators know that even after a scandal of epic proportions such as this, it’s never too late to embrace our proper role as models and show our students that we, too, make mistakes sometimes (big ones, even).  And that we, as adults, can step up to the plate, do the right thing, hold our head up high, and keep on going.  Let’s show our students the right way to do things, and the right reason for doing them. Let’s bring integrity and ethics back into ALL our schools, let’s acknowledge where these qualities are lacking, and let’s take steps to show our nation’s impressionable youth how to act with integrity, character, and pride in our work. 

These students who watched our nation’s educators make colossal mistakes are our leaders of tomorrow.  They’ve witnessed the actions, they’ve seen the carnage that resulted, and now they’re watching what we’re all doing in the aftermath.  Let’s stop pointing fingers, casting blame, and castigating Atlanta Public Schools.  Let’s applaud them for taking the right steps in their commitment to creating a culture of integrity in their schools, and let’s help them succeed.

It is interesting, therefore, to study the words that are spoken on these historic occasions. What messages come across? What themes can we promote to future graduates? You will be hard pressed to find a graduation speech that extols the wisdom of achieving fame and wealth. Despite America’s ambitious and capitalistic nature, when it comes down to these defining moments in our lives, we stop to think about the qualities of life that really matter—things like being kind to others, respecting and valuing different opinions, being open to new experiences throughout your life—in general finding a way forward on the path to happiness.

Once you get past the obligatory references to late nights with too much alcohol, the endless opportunities open to new graduates, and the need to step back from social media every now and then—and even this year’s favorite theme: overcoming fear (fear of the future, fear of the job market, fear of progressing in life)—this year’s notable graduation speakers focused on how to get fulfillment out of life.

Despite their fame, speakers Denzel Washington, Amy Poehler and Tom Hanks did not encourage a focus on gathering fame and wealth. Rather, they emphasized going after what you’re passionate about, collaborating with others, and persevering in the face of failures. Poehler discussed the importance of finding a good group of people to work with and learn from: “You can’t do it alone. As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration….Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you.” By helping others, you learn and grow with them and some day those very same people will be able to help you on the way.

Other speakers (known more for their scholarly efforts) such as Thomas Freidman and Robert Krulwich followed a similar vein, while encouraging a connection to the wider world. The importance of working together with others spills over and affects a larger community. By being involved in your own efforts with others, you help to create chains of kindness that can stretch around the globe. Professor Robert Cargill shared some things he’d learned “over the past 18 years that may help you in your next 18 years…Say thank you. Be gracious. There is an Arab saying which says: ‘Blessed is the one who can say thank you in a thousand languages.’” He went on to thank his own college coaches, who taught him “not only…to play baseball, but how to compete with character and confidence in life.”

Even without years of wisdom, one graduating student boiled his thoughts down to this goal of happiness: “Happy people get what they want because often happy people are the ones who realize they don’t need much more than they already have and they appreciate what they’ve already got” (Chris Sacca, Univ. of Minnesota’s School of Management).

These ongoing efforts to work with others and find happiness prove just one thing—you never graduate from learning and demonstrating good character. This life-long endeavor is best summed up in the words of Denzel Washington speaking at UPenn: “Be open to life, to accept new views, be open to new opinions…because the chances you take, the people you meet, the people you love, the faith that you have, that’s what’s going to define you.”

It’s worth taking a look at what these countries are doing to see if we can learn from them. If these countries don’t debate school choice, teacher accountability, or high-stakes testing, why do we? Will all of our interventions and measurements really make our students achieve more? Perhaps Merrow is right to point to our divergent state policies and lack of support or respect for teachers as weak areas of our educational system.

Even so, that leaves us with the question, “What do we focus on right now?” We at CEP propose one word to serve as the foundation of every effort: relationships. Schools should not be failing our kids. In fact, unless the buildings are falling apart, schools can’t fail them. It’s the breakdown in communication and interaction between teachers and students, between administrators and parents, between faculty and staff, between educators and the wider community. It’s been heartbreaking to see recent stories on teachers leaving the profession because of iron-fisted administration policies or facing daily threats with a lack of recourse.

Students, teachers, and parents at these schools all lose, because the environment doesn’t encourage the development of positive connections and relationships that would lead to an atmosphere of teamwork. Contrast that with the inspiring tales of how parents taking charge can become partners in a school’s improvement efforts. While we agree with Merrow that there are no “magic bullets,” there are many ways that fostering relationship-building can benefit a school.

One mom heard that the elementary school down the block from her new home was horrible and that she should search for another school to send her kids to. After visiting the school and seeing its dilapidated condition, she instead chose to take action. With support from the principal, she enrolled her kids and gathered together a coalition of parents who came together to help make changes the school could not afford or accomplish on its own—painting classrooms and changing the neighborhood perceptions of the school, allowing the teachers to focus their efforts on teaching.

Another mom also started taking action when she heard about the facility conditions at her son’s school. She hung a shower curtain on a bathroom stall when none of them had doors and then took larger action to build a partnership with other parents that enabled them to develop a compelling case that the school district’s board members could not ignore. Now she’s the president of a reinvigorated PTA that is helping to develop more effective parent-teacher partnerships at other local schools.

While parents can have a powerful impact on schools, teachers have the most direct impact on student learning. To be effective, teachers need to work in an environment where they feel comfortable suggesting ideas, collaborating with others, and working together with parents and the school administration to gather feedback and make changes. This is why the importance of school leadership cannot be overemphasized. A caring school community can be developed through effective school policies that encourage the development of connections among staff as well as with students and parents. One of this year’s National Schools of Character is accomplishing amazing things while still managing to leading the district in closing the achievement gap—or perhaps they have closed the achievement gap because of these relationships.

Uthoff Valley Elementary School is a public school in Fenton, MO, that has about 20% of its students on free or reduced lunch. While everyone in the school works hard on building relationships, just one example of these efforts comes through monthly early release days, where cross-grade buddy activities are planned by staff teams. Each month, 20 – 30 parent volunteers will come in to the school that day and help run these activities. This frees up the staff, who can therefore be engaged in full-day professional development and planning opportunities. Staff members take the time to recognize and appreciate each other for their actions as well, both publicly and privately, often for something the staff member may not realize he or she had done.

How can we build on these individual school efforts? Great things are happening on a smaller scale—now we need to find a way to bring these empowering stories into the limelight and build some powerful momentum in a larger undertaking.

If you could come up with your own way to acknowledge the hard work of all of our teachers, school leaders, and the faculty and staff as a whole, what would you do?

Here’s one idea that was recognized as a 2010 Promising Practice.

S.E.S. Hall of Fame

Sullivan Elementary School in Sullivan, MO, took the need to teach students the school’s adopted character traits and turned it into a year-long opportunity to recognize staff members. Students are selected to interview school staff members on a bi-monthly basis. Staff members and students are chosen by a 5th grade committee and after the interview, a visual display is created as a new spotlight in the Hall of Fame.

Don’t forget the importance of recognizing your staff members throughout the year, whether by offering a simple thanks for kind acts or honoring them in more public ways. A little bit of appreciation goes a long way, and it seems in this current atmosphere of high-stakes school critiquing, we need to show it more than ever.

What’s that old adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention”? In 2009, we earned National Schools of Character (NSOC) winner status; in 2008, we earned standing as “finalist.” As a finalist in the NSOC process, our site visitors rightly recommended that we work on the integration of character education so as to make it more systematic. We took this feedback to heart as we grappled with what this actually meant.

In the summer of 2008, our district central office declared that it was the season for curriculum renewal for reading and language arts. The district selected, “Rigby, Literacy by Design” (LBD) by Harcourt. Thus, the task at hand was to codify this new program through the lens of Principle #6 that defines character education to include a “meaningful and challenging curriculum that respects all learners, developing their character and helping them to succeed.”

The new reading program, Literacy by Design, was selected by the district for its strong explicit, direct comprehension strategy instruction, and sensitivity to multi-modal learning. With the adoption of the new curriculum, the Leary faculty devised a plan to analyze the new program vis-à-vis character virtues, ethical decision-making, coping skills and authentic learning. What we constructed was a method and a means to infuse character education into the curriculum and instruction that mobilized strong teacher collaboration and the construction of a “Design” center, a small group character-literacy center during the language arts block. Here is how we did it…

One teacher initiated the study of the new reading series throughout the grade levels, examining the Literacy by Design “Sourcebook” (student textbook) and guided reading series for its alignment with character virtues, ethical decision-making, coping skills and authentic learning. From study and examination, one teacher devised a graphic format to take stock of essential questions that framed the content, human issues and themes and complementary learning activities. The learning activities that were suggested for gifted/enrichment students are problem-based, necessitating small group collaboration, research, discussion, empathy, design, scientific inquiry, debate, question of our civic community constructs and personal and community reflection, the affective domain. This graphic format became a terrific means to “account” for the character emphasis in our teaching and learning, and a point of departure in our faculty’s development of a systematic means to codify the curriculum. This graphic format was shared with the school leadership team and endorsed.

The notion of the graphic format for visualizing and conceptualizing the curriculum vis-à-vis character education became shared with key leadership staff and enthusiastically adopted in terms of getting the work done. The task at hand was two-fold: (1) constructing the Character by Design materials so that there was not only a teacher set but also a student-friendly activity center, and (2) a teacher-friendly mechanism to store character education curriculum and activities and invite dialog/reflections/ideas. Throughout a progression of school leadership team meetings, grade level faculty meetings and summer workshop sessions, the conception of “Character by Design” centers became accepted and adopted. The title, “Character by Design” was voted unanimously. A robust group of staff worked painstakingly on formatting the curriculum following the “model” and creating for each class an index box filled with laminated cards of character-activities for each of the units in the LbD sourcebooks.

The turning point in the change implementation arrived at a faculty in-service session where two faculty members presented to the faculty the winning features of what has become the bedrock in our literacy and character program. It became clear to the faculty that the work had been simplified and “made sense.” Character education was infused naturally through the essential questions and the lens provided through graphic format. The presenters modeled explicitly, (1) the graphic format that formed the basis of the Character by Design student centers and (2) the access of a WIKI, created by our librarian on our district’s T:drive (intranet). This computer-based construct allows faculty members to codify and share every attempt they make to merge curriculum with character-education standards and service learning. The WIKI allows us a school-wide venue to post samples that celebrate our students’ pursuit in living a noble life. Teachers can post examples of student’s moral growth whenever they witness it. The WIKI was embraced by the faculty and is regularly updated by all teachers and staff.

Ironically, the activities identified in each chapter of the Sourcebook intended for “Gifted/Enrichment” students, were precisely what we recognized as perfect Character Education constructs and pedagogy necessary for all students. Interestingly, what was earmarked by the publisher for gifted students, we believe, should be challenging and enjoyed by all students.