Jan Elliott, Executive Director, Partners for Citizenship and Character, Worthington, Ohio

The second meeting in the series of conversations about character development was opened by Moderator David C. Smith who asked: l) What is character education? 2) How can we help young people develop important qualities of good character? 3) What is the role of the school and the community? 4) How can business support character education?

From the beginning of time, people have been concerned about educating the new generation as to the values of the society. For our purposes I want to start with a brief history of the United States beginning with the year 1837. At that time the Common School Movement started with Horace Mann in Massachusetts. This movement sought to develop strong moral and non-sectarian Christian type of education. There was no apology for the moral education in the beginning of the Common School Movement in this country. It was a quasi-Protestant kind of education—not clearly identified as such, but that is what it turned out to be.

From 1836 to 1920, McGuffey Readers were the most widely used textbooks in the Common Schools. They included many moral and ethical lessons that demonstrated Christian virtues of honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, compassion, etc. Such qualities were highly under-scored with all kinds of moral stories taught in the reading classes and other parts of the curriculum. Even the Sermon on the Mount can be found there because it was a quasi-Protestant understanding of what should be happening. McGuffey was professor of Moral Philosophy at Miami University (Ohio) and later was president of the University of Cincinnati.

From 1880 there was a great increase in diversity of people due to immigrants coming to this country. Arriving immigrants encountered the quasi-Protestantism that prevailed in the public schools. (State Departments of Education often had a clergyman as Head because they saw the importance of religious education through public education.) Since it became clear that public schools were primarily Protestant, Catholic and other parochial schools emerged. This highlighted some-thing that had been in our history for a long time—the separation of church and state concept. This was evident back when Thomas Jefferson established the University of Virginia and sought an Ethics Professor to teach common core ethical values. Theological schools were to be established adjacent to the University to teach their own sectarian views.

With the idea that we couldn’t have religious education in the public school, Released-Time Religious Education was started in Gary, Indiana in 1913. By 1948 this pattern could be found in forty-six states. It included released-time, shared-time and dual school enrollment. Beginning in 1948 there was a series of Supreme Court challenges. As a result, the following rulings were made:

1948. Religious instruction and moral education based on religion cannot be taught in the classrooms of public schools because of the separation of church and state. (McCollum case)

1952. Releasing of students to attend religious education off of school property was approved. (Zorach case)

1963. Prescribed prayers, scripture reading and devotionals in the public school room is unconstitutional. It is the prescription of the prayer or the moral instruction that is unconstitutional—not that prayer or the discussion of ethics is unconstitutional, rather the prescribing of it by a public institution for people with diverse religious views is. (Schempp case)

The study about religion in the public school remains constitutional and essential. But there has been a great misunderstanding since 1963 about what can actually happen in our public schools. The study about compar-ative religions, the Bible as literature, the role of religion in history, art and music are all legal and all needed. They are often not taught in the public schools because of fear of lawsuit.

From 1970 to the present there have been several developments related to values and the schools such as:

•Christian School Movement. This is largely evangelical/funda-mentalistic in nature.

•More private schools and "vouchers" experiments.

•Values Clarification Programs in public schools. Louis Rath and Sidney Simon were leaders of this group that tried to help people see what values they had, why they had them and what the results of having them would be. This left the schools without any particular place to stand on any particular ethics.

•Moral Education. Based on Jean Piaget’s stages of moral development refined by Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard (a six stage theory). This is taught in the schools as ethical dilemmas. Students are asked to try to solve these dilemmas and to think ethically. This has been refined in many ways. As a result of her research efforts, Carol Gilligan said that thinking ethically with reason is only part of what moral development is about. The other part is about caring and about feeling. Kohlberg’s research was on men and Gilligan’s research on women.

•Character education. Clear teaching of certain "common core" universally affirmed moral values in homes, schools and communities that schools, community leaders, and churches can teach with some conviction. We believe in honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, moral courage, etc. because historically they have proved to be valuable and important. We don’t back off from them. Over and over again they have been deemed important to teach—not just in terms of teaching "about" but in terms of the discovery of their truth. The dilemma method and all kinds of creative teaching methods using art, music and others can be used. We should not just say: Here is a list of values, now take it and that’s it.

Today there are many efforts that relate to character education. On the international scene:

•The Global Ethic of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Thanks to the leadership of Dr. Hans Küng, the meeting of the Parliament in Chicago in 1993 resulted in a global ethic that transcends all the world’s religions and is supported by all of them in common. It was signed by 300 of the top religious leaders from all religions (6,000 persons were there). It contained four irrevocable directions: 1) Non-violence, 2) Just economic order, 3) Culture of tolerance and life of truthfulness, and 4) Equal rights and partnership between men and women.

•The Institute of Global Ethics in Camden, Maine. There was a disco-very of universal ethical values in fifty world religions.

Here are some of the grass root efforts:

•The Character Institute was founded in 1942 in San Antonio, Texas, came up with twelve universal values, a curriculum, and training patterns.

•The Center for 4th & 5th Rs is located at State University of New York at Cortland, New York. Thomas Lickona, Director, is author of Educating for Character that has become the "Bible" of the movement.

•Character Counts developed by The Josephson Institute in California is a big program. It is in hundreds of schools and communities across the country.

•Others: Jefferson Center, Communitarian Network, Phi Delta Kappa, Character Education Partnership, University centers as well as support from national school administrators and curriculum experts.

A national movement has been initiated by the U. S. Department of Education under Title X for Improving America’s Schools with an offer of federal funds up to $1,000,000 for a four year grant to states committed to character education development (pilot projects). Twenty-two states have been given grants, including Ohio (July 1998).

Asbury Elementary School is one of the schools in the Groveport Madison Local School District in Ohio (6,000 students). We have kindergarten through fifth grade in our building with approximately 410 students.

Asbury staff has had a strong commitment to professional development, especially in the area of character education. A committee was convened to develop goals, objectives and evaluation strategies in the area of social problem solving. Character education, conflict resolution, cooperative discipline, safe schools and peer mediation have all been part of the focus to develop a positive climate for learning and led us to become one of the Ohio Partners in Character Education.

We initiated our endeavors by visiting Allen Academy, an elementary public school in Dayton, Ohio, to view their character education program already in progress. In January 1996, three surveys—one each for parents, teachers, and students—were developed and implemented for the collection of baseline data. Data have been collected each January since implementation. Each year’s goals are developed and objectives identified based upon these data. Follow-up evaluations also use these data.

In developing these surveys and after some discussion, we used the following definition of character education issued by the Ohio Partners in Character Education from the Ohio Department of Education:

The Asbury staff has incorporated in their daily instruction numerous character elements over the past two years. During the second semester of the 1995-96 school year, the Social Problem Solving Committee, staff, and parents determined to focus on the following words:

One word each week was the focus for the school. It was advertised on our message board. Each day, morning announcements highlighted the word of the week (WOW) with students and/or staff reading or singing about the concept. Teachers did brainstorming activities with classes about the words and students wrote about them in their journals. Some students developed skits and raps having to do with the WOW and shared them at assemblies. Numerous books for the library and materials for use in character education instruction were purchased. In addition to students making posters about the WOWs and their meanings, posters were purchased. Family information and work sheets were sent home weekly, and families completing the brief assignment and returning the tear-off to school entered a drawing on Fridays for prizes donated by Burger King, our business partner. The art teacher had students design ceiling tiles using the WOW to display on hall ceilings.

Last year the staff decided to spend more than a week on each word, so we went to a word a month and added our Citizen of the Month recognition program. Each month in each class, the teacher chooses one student and the class chooses one student who, in their minds, exemplify the characteristics of the word of the month. We call them Citizens of the Month. Their pictures get posted on the bulletin board out in the front of the building and they are recognized with a pizza luncheon with the principal. During our Honor Roll Assembly, I feel that it is equally important to recognize these students and not just students who are working well academically. They are asked to stand, are given a pencil and applause. We try to make this as important as the academic recognition. There is hope that with a positive climate we will have academic success—research supports this. We are hoping that we will see improvement in our test scores; already we are seeing improvement in the climate in our school and in our children being responsible.

This approach has given us a common language which I find very effective when working with students. When I see a student referred to my office or need to talk with a student on the playground, I might ask the student: Were you being responsible to the other student? We might have them write something about how to be more responsible next time. In another situation, I might need to ask: Were you being respectful to your teacher? I might ask them to tell me how they are going to give their teacher more respect. When the child goes back to the teacher, I ask that they talk with the teacher about how they are going to be more respectful next time. The student and I and the teacher have a common understanding about the words, responsibility and respect, that give meaning to our discussions. In addition we believe that we need to discipline but not punish. We went through a major change in terms of focusing our attention on discipline vs. punishment. This fits in with this program very well. As with any change, you have turnover in personnel and must begin again with these concepts, so on-going development for staff is important. Our venture capital money has run out but now this grant enables us to continue to send teachers to workshops and to buy materials.

We are a literature-based school so that is one way the teachers have been able to integrate much of this program. Today there are many materials that include the concepts of character education. The other day I was observing a class of second graders and the teacher was reading Little Red Hen. It was about helpfulness. She asked the students: How did the little red hen get some help, Who was helpful and What was the outcome? In addition, we can begin to include some higher level thinking such as: What do you think would happen if? The next step in the class was to make little slip books—I can be helpful at home, I can be helpful at school, I can be helpful in my community. Inside they drew a picture and wrote a couple of sentences about how they might be helpful in those different situations.

In our new Social Studies Course, under the strands of Democratic Processes and Citizenship Rights and Responsibilities, many character education objectives are included, such as "demonstrate respect for the rights of others, practice honesty, show care for the needs of others, display courtesy and respect toward others, display self-assurance, perform assigned responsibilities, demonstrate a sense of justice and fair play, show empathy for the feeling of others, assume responsibility for his/her own actions in working with others." These concepts are already linked to many objectives and activities taking place in the school, but with this new emphasis in Social Studies, they will become more embedded in all curricular areas. We have learned over the past two years that embedding our character education efforts within the curriculum is the most effective way to implement such a program—not including it as a separate entity in the curriculum.

Discipline policies and procedures alone cannot build the character qualities of children. Character education has been an important factor qualitatively in reducing behavior problems and providing a positive school climate for learning to take place.

In 1995 the School/Business Partnership Director from Worthington schools called Paul Minus, a retired professor from the Methodist Theological School in Delaware, Ohio, and founder of the Council for Ethics in Economics, to talk about how to obtain more financing for the Peer Mediation Program in the Worthington Schools. In that discussion they realized that peer mediation was on the surface of a deeper problem. The question was asked: What is the meaning for all this conflict? They decided to bring in other community members for a discussion about the underlying issues. This started a process of meetings with other leaders in the Greater Worthington School District that includes the 14,000 persons in the city limits of Worthington and certain addresses of families in Westerville, Dublin and Powell.

They began talking about the problems that they found: 1) Drug use going up among the youth, 2) A rising number of incidents of rudeness and dishonesty, 3) Too little respect and responsibility among students. They also realized that the school community is just a mirror of other communities within the larger community—in other words: the business, political, athletic communities, etc. They also found solid evidence that people who are determined to make their communities better places to live could do this! As a result Partners for Citizenship and Character (PCC) was initiated.

Our organization has gone through three phases. I call the first The Listening and Deciding Phase where we brought in persons who could talk about their experiences. Jenny Smucker of Smucker Jams & Jellies from Orrville, Ohio spoke to us two different times. Sandy McDonnell who is the former CEO of McDonnell Douglas talked with our group. He is with PREP in St. Louis—another community-wide effort. We received both infor-mation and moral support from them. It was during this time that we decided to incorporate (1997) as a not-for-profit organization with a board of trustees and a chair, Paul Minus. PCC is an association of parents, students, educators and community members who are working together to engage the entire Worthington school District community in support of efforts to help the community develop responsible patterns of citizenship and character. Our organization also has become one of the Ohio Partners in Character Education.

I call phase two Choosing Qualities Important to Our Community. We set up a dialogue process within the community and called people together using the media and letters. It was a brainstorming operation whereby all the character traits thought to be important were listed. We meshed words that had similar meanings. Each person was given fifteen stickers to place on the traits he/she thought were most important. This process resulted in identifying eight character traits that this community would try to incorporate in their daily lives. They are responsibility, respect, honesty, integrity, compassion, spirituality, moral courage, and self discipline.

The third phase is the Action Phase. We have divided our community into eight segments which are: 1) pre-school, 2) school, 3) senior citizen, 4) parents and grandparents, 5) businesses and professions, 6) congregations of faith, 7) government, and 8) resources. The resources segment is our umbrella with the responsibility for developing assessment tools, baselines and continued evaluation throughout our effort. We all connect back to the resource group.

Because of the community-wide effort, more groups are getting together. Never before have all the pre-school directors met, but they are now in the process of developing a family pre-school festival. There will be activities for the children where they will be learning these eight character qualities, and mini-seminars for parents and families. It won’t occur until the year 2000 so there is time to make it a well-planned event.

We have a great commitment from the library for the purchase of books that we feel are important to this effort. They are helping us with our website that will be integrated into theirs. We have a commitment from the local newspapers. We are going to start a Quality of the Month (QOM) activity. One of the papers is going to give us a page or a half page three weeks out of the month. We will provide ethical scenarios that are open-ended and ask the people in the community to respond. The Worthington community loves to write letters to the editor so there should be a good response. At present, work teams are developing action plans, and we are getting ready to put them in operation. QOM begins in August, 1999.

Response: We were asked a few questions at our meetings—nothing major. When we talk about the qualities we want to emphasize, it is very hard for someone to say they don’t want us working on respect. I have heard teachers say we can’t teach values to children. But I say that every time a teacher or principal says to a child: Tell me the truth—we are teaching a value. If we tell a child she is responsible for bringing this book back tomorrow, we are teaching a value. We have been doing this for a long time although we haven’t called it that as we have just heard from Dr. Browning.

In our survey response from parents, a few commented that the school shouldn’t be teaching some of these qualities but the home should be teaching them. We respond by saying absolutely the home does need to be teaching these things, but we do many things in school where we need to be teaching them also. Even first graders need to know what we mean by "being responsible", by "being respectful" or "helpful". Being able to bring that concept down to a first grader’s level can be difficult.

We have been reluctant to use the word "character" only because we don’t want to spoil what we have by using a word or a particular terminology. Our parents receive a letter saying their child has been chosen Citizen of the Month in our Word of the Month program and that makes the parents feel good. I don’t want to lose the gains we have made by saying we are teaching your child values. I want to say we are teaching your children to be good citizens.

It is interesting that the new state social course of study we are using has a section called citizenship. In it they say we need to teach children about respect, responsibility, caring, etc.—so the new social science course really supports what we are doing and gives us backing. It appears that the Ohio State Department of Education, in going after this grant with the federal government, is making a stand that says: We support this type of integration into schools today. That has been very helpful for us.

Comment: Many of these word-of-the week/month programs are in fact an attempt to draw out and legitimate a vocabulary for things like values that seem to be inchoate feelings for our young people. We have words to use to discuss approaches to situations, traits of character, the dispositions that we think are important—not just to think about but to eventually internalize.

Comment: Having been deeply involved in the whole values clarification material, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that this was a values-free attempt. Values were clearly part of the program. Part of those values were linked to the idea of being in a position where you could utilize your emotional capacity to be able to make some decisions and to have some logic behind these decisions. So I don’t think it would be fair for us to say value clarification was somehow a value-free time that we put ourselves through. For any program all kinds of different things happen. Sometimes when it was put into certain schools, it became something less than we might have desired. The essential approach was more that we need to have a discussion, an analysis, a process whereby we can look at the decision and see what the consequences are. As a school person—and I have been involved in schools all of my adult life—we never did away with values. We called them behavior codes, or expec-tations we had for students, or class codes of conduct. Sometimes parents haven’t agreed with those values, and they are not all going to agree with them now.

Comment: What is taking place now is more clarity about what values are. People are beginning to ask: What do we really want to see happen here?—not only the teachers and administrators but also the parents. This is a process that the character education movement has enhanced.

Comment: It is becoming more legitimate in schools to say we do teach some character traits. Our school district received a school-to-work grant recently. I served on the district committee not only with school personnel but also business people who were saying: Give us students who can read and write and we can provide further intellectual training. What we really need are workers who are on time, who are trustworthy, responsible, etc. The work community wants these ethics traits in people wherever they are developed—in the schools, the home, wherever.

Comment: A little more history—the state of Ohio went through this process in the 1980s and published in 1990 their own character education program with qualities that are not too dissimilar from the Worthington list. It was sent to all the schools in the state but the whole program was never used. Very few schools do anything when they and the communities are not involved in the process. We are involving people at the grass roots level and bringing it about in a different way. The new governor is committed to this, putting $2 million in the biennial budget for experimentation in character education.

Berkowitz, Marvin W. A Primer for Evaluating a Character Education Initiative. Written for the Character Education Partnership (CEP) with the CEP Assessment Committee. Washington D.C., CEP, n.d. 23 p. (Pamphlet)

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Kohlberg, Lawrence. The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco, Ca., Harper & Row, c1981. vol.1

Küng, Hans. Global Responsibility in Search of a New World Ethic. New York, N.Y., Crossroad, c1991. 158p.

Lickona, Thomas. Educating for Character: How Our Schools Can Teach Respect and Responsibility. N.Y., Bantam, c1991. 478p.

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Vincent, Philip Fitch. Developing Character in Students: A Primer for Teachers, Parents, and Communities. New View Publications, c1994. 167p.

Vincent, Philip Fitch, ed. . Promising Practices in Character Education. Nine success stories from around the country. Chapel Hill, N.C., Character Development Group, c1996. 104p. (Paperback)

Wynne, Edward H.; Ryan, Kevin. Reclaiming Our Schools: Teaching Character, Academics, and Discipline. 2d ed. Prentice-Hall, c1997. 272p.

Robert L. Browning is an educator, clergyman, and author. In addition he is active in many organizations. He has a BA from Missouri Valley College, the MDiv from Union Theological Seminary and a Ph. D. from The Ohio State University. Postgraduate work was done at Columbia University and Oxford(England) University. He is chair of the Task Force on Character Education for the Council on Ethics in Economics.

Janice L. Elliott is Executive Director of Partners for Citizenship and Character, a not-for-profit organization serving the community of Worthington, Ohio. She has a Bachelor of Science in Education from Miami University (one of the state universities in Ohio) and has done post graduate work at Miami and The Ohio State University. She has taught at the second, third and fourth grade levels and is now very active in community work.

Sue Rieger is Principal of Asbury Elementary School in Groveport, Ohio. She has been a teacher and then a principal in several Ohio schools prior to her current position. She also has taught several quarters at the University of Dayton and Wright State University. She has a B.S. from Bowling Green State University, an M.S. and Ed. Specialist from the University of Dayton, and a Ph. D. degree from The Ohio State University—all in the field of education.

Wesley Glen is a not-for-profit retirement community established by the United Methodist Church in 1969. However, residents are not required to be Methodists. Wesley Glen welcomes residents from all faiths. It is situated on eleven acres in Clintonville, a neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, and has 397 residents. It is administered by CEO Robert L. Rouse, Jr. and a board of trustees.

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