Complete survey results available here.

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In the following essays, we identify some of the key findings from the sixth annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens interviewed during April and May of 2012 (for survey methodology, see sidebar). Highlights include

• the Republican tilt of the education views of independents

• the especially high marks that Hispanics give their public schools

• strong support among the general public for using test-score information to hold teachers accountable

• lower confidence in teachers than has previously been reported

• the public’s (and teachers’) growing uneasiness with teachers unions

• the shaky foundations of public support for increased spending

• majority support for a broad range of school choice initiatives.

In addition to the views of the public as a whole, in this year’s survey special attention is paid to Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers, all of whom were oversampled in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. And in an effort to assess the sensitivity of respondents’ opinions to information and question wording, we embedded in this survey, as we have done in previous ones, various experiments. Responses to all questions are posted on our website, www.educationnext.org.

Independents lean Republican in their views of teachers unions and school spending—and support private school choice.

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck and neck, the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election. And in the days leading up to the national conventions, education policy, though hardly at the top of the public agenda, did assume a more prominent role in both campaigns. Which candidate is best positioned to use education to bring undecided voters into the fold? The answer may be surprising.

Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assign him a “fair” or “poor” rating. And on the education policy issues that most clearly divide the parties—the role of teachers unions and support for school spending—the views of independents hew closer to those of Republicans than of Democrats. Moreover, independents are more supportive than members of either party of expanding private school choice for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of Governor Romney’s proposals for K–12 education reform.

Whereas 25 percent of respondents to the EdNext-PEPG survey report that they are Republicans and 34 percent say that they are Democrats, fully 41 percent claim no affiliation with either major party. Of this group, 52 percent claim that they lean Democratic, while just 40 percent lean Republican. On key education issues, however, these independents express views that better align with Republicans.

No single education issue divides Republicans and Democrats more sharply than the role of teachers unions (see Figure 1). Seventy-one percent of Republicans report that the teachers unions have a generally negative effect on schools, as compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. Though independents come down in between, a majority of them (56 percent) agree with Republicans that unions have a negative effect.

Republican and Democratic voters also diverge in their preferences on school spending and teacher salaries. Figure 2 shows that when not provided with information about current spending levels, 79 percent of Democrats say that spending on public schools in their local district should increase, as compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 57 percent support increased spending, again placing them closer to Republicans in their view of the issue. And when respondents are informed about current spending levels, the gap between Republicans and independents vanishes: 39 percent of both groups support spending increases, compared to just 51 percent of Democrats.

The same pattern holds for teacher salaries: when respondents are not provided with information about current salary levels, 60 percent of independents support increasing teacher salaries, placing them closer to Republicans (54 percent of whom support increases) than to Democrats (75 percent). Providing information on current teacher salaries in their state reduces support for salary increases among independents to 34 percent—exactly the same as among Republicans. Information also shrinks the share of Democrats supporting salary increases to 41 percent.

Governor Romney has made the expansion of school choice for disadvantaged students central to his campaign, calling for the expansion of the Washington, D.C., voucher program and for allowing low-income and special education students to use federal funds to enroll in private schools. It is perhaps surprising, then, to find that Republicans are less supportive of this concept than are Democrats (see Figure 3). Just 42 percent of Republicans express support for the idea, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Voucher support among independents appears to be as high as (or greater than) it is among Democrats, at 54 percent.

Hispanics like public schools but not all union demands in contract negotiations.

Increasingly, both the Republican and Democratic parties have sought ways to court Hispanics. Though they lean Democratic—63 percent of Hispanic adults approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president—they are not as blue as is the African American community, 92 percent of whom give Obama a thumbs-up.

Those seeking the Hispanic vote in 2012 should know that education is an issue that resonates with the Latino community. Almost 60 percent of those we surveyed say they are “very” or “quite a bit” interested in education issues, as compared to less than 40 percent of African American and white voters.

On many topics—including school vouchers, charter schools, digital learning, student and school accountability, common core standards, and teacher recruitment and retention policies—the views of Hispanic adults do not differ noticeably from those of either whites or African Americans.

But in certain domains—estimates of school costs and school quality, support for teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher pensions—the views of Hispanics differ rather substantially. Their judgment of the American school is generous, perhaps because they compare public schools in the United States to much less effective institutions in Mexico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. They also underestimate the costs of running public schools, though they revise their thinking rather substantially about the merits of spending increases once they learn the facts. They are less supportive of unions and union demands than are African Americans.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to evaluate schools (see Figure 4). When asked about the public schools in their community, no less than 55 percent give such favorable assessments. By comparison, whites and African Americans express significantly less enthusiasm about the nation’s schools. Less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans accord the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” and only around 40 percent give the schools in their community one of these two top grades.

Hispanic respondents think American students perform better academically than is actually the case. American 15-year-olds ranked no better than 25th among the 34 developed democracies participating in the latest round of international tests. Yet nearly 45 percent of Hispanics say student math performance in the United States ranks among the top 15 countries in the world in math. Only 30 percent of white and African American respondents place the United States that high.

Hispanic respondents also think the public schools cost a lot less than they actually do. While annual per-pupil expenditures run around $12,500, Hispanics, on average, estimate their cost at less than $5,000. Whites and African Americans estimate the costs to be more than $7,000.

The same goes for teacher salaries, which average about $56,000 a year. On average, Hispanics think teachers are paid little more than $25,000 a year; blacks, on average, think they are paid around $30,000 a year; and whites estimate salaries at $35,000.

When told just how much schools cost, however, Hispanic respondents adjust their thinking quite dramatically. When informed about actual per-pupil expenditures, Hispanics’ support for higher taxes to fund spending increases drops from 46 percent to 25 percent. When given the actual amount teachers receive, their support for higher salaries plummets nearly in half—from over 60 percent to little more than 30 percent.

Although learning the truth about costs and salaries has a similar impact on white opinion, African Americans remain more committed to higher spending. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans favor higher taxes, even when told how much is currently being spent, only a slight dip from the 42 percent favorable when that information is withheld. When given the facts about teacher salaries, African American support for higher salaries drops 20 percentage points—from 74 percent to 54 percent.

Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics do not appear especially sympathetic to teachers union demands in collective bargaining negotiations. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic adults think teachers should pay 20 percent of their pension and health care costs, as do 56 percent of African Americans.

By an overwhelming margin (87 percent), Hispanic respondents favor proposals to condition teacher tenure on their students’ making adequate progress on state tests. Whites and African Americans also favor such proposals but not to the same degree (75 percent and 80 percent, respectively). When it comes to whether teachers unions are playing a more positive or a more negative role in their local community, Hispanic adults come out in the middle—at 59 percent in support, they are more supportive than whites (45 percent) but less supportive than African Americans (75 percent).

Use test scores for evaluations, says the public (but not the teachers).

Teachers have long been paid primarily on the basis of their academic credentials and years of experience, creating in most parts of the country a lockstep pay scale that does not account for a teacher’s classroom performance. This approach is often justified on the grounds that it precludes favoritism on the part of principals, school board members, and other administrative officials.

As teacher effectiveness has become an increasingly visible policy issue, standard approaches to salary and tenure decisions are undergoing substantial change. More than 20 states now require that student test-score gains be used in key personnel decisions, often including tenure and salary determinations. Four states go so far as to prohibit a teacher from receiving a top rating if students do not exceed a certain level of accomplishment, while another 10 require that achievement gains constitute at least 50 percent of each teacher’s evaluation.

Is the public onboard with these changes? And what do teachers think about them? To find out, we randomly divided those interviewed into two groups (see Figure 5). The first group was given a stark choice: How much weight should be given to test scores and how much should be given to principal recommendations?

Given this simple dichotomy, the public says test-score gains should be given more than half the weight (62 percent) in making salary and tenure decisions. Teachers, by contrast, are prepared to place only a quarter of the weight (24 percent) on this information, with the other three-fourths of the weight being given to principal recommendations.

The second half of the sample was asked a more complex question, which required giving weights to test scores and evaluations from four different sources: principals, parents, students, and fellow teachers.

When the question was posed this way, the public and the teachers once again disagree. The public would place about one-third of the weight (32 percent) on test scores, but teachers would assign them less than one-fifth (19 percent). Conversely, teachers would give principal recommendations nearly half the weight (44 percent), while the public would give their recommendations less than one-quarter (23 percent).

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are unenthusiastic about being evaluated by their fellow teachers. Like the rest of the public, they divide up the remaining weight more or less equally among the three remaining sources of evidence (students, parents, and fellow teachers).

An even bigger gap between teachers and the public emerges on the desirability of releasing information about teacher performance to the public at large. In both New York City and Los Angeles, newspapers have published such information, provoking an outcry among teachers, who felt their privacy had been invaded. When we asked respondents about this as a general practice, 78 percent of the public expresses support, compared to just 33 percent of teachers (see Figure 6).

When given the option of expressing neutrality on the issue (as another randomly chosen half of the sample was), 60 percent of the public still says it supports the publication of information about teacher performance, while only 13 percent is opposed, the remaining 27 percent taking the neutral position. Teacher opinion is almost the mirror image. Fifty-four percent oppose making information on test-score impacts publicly available, 30 percent express support, with the remaining 16 percent not taking a clear position either way.

Are teachers unions undermining teacher popularity?

Teachers have long held a cherished place in American popular culture. In such films as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society, Hollywood has highlighted the power of teachers to utterly transform the lives of their students.

But is this now changing? Are Waiting for Superman, Bad Teacher, and Won’t Back Down (forthcoming “A Takeover Tale,” cultured, Winter 2013) harbingers of a new, more skeptical depiction of teachers? At first, it would seem that public trust in teachers is widespread. When we asked half of the respondents in our survey whether they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” no less than 72 percent say “yes” (see Figure 7). This is almost exactly what Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), a publication sympathetic to teachers unions, found in its 2012 poll and about the same as in PDK polls in previous years.

When we expand the possible response categories, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Only 4 percent of the American public has “complete” trust and confidence in teachers, and just 38 percent has “a lot” of trust and confidence in them. Meanwhile, 49 percent has “some” trust and confidence, and 9 percent has “little” trust and confidence. In other words, 58 percent of those surveyed express less than “a lot of trust and confidence” in the teaching force.

Since this is the first time the public has been asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories, we cannot document any trends over time. But we do know that public opinion toward teachers unions—and teachers’ opinions of them, too—has turned in a negative direction. The portion who thinks that teachers unions have had a positive effect on their local schools has dropped by 7 percentage points over the past year. Among teachers, the downward shift is no less than 16 percentage points.

In this year’s survey, as we have done in the past, we asked the following question: “Some people say teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What is your opinion? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive view on your local schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Respondents could choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.

In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40 percent of respondents took the neutral position, saying that unions had neither a positive nor a negative impact. The remainder were divided almost evenly, with the negative share just barely exceeding the positive.

This year, however, the teachers unions lost ground. While 41 percent of the public still takes the neutral position, the portion with a positive view of unions dropped 7 percentage points in the last year, from 29 percent to 22 percent.

The drop is even greater, in both magnitude and significance, among our nationally representative sample of teachers. At a time when, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has lost 150,000 members over the past two years, and projects to lose 200,000 more members by 2014, teacher discontent appears to be rising. Whereas 58 percent of teachers had a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43 percent do so in 2012. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled during this period, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

But when that same question was posed in either/or terms to the public as a whole, respondents split down the middle: 51 percent say unions had a negative impact, while 49 percent say their effect was positive. Teachers, meanwhile, offered a more positive assessment. When forced to choose between just two options, 71 percent of teachers claim that unions are a force for good, whereas 29 percent see them as a stumbling block to reform.

Support for school spending is shaky.

With the U.S. economy trying to crawl back to recovery, an unemployment rate above 8 percent, and state and local governments facing the prospect of insolvency, many school districts have found it necessary to cut expenditures and personnel. In California, the cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have declared bankruptcy. In Michigan, the financially bankrupt Muskegon schools have been handed over to a for-profit charter organization. Cuts in arts programs and extracurricular activities are becoming commonplace. Nationwide, the number of school employees has drifted downward by as much as 5 percent in the past few years.

Still, the American public continues to support increasing spending on local public schools. Or at least it appears to do so (see Figure 8). Sixty-three percent of the general public says it prefers an increase in school expenditures in the local district, well up from levels in 2007 when only 51 percent of the public called for expenditure increases. Not surprisingly, teachers are even more enthusiastic about increasing expenditures, 68 percent of whom like the idea.

When one investigates the issue just a bit further, however, fractures can be detected in the public’s willingness to spend more on public schools. Though most Americans still offer their support for spending increases in the abstract, their enthusiasm ebbs rather substantially when the taxes needed to pay for the increased expenditures are broached and when information about actual expenditures and salaries is provided.

Part of the explanation for this is the widespread ignorance on the part of the general public about just how much already is spent on public schools. When asked to estimate per-pupil expenditure in their district, Americans guess that expenditures are about $6,500 annually, when in fact they are around $12,500. That is only a slightly better set of estimates than the ones given in 2009, when Americans thought $4,231 was being spent per pupil and the reality was closer to $10,000 (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009).

When respondents are told the correct figure, support for spending on public schools shifts sharply downward. Support for increased spending on our standard question drops by 20 percentage points, a much bigger drop than what was observed in 2009, when support for increased spending fell only 8 percentage points (from 46 percent to 38 percent).

In another sign of less-than-wholehearted support for an education spending spree, only 35 percent of the public says taxes should increase to fund the schools. Support drops by another 11 percentage points—to just 24 percent—when those interviewed were first told how much was currently being spent.

Teachers, who stand to benefit from increased expenditure, remain committed to more spending when told the realities of the expenditure situation in their district. Their support slips only 8 percentage points from the high of 68 percent when no information is supplied about current expenditures. But even teachers are 17 percentage points less likely to support higher taxes to fund increases in education spending.

When the subject turns from per-pupil expenditures to teacher salaries, the same pattern emerges (see Figure 9). When asked without any accompanying information, nearly two out of three Americans think that teacher salaries should go up. Among teachers, support for a salary boost registers at no less than 85 percent.

As they do on per-pupil expenditures, however, Americans hold markedly inaccurate views about actual teacher salaries. When asked to hazard a guess, Americans estimate that public school teachers in their states receive, on average, about $36,000 in salary annually. The true figure, even without accounting for benefits, pensions, and the like, sits at about $56,000 nationwide.

Support for higher salaries plummets, however, when Americans are told how much teachers actually make in their states. Of those given the facts, only 36 percent favor an increase, which amounts to a whopping 28-percentage-point decline from the 64 percent favoring an increase when no information is supplied.

When teachers were given accurate information about salary levels in their state, their support slips by only 10 percentage points, probably because they are thinking about their own paycheck. Also, they have a better sense of teacher salaries in their state than the public has, estimating them to be about $44,000 annually.

Is public support for charters really that much higher than for vouchers and tax credits?

As a policy reform, school choice shows no signs of slowing. The number of states with school-voucher and tax-credit programs has escalated since 2010, the number of students attending charter schools climbs steadily year by year, and new technologies for online learning are being promoted by a cascade of new entrepreneurs.

The contours of elite debate about school choice, however, are not replicated in the larger public. While charter schools and digital learning are thought to be the safest choice options for political elites to promote, tax credits are even more popular than charters, and vouchers, the most controversial proposal, also command the support of half the population when the idea is posed in an inviting way.

Vouchers and tax credits. When it comes to school vouchers, apparent levels of public support turn on the wording of the question. For the past two years, PDK has asked whether respondents “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Even with the rather loaded “at public expense” phrasing, PDK reported that support shifted upward from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2012.

If one asks the question in a more inviting manner, as we have, support jumps further still (see Figure 10). Told about a proposal “that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition,” 50 percent of the American public comes out in support and 50 percent expresses opposition.

Still, support for vouchers does not match public willingness to back tax credits, even though most economists think the difference between vouchers and tax credits more a matter of style than substance. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of the public favors a “tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” We find little evidence that support for tax credits has changed significantly since 2011.

Charters. Figure 11 shows that when given a choice of supporting or opposing charter schools, 62 percent of the public says it favors ”the formation of charter schools,” nearly identical to what PDK finds (66 percent favoring ”the idea of charter schools”). Support for charters, however, is softer than it might seem. When respondents are given the opportunity to take a neutral position that neither supports nor opposes charters, no less than 41 percent choose that option. Among the remainder, the split is nearly three to one in favor of charters.

Meanwhile, public knowledge about charters remains as impoverished as ever. As our survey did two years ago, we asked respondents a variety of factual questions: whether charter schools can hold religious services, charge tuition, receive more or less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, and are legally obligated to admit students randomly when oversubscribed. We found little change in the level of public information over the past two years. Large percentages of respondents still say they don’t know the answers to these questions. Among those who hazard a guess, they are as likely to give the wrong answer as the correct one. Although teachers do a better job of accurately identifying the characteristics of charter schools, even a majority of teachers get many of the answers wrong or say they don’t know.

Online education. As major universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others—are joining community colleges and state universities in a nationwide dash toward online learning in higher education, many states are exploring ways of incorporating new digital technologies into secondary schools.

A substantial share of both the public and the teaching force seems ready to consider the expansion of online learning. When asked if high school students should be allowed to take “approved classes either online or in school,” opinion splits down the middle, with a bare majority (53 percent to 47 percent) favoring the idea. Teachers are more enthusiastic, among whom no less than 61 percent feel students should be given an online option.

The public, however, is not equally enthusiastic about all uses of the online tool, nor is support for the idea gaining strength. The most popular uses are for rural education and advanced course taking. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed think students in rural areas should have online opportunities, with only 14 percent opposing the idea. That is down modestly from the 64 percent who supported this use in 2008. Similar percentages of support and opposition are expressed for advanced courses taken online for college credit. But once again, levels of support have slipped since 2008 (from 68 percent to 57 percent in 2012).

Less popular are online courses for dropouts and home schoolers. Only 44 percent favor, and 30 percent oppose, using public funding to help dropouts take courses online. Many home schoolers find online courses to be a valuable tool, but the public remains dubious. Only 28 percent favors public funding for such uses, and 38 percent opposes it. Those percentages have not changed materially since 2008.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The gap between white and Hispanic students is similar. But some remarkable inner-city schools are showing that the achievement gap can be closed, even at the middle and high school level, if poor minority kids are given the right kind of instruction.

Over the past two years, I have visited six outstanding schools. (For a list of schools, see sidebar.) All of these educational gems enroll minority youngsters from rough urban neighborhoods with initially poor to mediocre academic skills; all but one are open-admission schools that admit students mostly by lottery. Their middle school students perform as well as their white peers, and in some middle schools, minority students learn at a rate comparable to that of affluent white students in their state’s top schools. (For one impressive example, see Figure 1.) At the high school level, low-income minority students are more likely to matriculate to college than their more advantaged peers, with more than 95 percent of graduates gaining admission to college. Not surprisingly, they all have gifted, deeply committed teachers and dedicated, forceful principals. They also have rigorous academic standards, test students frequently, and carefully monitor students’ academic performance to assess where students need help. “Accountability,” for both teachers and students, is not a loaded code word but a lodestar. Students take a college-prep curriculum and are not tracked into vocational or noncollege-bound classes. Most of the schools have uniforms or a dress code, an extended school day, and three weeks of summer school.

Six Effective Urban SchoolsAmerican Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS), Oakland, CA Amistad Academy, New Haven, CT Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, Chicago, IL KIPP Academy, Bronx, NY SEED School, Washington, DC University Park Campus School, Worcester, MA

Yet above all, these schools share a trait that has been largely ignored by education researchers: They are paternalistic institutions. By paternalistic I mean that each of the six schools is a highly prescriptive institution that teaches students not just how to think, but also how to act according to what are commonly termed traditional, middle-class values. These paternalistic schools go beyond just teaching values as abstractions: the schools tell students exactly how they are expected to behave, and their behavior is closely monitored, with real rewards for compliance and penalties for noncompliance. Unlike the often-forbidding paternalistic institutions of the past, these schools are prescriptive yet warm; teachers and principals, who sometimes serve in loco parentis, are both authoritative and caring figures. Teachers laugh with and cajole students, in addition to frequently directing them to stay on task.

The new breed of paternalistic schools appears to be the single most effective way of closing the achievement gap. No other school model or policy reform in urban secondary schools seems to come close to having such a dramatic impact on the performance of inner-city students. Done right, paternalistic schooling provides a novel way to remake inner-city education in the years ahead.

But while these “no excuses” schools have demonstrated remarkable results, the notion of reintroducing paternalism in inner-city schools is deeply at odds with the conventional wisdom of the K–12 education establishment. For a host of reasons, teachers unions, school board members, ed school professors, big-city school administrators, multicultural activists, bilingual educators, and progressive-education proponents do not embrace the idea that what might most help disadvantaged students are highly prescriptive schools that favor traditional instructional methods. And even the many parents who are foursquare in favor of what paternalistic schools do cringe at labeling the schools in those terms. In 2008, “paternalism” remains a dirty word in American culture.

Paternalism Reborn

What is paternalism and why does it have so few friends? Webster’s defines paternalism as a principle or system of governing that echoes a father’s relationship with his children. Paternalistic policies interfere with the freedom of individuals, and this interference is justified by the argument that the individuals will be better off as a result. Paternalism is controversial because it contains an element of moral arrogance, an assertion of superior competence. But in the last decade, government paternalism has enjoyed a kind of rebirth.

In a 1997 volume titled The New Paternalism, New York University professor Lawrence Mead, the leading revisionist, explored the emergence of a new breed of paternalistic policies aimed at reducing poverty, welfare dependency, and other social problems by closely supervising the poor. These paternalistic programs try to curb social problems by imposing behavioral requirements for assistance and then monitoring recipients to ensure compliance. “Misbehavior is not just punished” in paternalistic programs, writes Mead. “It is preempted by the oversight of authority figures, much as parents supervise their families.” The schools I visited are paternalistic in the very way Mead describes.

Paternalistic programs survive only because they typically enforce values that “clients already believe,” Mead notes. But many paternalistic programs remain controversial because they seek to change the lifestyles of the poor, immigrants, and minorities, rather than the lifestyles of middle-class and upper-class families. The paternalistic presumption implicit in the schools is that the poor lack the family and community support, cultural capital, and personal follow-through to live according to the middle-class values that they, too, espouse.

In the narrowest sense, all American schools are paternalistic. “Schooling virtually defines what paternalism means in a democratic society,” the political scientist James Q. Wilson has written. Elementary schools often attempt to teach values and enforce rules about how students are to behave and treat others. The truth is that hundreds of parochial and traditional public schools in the inner city are authoritarian institutions with pronounced paternalistic elements. Yet the new paternalistic schools I visited look and feel very different from these more commonplace institutions.

The most distinctive feature of new paternalistic schools is that they are fixated on curbing disorder. The emphasis springs from an understanding of urban schools that owes much to James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling’s well-known “broken windows” theory of crime reduction: the idea that disorder and even signs of disorder (e.g., the broken window left unfixed) are the fatal undoing of urban neighborhoods. That is why these schools devote inordinate attention to making sure that shirts are tucked in, bathrooms are kept clean, students speak politely, and trash is picked up.

Paternalistic schools teach character and middle-class virtues like diligence, politeness, cleanliness, and thrift. They impose detentions for tardiness and disruptive behavior in class and forbid pupils from cursing at or talking disrespectfully to teachers. But the new paternalistic schools go further than even strict Catholic schools in prescribing student conduct and minimizing signs of disorder.

Pupils are typically taught not just to walk rather than run in the hallway—they learn how to walk from class to class: silently, with a book in hand. In class, teachers constantly monitor whether students are tracking them with their eyes, whether students nod their heads to show that they listening, and if students have slouched in their seats. Amistad Academy enforces a zero-tolerance policy. Calling out in class, distracting other students, rolling your eyes at a teacher—all rather common occurrences in most middle-school classrooms—result in students being sent to a “time out” desk or losing “scholar dollars” from virtual “paychecks” that can be used to earn special privileges at school.

Teachers ceaselessly monitor student conduct and character development to assess if students are acting respectfully, developing self-discipline, displaying good manners, working hard, and taking responsibility for their actions. The SEED school even requires students to have teachers sign a note after each class assessing how the student performed on a list of 12 “responsible behaviors” and 12 “irresponsible behaviors.”

Culture Change

Paternalistic schools are culturally authoritative schools as well. Their pupils learn—and practice—how to shake hands when they are introduced to someone. At SEED and Cristo Rey, students practice sitting down to a formal place setting typical of a restaurant and learn the difference between the dinner fork and the salad fork. The new paternalistic schools thus build up the “cultural capital” of low-income students by taking them to concerts, to Shakespearean plays, on trips to Washington, D.C., and to national parks. They help students find white-collar internships, and teach them how to comport themselves in an office.

One of the distinctive features of Cristo Rey is its novel work-study program, which dispatches students one day a week to clerical jobs in downtown Chicago in accounting firms, banks, insurance companies, law firms, and offices of health-care providers. For the first time in their lives, students are surrounded by white-collar professionals who had to attend college and graduate schools as a prerequisite to landing their jobs.

At the same time that these schools reinforce middle-class mores, they also steadfastly suppress all aspects of street culture. Street slang, the use of the “n-word,” and cursing are typically barred not only in the classroom but in hallways and lunchrooms as well. Merely fraternizing with gang members can lead to expulsion. If students so much as doodle gang graffiti on a notebook or a piece of paper at Cristo Rey, they are suspended. And if they doodle a gang symbol a second time, principal Pat Garrity expels them. The school day and year are extended in part to boost academic achievement, but also to keep kids off the street and out of homes with few academic supports.

The prescriptive rigor and accountability of paternalistic schools extend not just to student character and conduct but to academics as well. AIPCS is one of only two middle schools in Oakland to require every 8th grader—including special ed students—to take algebra I. All KIPP Academy 8th graders complete a two-year high-school-level algebra I course and take the New York State Math A Regents exam, a high school exit exam. In 2006, an astonishing 85 percent passed it.

Paternalistic schools, in short, push all students to perform to high standards. They spell out exactly what their pupils are supposed to learn and then ride herd on them until they master it. From the first day students walk through the door, their principal and teachers envelop them in a college-going ethos, with the goal that 100 percent of students will be admitted into college. Over time, paternalistic schools create a culture of achievement that is the antithesis of street culture.

By their very nature, the new paternalistic schools for teens tend to displace a piece of parents’ traditional role in transmitting values. Most of the schools are founded on the premise that minority parents want to do the right thing but often don’t have the time or resources to keep their children from being dragged down by an unhealthy street culture. But the schools do not presume that boosting parental participation is the key to narrowing the achievement gap. Parents’ chief role at no-excuses schools is helping to steer their children through the door—paternalistic schools are typically schools of choice—and then ensuring that their children get to school on time.

Principals and teachers at these schools are surprisingly familiar with students’ personal lives. As a result, students call on teachers and principals for advice and help. Teachers are deeply devoted to their students, often answering phone queries from students late into the night, showing up before school starts to help a struggling pupil, or staying late to help tutor. A KIPP student recalls, “I needed help in math in 5th grade and called my teacher one week three times a night.” It is not uncommon for students to describe their schools as a “second home.”

What really makes this a kinder, gentler form of paternalism is that parents, typically single mothers, choose to send their children to these inner-city schools—but they are also acting under duress. They believe their neighborhood schools fail to educate students and are breeding grounds for gang strife and drugs. They are often desperate for alternatives, and are particularly excited to find a no-nonsense public school committed to readying their children for college. In this sense, paternalistic schools draw a self-selected student population. Even so, there is surprisingly little evidence that these schools are “creaming” the best and brightest minority students. At most of these schools, students are typically one to two grade levels behind their age-level peers when they arrive.

The Old Educational Paternalism

Twice before in U.S. history paternalism has held sway in schools for low-income or minority students—with very different results. The first major expansion of paternalistic schooling was the Indian boarding schools of the late 19th century, which sought to “civilize” Native Americans. The second major expansion took place when urban schools sought to acculturate the multitudes of European immigrants to American society.

From the start, Indian boarding schools proved controversial and unpopular with many parents. Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs rounded up Indian children—often against their parents’ will—to attend the schools. Upon their arrival, children’s hair was cut, Native American garb was replaced with school uniforms, and teachers forbade students to speak in their native tongue, often punishing students who failed to speak in English. Students with exotic or hard-to-pronounce Indian names were abruptly given Anglo surnames. Unlike the paternalistic schools of today, which seek to boost existing values among beleaguered single-parent families, Indian boarding schools sought to eradicate local culture and traditions and destroy the parent-child bond.

A more benevolent paternalism was evident early in the 20th century when urban schools took on the task of acculturating millions of Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrant children. Schools tried to “Americanize” impoverished immigrants by teaching them English and acclimating them to the schedules and expectations of city life. Most teachers and school administrators eagerly embraced the role of cultural evangelist. Teachers inspected children’s heads for lice and lectured them about hygiene and nutrition. Students were taught how to speak proper English; Anglicizing of names was common.

The ethos of Americanization was powerful, even within many immigrant slums. Time and again, when cities provided foreign-language instruction, immigrants declined to enroll in classes taught in their native tongue. Schools for immigrant children reinforced values that parents held but alone could not pass on to their children—namely, the desire that their children learn English and become Americans. On the whole, historians have judged the relatively rapid Americanization of millions of poor newcomers to be a qualified success.

In the latter half of the 20th century, paternalistic education largely disappeared from inner-city schools in the United States. For a quarter century after the controversial 1965 Moynihan report on “The Negro Family,” urban school administrators abided by an unwritten gag rule that barred candid discussion of the impact of ethnic culture and family values on academic performance. A core premise of paternalistic schools—that they can transport students out of poor communities by providing a sustained injection of middle-class values—became politically taboo. Decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced this trend beginning in the 1970s. By advancing the notion that students have the right to free speech and the right to due-process protections if they are to be suspended or expelled, the Court made it more difficult for principals and teachers to play a morally authoritative role.

Scaling Up

As Lawrence Mead has pointed out, paternalism is neither conservative nor liberal per se; in some eras of American history, liberals have pressed for paternalistic programs, while at other times conservatives have lobbied for them. At first glance, the character training and rituals of these paternalistic schools give them a decidedly traditional feel. The schools teach old-fashioned virtues, simply put. Yet these virtues—perseverance, discipline, politeness—are really the same as the “noncognitive skills” that liberal education reformers like Richard Rothstein and economists like James Heckman want inner-city schools to boost in order to raise academic achievement and compensate for low-income students’ economic and cultural deficits.

In fact, the founders of many of today’s paternalistic schools are liberals who believe that closing the pernicious achievement gulf between white and minority students is the central civil-rights issue of our century. Most of the founders and principals of the schools I visited were uneasy with having their schools described as paternalistic. “I don’t think there is a positive way to say a school is paternalistic,” Eric Adler, cofounder of the SEED School in Washington, D.C., asserted. Dave Levin, cofounder of the network of KIPP schools, shared Adler’s reservations: “To say that a school is paternalistic suggests that we are condescending, rather than serving in the role of additional parents….”

Today’s paternalistic schools are more palatable to liberals than earlier models were because their curricula for character development promote not only traditional virtues but also social activism. SEED, for example, explicitly encourages community involvement in progressive causes, as do KIPP Academy, Cristo Rey, and University Park. SEED requires students to participate in community service projects and teaches each student to “make a commitment to a life of social action.” Students are urged to reflect on their own experiences with prejudice, discrimination, and bullying.

While liberals applaud these schools for placing poor kids on the path toward college (and out of poverty), conservatives cheer them for teaching the work ethic and traditional virtues. And there is great demand for seats in paternalistic schools among inner-city parents. So why not create lots more of them? Unfortunately, the three legs of the education establishment tripod—teachers unions, the district bureaucracy, and education schools—are all unlikely to embrace key elements that make paternalistic schools work. (See sidebar, for some habits of effective urban schools.)

Habits of Highly Effective Urban Schools (abridged) 1) Tell students exactly how to behave and tolerate no disorder. 2) Require a rigorous, college-prep curriculum. 3) Assess students regularly, and use the results to target struggling students and improve instruction. 4) Build a collective culture of achievement and college going. 5) Reject the culture of the streets. 6) Extend the school day and/or year. 7) Welcome accountability for teachers and principals and embrace constant reassessment. 8) Use unconventional channels to recruit committed teachers. 9) Don’t demand much from parents. 10) Don’t waste resources on fancy facilities or technology.

In paternalistic schools, principals must be able to assemble teams of teachers with a personal commitment to closing the achievement gap, teachers who are willing to work an extended school day and school year, who want to instruct teens about both traditional course matter and character development, and who will make themselves available to students as needed. But requiring teachers to work longer days and years would in most cases violate union contracts. So would allowing principals to handpick teachers (who may or may not be certified) and fire those who are not successful in the classroom. District bureaucrats, meanwhile, are loath to grant individual schools the freedom to do things differently, especially when it comes to curriculum and budget.

It would appear that education schools (and many K–12 educators trained there) bear a special animosity toward paternalism and its instructional incarnations. This is evident in their dislike of teacher-directed instruction, “drill-and-kill” memorization, rote learning, and direct instructional methods that emphasize the importance of acquiring basic facts and skills.

The Romantic educational philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (and his American heir, John Dewey) continues to prevail. Most K–12 educators (and their teachers in ed schools) believe students should be free to explore, to cultivate a love of learning, and to develop their “critical thinking” skills unencumbered by rote learning. By contrast, the new paternalistic schools are animated more by obligation than freedom. Mead argues that “the problem of poverty or underachievement is not that the poor lack freedom. The real problem is that the poor are too free.” Paternalistic schools assume that disadvantaged students do best when structure and expectations are crystal clear, rather than presuming that kids should learn to figure things out for themselves.

Were it not for the recalcitrance of the education establishment, a grand bargain might be in the offing: If inner-city schools across the nation successfully adopted a no-excuses model, perhaps conservatives would be willing to support spending increases for longer school days, an extended school year, and additional tutoring. And perhaps liberals would be willing to grant principals and teachers of these schools a great deal of autonomy, allowing these schools to circumvent state and district regulations and union contracts.

For now, the spread of paternalistic schooling is taking place on a school-by-school basis in dozens of schools, but not on a massive scale. Unlike earlier generations of exemplary inner-city schools, today’s paternalistic institutions fortunately follow replicable school models and do not depend heavily on charismatic principals whose leadership cannot be copied elsewhere. The founders of these schools are devoting substantial resources to replicating their flagship schools, but they continue to encounter obstacles both political and practical. The difficulty of funding an extended school day and year, the reluctance of districts to grant autonomy to innovative school leaders, and the flawed charter laws and union contracts that tie the hands of entrepreneurs are just some of the factors that impede the spread of paternalistic reform. These obstacles make the restructuring of inner-city schools en masse in the mold of paternalism unlikely in the near future.

Still, these entrepreneurial school founders battle on, slowly replicating their institutions across the country. It is too soon to say that all of the copycat schools will succeed. But the early results are extremely encouraging. It is possible that these schools, so radically different from traditional public schools, could one day educate not just several thousand inner-city youngsters but tens or even hundreds of thousands of students in cities across the nation. Done well, paternalistic schooling would constitute a major stride toward reducing the achievement gap and the lingering disgrace of racial inequality in urban America.

David Whitman is a freelance journalist and former senior writer at U.S. News & World Report. This article was adapted from his forthcoming book, Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2008).

The modern character education movement emerged in the 1980s as a consequence of growing parental and public concern for moral drift, or what sociologist James Davison Hunter referred to as “the death of character.” This public anomie was captured in these words from Sanford McDonnell, chairman emeritus of McDonnell Douglas and chair of the Character Education Partnership (CEP), a national umbrella group that provides coordination, encouragement, and support to schools:

We have a crisis of character all across America. …the good news is that we know what to do about it: get back to the core values of our American heritage in our homes, our schools, our businesses, our government, and indeed in each of our daily lives.

Two decades later, it is time to ask, What are the successes of the character education movement? What do best practices look like? This essay explores these questions through the study of character education in six schools. Over the course of two months, I visited each of the selected schools to learn about the program in place—why it was initiated and by whom; what roles faculty, staff, and parents play; what the key program elements are; what the results are and how they are measured; and what obstacles the program faces. I selected programs in schools of various sizes, types, grade levels, and locations. The six sites include a suburban public school district and a small-town elementary school, a private religious school and a private secular school, an alternative public high school and a charter school. Each had been designated a National School of Character by the Character Education Partnership (CEP).

Each year since 1998, the CEP has identified several National Schools of Character through a juried process. The award recognizes schools and school districts that have improved the “behavior and learning of their students through character education.” CEP has also developed quality standards to aid schools in evaluating character education programs and curricula. National Schools of Character exemplify CEP’s Eleven Principles, among them defining “‘character’ comprehensively to include thinking, feeling, and behavior”; implementing “a meaningful and challenging academic curriculum that respects all learners, develops their character, and helps them to succeed”; providing “students with opportunities for moral action”; and using “a comprehensive, intentional, proactive, and effective approach to character development.” CEP describes character education not as an “add-on” to the curriculum, but as “a different way of teaching; it is a comprehensive approach that promotes core values in all phases of school life and permeates the entire school culture.”

Though they differ in many ways, the six schools share the critical elements of a comprehensive program in character education. Pedagogy is guided by a set of core values or virtues. The schools provide abundant opportunities for moral discourse about complex, contested matters and moral action through both organized community service and in-school conduct. Later, I will draw some conclusions, but first let’s hear their stories.

Educating Citizens: Hudson Public Schools (Hudson, Massachusetts)

“Education is about helping young people feel they can make a difference in the world. The purpose of public education is to create a public in which a democracy can thrive. Character education is a key vehicle to both goals.” The citizenship program in the Hudson schools reflects this vision of Superintendent Sheldon H. Berman, former head of Educators for Social Responsibility. Located in a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts, the Hudson district educates 2,750 students in four elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school. The district serves an increasingly diverse population, 30 percent of whom are immigrants from Brazil and the Azores.

Dr. Berman and the faculty worked together to develop a character education program in part to prevent disciplinary problems. A citizen group conducted a comprehensive community survey to discern what residents expected of their school. Discussion in the community and in the school led to consensus around three core goals: empathy, ethics, and service. The character education program was built slowly, with broad input, and with attention to faculty development and participation.

The Hudson effort implements age-appropriate strategies at every class level. In pre-K–5 classes, faculty use a program from Educators for Social Responsibility called Adventures in Peacemaking, among others. Second Step is a violence prevention program for grades pre-K to 9 developed by the Committee for Children. Thirty lessons at each elementary grade level help students develop empathy and learn anger management and conflict resolution skills. Ninth-grade history and English classes feature ethics-based civics instruction with a focus on the Holocaust. More than 85 percent of students are involved in service learning: kindergartners connect with a local food pantry, 1st graders interact with local senior citizens, and high-school students work on environmental issues.

In Brian Daniels’s senior ethics course, students cover the waterfront of current issues including affirmative action, assisted suicide, abortion, homosexuality, and a range of political topics. Daniels uses a Socratic process in addressing each topic, and students are forced to deal with their own and their generation’s inclinations toward relativism and individualism. Students learn to confront difference, take and defend positions, and practice civility.

Character education is embedded in the district’s stated goals and criteria for hiring new faculty. Teachers are highly invested through a continuing series of faculty initiatives. Superintendent Berman teaches courses for the faculty covering central pedagogical elements of the program and Mary H. McCarthy provides overall coordination. Parents are involved in  the Family Character Education Council.

Building Social Skills: The Somers Elementary School (Somers, Connecticut)

The 21 members of Rebecca Leiphart’s 4th-grade class gather for their morning meeting. In the first round of conversation, students exchange compliments for constructive social conduct such as reaching out to another student or always saying hello. The conversation shifts to expressions of regret by individual students: the failure to return something borrowed, not standing up for a classmate. The third part of the meeting is devoted to problem solving. A boy complains that other students are pushing him out of his seat on the bus. Class members offer advice. Each student addresses others by name, takes a turn speaking, is attentive to each speaker, and expresses thanks for the compliment or counsel. Ms. Leiphart notes that the class will return to this discussion at its next meeting to see whether or not progress has been made.

Located in northern Connecticut, the Somers Elementary School serves 750 students in kindergarten through 5th grade in a community that is increasing in economic, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Ms. Leiphart’s morning meeting is part of the school’s character education program, initiated in 1995 and motivated by the merger of three schools into one, out of concern for the social skills of the students and in response to the post-Columbine awareness that schools should give greater consideration to students’ social needs.

Principal Debra Adamczyk helped establish the character education program. Maureen Winseck, school psychologist, and Pat Clark, media specialist, provided leadership in implementation. The school identified five character goals on which to concentrate: cooperation, assert oneself positively, take responsibility, empathize, and show self-respect (CARES). The Social Skills Committee, a broadly representative group formed to give direction to the program, developed an activities guide that includes both homegrown and external vendor materials and implementation strategies to assist in developing social skills, promoting positive interaction, and integrating social skills into academic studies. Content elements include readings about Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, and others, and the book Voices of Hope, about everyday heroes. Class exercises focus on particular virtues and social skills. Peer activities are a prominent program component. Upperclass students are trained in a pedagogy called Friendship Groups.

A parents’ newsletter and web site, workshops for parents on social skills strategies, and parent volunteer and mentoring activities create significant buy-in for the program. Parents receive regular reports on attendance, academic achievement, and discipline, which are discussed at regularly scheduled family conferences that include students in the 4th and 5th grades.

Grounded in the Classics: The Montrose School (Natick, Massachusetts)

Soon after the school day begins at the Montrose School, students gather for an enrichment period. They may attend morning Mass or assemble in a quiet room for reading and reflection.

Students commute from 35 area towns to this college-preparatory day school, established in 1979 by parents who were unhappy with the direction of both the Boston-area public and Catholic diocesan schools. They wanted a school that centered on the Catholic faith and the liberal arts, as expressed in the school’s mission statement, “a Montrose education challenges each student to cultivate intellect and character, leadership and service, faith and reason.” The school enrolls 135 girls in grades 6–12; 75 percent are Catholic. The school director, Karen Bohlin, is a leading teacher-scholar in the character education movement and was previously the director of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University.

In addition to core studies in English, math, science, history, languages, and the fine arts, students take a required sequence in religion and philosophy: 6th-grade students study the Apostles’ Creed and the saints; in the 7th grade, they focus on the Church and the Ten Commandments; 8th graders conduct an overview of the Bible and the Sacraments; 9th-grade students study the Old Testament, the Apologetics, and C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity; the 10th-grade focus is the New Testament and Church history; 11th grade introduces metaphysics and ethics; and the 12th-grade course features the philosophy and social teachings of the Catholic Church. Juniors and seniors spend time on texts by Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and others.

The study of character is embedded in the broader curriculum. Courses in literature feature classic works, and history classes pick up on such challenging topics as the Holocaust and civil rights. Each week, homeroom teachers lead a discussion of character issues including friendship, conflict resolution, and being in control of one’s emotions. A student club focuses on service learning opportunities, and many classes include service dimensions.

School assemblies feature outside speakers on socially significant issues. On the Monday of my visit, a physician from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard Medical School spoke about end-of-life issues. After the assembly, students gathered in homerooms for faculty-led discussions on the speaker’s presentation. Montrose students are successful participants in a local Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest as well as an annual national conference on ethics and culture at the University of Notre Dame. For six consecutive years, Montrose students have been the only high school presenters at the Notre Dame conference, with the most recent papers discussing how the arts may reduce the allure of television and the influence of music on teen culture.

Student advisement is a key function of each faculty member. As one student explained, “It’s my advisor who challenges me to put virtue into practice. She’s the person I can talk to and get advice from; she knows when I am just being too proud; she helps me to know myself better.”

Comprehensiveness: Montclair Kimberley Academy (Montclair, New Jersey)

In Ralph Pacifico’s kindergarten physical-education class at Montclair, students form a circle around a multicolored parachute. Each panel of the parachute represents a character expectation. The students recite each goal and then explain, in their own words, what the goal means to them. Then, in an exercise in teamwork, they move the huge parachute around the room.

The school’s motto, Knowledge, Vision, Integrity, has shaped the academic and character goals of Montclair Kimberley throughout its history. As students move into the upper grades, their ownership of the character goals is demonstrated in student government, community service, the honor system, and athletics.

Montclair Kimberley Academy dates to 1878. Current enrollment in the pre-kindergarten through 12th grades exceeds 1,000 students from 80 communities across northern New Jersey. Former headmaster Peter Greer arrived in 1992 and soon after convened a group of teachers, staff, parents, and alumni to write a guiding statement for the school’s character education program. “Our Common Purpose” articulates the school’s aspirations. Greek philosophy shaped the framework, and the seven virtues set forth in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—respect, friendship, responsibility, confidence, temperance, fairness, and being informed—became the character expectations for the academy. The school added an eighth expectation, honesty, in 2004 in connection with the reformulation of the academy’s honor code. The story of Gyges’s ring from Plato’s Republic provides the touchstone for the curriculum.

The Core Works Program, developed by the faculty, includes 60 readings representing the greatest works in Western and non-Western literature plus masterpieces in the arts. Curricula tie the material to the character goals and are tailored to each class level. Charlotte’s Web is the first core work for 1st graders, 7th graders study The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories, while upperclass students delve into such masters as Dante, Confucius, and Plato.

Responsive Classroom guides the character education program in the pre-K though elementary grades. The goal is to identify and cultivate character goals in all aspects of the students’ experience both inside and outside of the classroom. During morning meeting, students identify, study, and practice the virtues and engage in community building.

The key, says new headmaster Thomas Nammack, is that “the school is working on character education in many ways, on many levels, all at the same time.” Moreover, he adds, “we strive to give our students a sense of what is possible in the task of mastering their own fates, and we seek to equip them to become independent practitioners of humane behavior.”

Freedom and Accountability: Malcolm Shabazz City High School (Madison, Wisconsin)

For most Shabazz students, the traditional high school was an uncomfortable straitjacket; 92 percent say they were “bored” in their previous high school. Shabazz is one of the oldest alternative schools in the nation, established in 1971 to educate Madison students whose circumstances, attitudes, and conduct are often not conducive to successful academic work in a traditional school setting. The school serves a diverse student population of 140 in grades 9–12. Its mission is to create a learning environment free of discrimination and harassment and to strengthen the connection between the students and their community.

Shabazz students must commit to the academic expectations of the school and give assurance, in writing, that they will observe nonharassment, alcohol and other drug, and attendance policies. These expectations are upfront, concrete, and strictly enforced. At the same time, the school does not have a dress code, has few standard academic requirements, and provides many nontraditional learning opportunities. At the end of each course, students reflect on 10 or 12 key questions. Faculty members, in turn, develop their own essays to evaluate each student. If the student meets all of the required course goals and 70 to 80 percent of the optional goals, he or she passes the course.

Four pillars shape character education at the Malcolm Shabazz High School. First, there are the explicit expectations. Second, all entering students take “The Shabazz Experience” in which they explore the school’s mission and the life of Malcolm Shabazz, better know as Malcolm X. A third pillar is Mirrors of Discrimination. One premise of this class is that America is not a “melting pot” but a “salad bowl,” where “the races and cultures of our society remain distinct and unique even though we all live together in the same big ‘bowl.’” Readings include an essay about World War II German patriot Martin Niemoeler, Howard Zinn’s You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, and Beverly Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? The fourth pillar is service learning. Retired social worker Jane Kavaloski was a key architect of the Shabazz program, and research she initiated established a positive connection between service learning and both student motivation and learning. Projects include volunteer work in the American South, Latin America, poverty zones of American cities, neighborhood schools, and environmentally vulnerable areas. Project Green Team is a coordinated set of courses in which students earn physical education and science credits for their work on stream ecology and fly-fishing. In Equity in Computer Access, instructor Tina Murray works with her students to recycle discarded computers for use by students, families, or institutions that cannot afford to purchase one.

Intentional Design: Community of Peace Academy (St. Paul, Minnesota)

Sarah Zosel’s 10th graders are studying world religions. In class, short video clips feature spokespersons for the Buddhist and Native American religions. Zosel asks students to identify the points of emphasis in each religion. An Asian student mentions the Buddhist emphasis on tolerance and peace, adding, “There is so much more to life than sex, television, clothes, and money and all that stuff.” Zosel reiterates the key questions that religions try to answer: How should we live? Why do people suffer? What happens when I die? Once a week the class has a class meeting or, as they call it, a “circle talk” in which students raise issues they face at school or in their personal lives or discuss current events.

Community of Peace Academy (CPA) was established as a charter school and is sponsored by the St. Paul Public School District. Seventy percent of the 550 students in grades K through 12 are Hmong and 20 percent are African American; 70 percent come from homes in which English is the second language; most are poor. On rare occasions, weekend neighborhood gang activities reverberate in school hallways on Monday morning (as they did on the day of my visit).

Community Peace Academy was designed around three components: caring relationships (community), a strong ethical focus (peace), and seriousness about academic achievement (academy). The founder and head of CPA is Dr. Karen J. Rusthoven, who got her start as an educator in the 1960s. Inspired by the idealism of that decade, she believes education is the key to resolving economic and social disparities. Her vision for CPA: “At Community of Peace Academy, our desired outcome is to educate the whole person—mind, body and will—for peace, justice, freedom, compassion, wholeness and fullness of life for all.”

Faculty serve as exemplars and motivators, attending to student needs, while respectful of the moral and intellectual freedom of each student. Relatively small classes—16 in grades K and 1, and 24 in other grades—permit faculty to give close attention to each student’s progress. Rusthoven and the CPA faculty adopted many established best practices, including a peacemaking curriculum for the primary grades developed by Growing Communities for Peace; PeaceBuilders, a conflict prevention program; the Heartwood series of readings in ethics for grades K–6, which features seven ethical principles; and the Responsive Classroom, which encourages students to take responsibility for their learning and moral conduct. Ninth graders take an ethics class focusing on care for self, others, and learning. Tenth graders study world religions, and juniors enroll in a PeaceBuilders course, which includes a vision quest retreat and a personal service project. CPA is developing a course for seniors that will involve significant engagement in a community project.

Measuring Success

These six character education programs share key features, many of which are explicit in the CEP criteria. The programs are comprehensive, encompassing all school activities, engaging all members of the faculty and staff, and including all grade levels. At each site, there is clarity and transparency about goals and values. Character education was initially the vision of a school principal or superintendent. Program fit in hiring and subsequent evaluation of faculty is a priority. Adequate and appropriately led and supported opportunities for faculty and curriculum development are critical components. Parent support and engagement is another common thread.

Variation across the sites is evident in stated program objectives, curricular content, and pedagogy as well as in the school culture, the student population, and the community. Program goals range from the citizenship objectives of the Hudson schools to the social action agenda of Shabazz to the moral and intellectual reflection of Montrose. The schools draw content from sources as disparate as religious works, literary classics, contemporary novels, and social commentary. As a Catholic school, Montrose can tie character education directly to a religious tradition. While this facilitates the program, results in the other schools demonstrate that religious affiliation is not a prerequisite for success. Two of the six sites—Somers Elementary and the Hudson district—are public schools to which students are assigned, while the other four are schools of choice. I observed no obvious effects of this difference on program outcomes.

Program assessment, a work in progress in most of the schools, reflects similar variety. Much of the research cited by the schools focuses on such objectives as improved discipline, campus climate, social attitudes, and community engagement. Some evaluations limit measures to those that are relatively easy to track, such as improved attendance or reduced incidents of violence and cheating. Others seek to tie character education to broader outcomes, including improved academic achievement:

•  In Hudson, enthusiasm from the community for the character education program and other district initiatives is one measure of success; others are SAT scores that exceed national and state averages and the percentage of graduates (79 percent) who pursue postsecondary education.

•  Somers Elementary School faculty report less classroom bullying than before the program was initiated, more time in class for academic work, and strong family support.

• Veteran teachers at Montclair Kimberley Academy speak of the positive difference the program has made in campus climate and student conduct, including a decline in the incidence of student cheating.

•  All Montrose graduates matriculate to four-year colleges, many of which are among the best in the nation. While exit interviews with each graduate provide Montrose School director Dr. Karen Bohlin with feedback on all aspects of the student experience, she identified the need for a more comprehensive assessment program.

•  Ninety-three percent of Shabazz students graduate from high school, and 74 percent pursue postsecondary education. Incoming students had a 40 percent truancy rate at their former schools, while at Shabazz the truancy rate is 16 percent. Both students and parents give Shabazz approval ratings that are much higher than those other district schools receive.

•  Of the six, Community Peace Academy devotes the most energy and resources to program assessment. Qualitative and quantitative exercises measure everything from academic performance to campus climate. Teachers, parents, students, and graduates are part of the assessment process, which includes character education goals. The data are positive with respect to those goals. Eighty-two percent of sophomores met or exceeded the state standard on the 2003 Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment in math, and 84 percent met or exceeded similar standards in reading. No other public or charter high school in the state with similar percentages of low-income and ESL students even approached these rates. The assessment data provide the basis for an annual review of the school’s programs which, in turn, leads to an improvement plan for the following year.

While both advocates and critics call for more comprehensive research on the effects of character education strategies, a growing body of research data appears to support the experiences of the schools studied. The Journal of Moral Education has been around for a while, and an increasing number of its articles address the effectiveness of character education strategies with quantitative methodologies. The first issues of the Journal of Character Education have made their appearance with similar content. The publications of CIRCLE, The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement, and CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, are also contributing to the inquiry.

Public and political emphasis on academic achievement and accountability has led both program leaders and education researchers to explore the relationship between the affective goals of character education and academic achievement. The What Works Clearinghouse, part of the federal government’s Institute of Education Sciences, released in September 2006 its review of 55 studies of character education programs, which looked at “student outcomes related to positive character development, prosocial behavior, and academic performance.”

Marvin W. Berkowitz and Melinda C. Bier, both of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, reviewed 78 studies and identified 33 programs that researchers deemed effective with respect to both affective and academic goals. Peacebuilders and Second Step were among the programs they studied. They conclude that “effective character education supports and enhances the academic goals of schools: good character promotes learning.”

CASEL president Roger P. Weissberg and Joseph Durlak, a Loyola University psychologist, reviewed 300 studies and found that, compared with nonparticipants, students participating in programs aimed at improving the social and emotional learning environment in schools “have significantly better attendance records; their classroom behavior is more constructive and less often disruptive; they like school more; and they have better grade point averages. They are also less likely to be suspended or otherwise disciplined.” Participants scored at least 10 points higher in achievement tests than students who did not participate.

So far, character education programs that are carefully designed and implemented appear to be succeeding. Undeterred by philosophical disputes on the one hand and the preoccupation with academic achievement on the other, character education finds its strength at the grass roots, in those individual schools and communities where teachers, administrators, and citizens initiate programs designed to improve civility and citizenship—legitimate goals in their own right. If research continues to show that comprehensive character education has positive effects on student achievement as well, then the movement may in time gain more robust political and financial support from education policymakers.

Paul J. Dovre is president emeritus of Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, and was a visiting scholar with the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Kennedy School of Government in 2005–06.