The War Against Boys (30 page)

Individual schools have testified to its effectiveness. Fallon Park Elementary School in Roanoke, Virginia, for example, saw a dramatic change in its students after the principal adopted the Character Counts program in 1998.
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Every morning the students recite the Pledge of Allegiance. This is followed by a pledge written by the students and teachers: “Each day in our words and actions we will persevere to exhibit respect, caring, fairness, trustworthiness, responsibility, and citizenship.” These core values were integrated into the daily life of the school. According to the principal, suspensions declined, attendance and grades improved, and—
mirabile dictu
—misbehavior on school buses all but disappeared.
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That was in 1998; in 2012 the program was still going strong.

Character Counts is the most widely used character education program. So far there is little research proving its efficacy, but dozens of evidence-based programs have flourished over the years, and many received strong federal support for a time. Among the most successful are PATHS (South Deerfield, Massachusetts), Roots of Empathy (Toronto, Canada), Caring School Community (Oakland, California), and Positive Action (Twin Falls, Idaho). Stanford's William Damon reports, “Federal support for such programs was authorized under the Clinton administration and tripled in size during the Bush administration.”
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According to Damon, the Obama administration has “reduced or eliminated support . . . with the lone exception of a new bullying initiative.”
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Members of the Obama administration may have recoiled from the conservative connotations of “character.” But it is also possible they were reacting to the muddled state of research surrounding such programs. There are hundreds of different programs, and the research on their effectiveness is mixed. In
What Works in Character Education
, a 2005 survey, University of Missouri–St. Louis education scholar Marvin Berkowitz and his colleague Mindy Bier identified “sixty-nine scientifically rigorous studies showing the effectiveness of a wide range of character education initiatives.”
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Thirty-three programs were cited for having “scientifically demonstrated positive student outcome.” However, these results were contradicted by a major 2010 Department of Education study, which examined seven typical character education programs and found them ineffective.
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Researchers randomly assigned programs to eighty-four schools in six states and then measured their impact on student behavior and achievement. When compared to the results of a control group, they could find no evidence of improvement.

The latter study has proved controversial. According to Berkowitz, the research design was so rigorous that it likely made it difficult to implement the programs effectively. Such comprehensive school initiatives usually require strong commitment from school leaders and staff, and randomly assigning programs to schools and classrooms is therefore an obstacle to effectiveness. William Damon judged it to be “a poor test of how real character education influences students.”
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Allen Ruby, the coauthor of the Department of Education study, conceded that “this is one study, so people shouldn't just say, ‘We're done, let's move on.' ”
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All the same, the findings were sobering and remind us that the task of finding our way back to moral education is not going to be easy. Needless to say, we have to keep trying. Too many children, boys most of all, are morally adrift. And there are some programs that have been judged effective by other researchers. Consider Positive Action.

Positive Action is a character education program founded in 1982 by education scholar Carol Gerber Allred. Today more than eleven thousand schools,
twenty-five hundred districts, and two thousand community groups have adopted it. The K–12 curriculum consists of teachers' guides and scripted lessons, along with a variety of age-appropriate games, music, posters, stories, and activities. Lessons are taught fifteen minutes a day throughout the school year. When the Department of Education carried out an evaluation of forty-one leading character education programs in 2007, Positive Action was the only one to receive its seal of approval. Positive Action is the one ethics program included in the department's influential What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). “The WWC considers the extent of evidence for Positive Action to be moderate to large for behavior and for academic achievement.”
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In the late 1970s, Allred was teaching high school in Idaho and became discouraged by her students' lack of engagement and ambition. Many were confused about basic ethics and had little understanding of work ethic. “I just knew they could do better,” she told me. In response, Allred developed a character education system based on her readings in psychology, philosophy, and her appreciation of “Idaho farm values.” She asked herself, “What do these hardworking, self-reliant, and honorable farmers know, and how can I teach it to my students?” She came up with a simple formula, which she named Positive Action. According to several carefully designed studies, her formula works.
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These studies found that Positive Action improved behavior, increased academic achievement, reduced suspension rates, and, according to the WWC, reduced “serious violence among boys.”
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A third, more recent study found that Positive Action had “favorable program effects on reading for African American males.”
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The Positive Action curriculum is based on the old-fashioned idea that “you feel good about yourself when you think and do positive actions, and there is a positive way to do everything.” Its philosophy was crisply expressed by Abraham Lincoln: “When I do good I feel good, and when I do bad I feel bad.”
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Children as young as three or four are able to grasp this simple truth. The program teaches them how to stay inside the “Success Circle” (or “Happy Circle” for the younger children). The key is to fix on and hold positive thoughts and then act on them. Good feelings follow.

But Positive Action is not an “I love myself” self-esteem program. Allred
became disillusioned with the self-esteem movement when she realized it lacked moral substance. Positive Action directs children toward a set of core values: specifically, trustworthiness, industry, kindness, and achievement. Children learn to pay close attention to how they feel when they are honest, hardworking, and kind; and they learn to avoid the vicious cycle that comes from cultivating bad thoughts, taking destructive actions, and feeling self-loathing. They become their own moral mentors.

One goal of the program is to get kids hooked on self-improvement—physical, moral, and intellectual. They are taught that it can be hard to stay inside the Success Circle but intrinsically very rewarding. It may be tempting to shirk a demanding task, lie to a friend, or steal something from someone. But children learn to monitor the toll it takes on their psyches. They also learn the central lesson that comes down to us from the ancient Stoics: you don't have to be at the mercy of your thoughts and ideas—you can change them and improve them. As the first-century Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “What upsets people is not things themselves, just their judgment about things.”
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Through Positive Action, children learn to be mindful and careful of their judgments.

Older students also study the lives of great individuals—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Einstein, the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, or Rosa Parks—with a focus on “the thoughts that lead them to take great actions.” Allred's program is practical, mundane, and homespun, but it somehow captures the insights of the world's great moral traditions. What's more, it resonates with children. “It is intuitive in them,” Allred told me. Aristotle and Epictetus could not agree more. This Idaho educator may have found a way to equip children with a moral compass—and the means to find their way back to true north when they stray.

In June 2011, an eleven-year-old boy at Monterey Heights Elementary School in California gave a speech at graduation about how Positive Action had changed his life. He had once been a bully and a troublemaker and was failing his classes. “The lunch lady tried to keep me from recess so I cursed her out,” he told his audience. “School was a prison to me and teachers were
just trying to keep me locked in.” But something in the Positive Action curriculum reached him. He is now a Positive Action “Sumo.” His grades are good, he has more friends, and he has emerged as a school leader. “To all my future lunch ladies—I will not cuss you out.”

When a Michigan state official visited a Positive Action class at Tustin Elementary in Tustin, Michigan, she remarked to a coworker, “I can use this in my own life.”
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We can all use it in our lives, but too many parents and schools simply fail to impart basic worldly wisdom to children. Positive Action appears to be effective with both girls and boys; but today, with so many boys clueless about right and wrong, misdirected by the self-esteem movement, and lacking ambition—it is just the sort of instruction they desperately need.

The movement to restore directive moral education to the schools has been fiercely resisted by many educators since its inception. Amherst professor Benjamin DeMott wrote a piece for
Harper's
Magazine
in 1994 jeering at the revived character education movement. Like Professor Puka, DeMott asked how we can hope to teach ethics in a society where CEOs award themselves large salaries “in the midst of the age of downsizing.”
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Alfie Kohn, a popular education speaker and writer, wrote a long critical piece in the education magazine
Phi Delta Kappan
accusing character education programs of indoctrinating children and making them obedient workers in an unjust society where “the nation's wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.”
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Reactionary values, he claims, are already a powerful force in our nation's schools: “Children in American schools are even expected to begin each day by reciting a loyalty oath to the Fatherland, although we call it by a different name.”
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Kohn's comparison—likening the Pledge of Allegiance to a loyalty oath to Hitler's Reich—is a fair example of the mind-set one still finds among some progressives.

Thomas Lasley, former dean of the University of Dayton School of Education and another foe of the “old morality,” denounces the “values juggernaut” for its hypocrisy:

Teachers tell students to cooperate, but then they systematically rank students in terms of their class performance. . . . Teachers tell students that respect is essential for social responsibility, but then they call on boys a majority of the time. . . . And finally students are informed that they should be critical thinkers, but then they are evaluated on whether they think the same way that their teachers do.
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Jerry Harrington (now retired) taught math at the Woodland Park Middle School, located in a poor neighborhood of San Diego, for more than thirty years. During his time at Woodland Park, Harrington taught a fifteen-minute morning class to students called How to Be Successful. It's a course on what Aristotle called the practical virtues. But it is also the kind of course critics like Kohn and Lasley deplore. In Harrington's class, the kids learn the “Eleven B's”: Be responsible. Be on time. Be friendly. Be polite. Be a listener. Be a tough worker. Be a goal setter. And so on. Children are taught all about the work ethic and how to integrate it into their lives.
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Writer Tim Stafford described what happened when Harrington ran into a former pupil.
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The student, Philip, then in high school, was bagging groceries, and Harrington asked him how he got his job. Philip said he got it by applying what he had learned in class. First, he set a goal: “I set a goal that I needed to earn six hundred dollars in the summer because my mother could not afford to buy me clothes for school.” Adhering closely to the method taught in the course, Philip then broke the goal down into small parts. Next he had taken what are called “action steps.” Step one: He listed twenty businesses that were within walking or biking distance of his house. Step two: He went to each one to apply for a job. After sixteen rejections, the seventeenth place—the grocery store—hired him.

Two years later, Mr. Harrington ran into Philip's older brother, who told him that Philip was still working. The older brother told Mr. Harrington, “You saved my life too.” He explained that their mother was an alcoholic who had had a series of boyfriends. Their home life was chaotic. Philip had told his brother about what he had learned in his How to Be Successful class. Now both brothers were putting their lives together.
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I spoke with Harrington in the fall of 1999. He told me that, on average, middle school boys are less mature than the girls: “The boys have difficulties at the level of basic organization: being responsible for their backpacks, their homework.” Most of the girls understand the idea of personal responsibility and are ready to move on to the idea of being responsible for others. At Harrington's school, it is girls who are active in school events and who hold the leadership positions in student government. The male students are preoccupied with skateboarding, surfing, and roller blading—activities with few rules, little structure, no responsibilities. When he asks his male students about their long-term goals, many of them confidently assert that they plan to become sports stars. But when he inquires about what steps they are taking to realize even that unrealistic goal, he finds that they have a very poor understanding of the relationship of means to ends. Harrington has two daughters and assures me that “girls are very dear to my heart.” But, he points out, no one seems to be focused on boys: “Every time I turn around, if there is an event or program where someone is going to be lifted up and encouraged, it's for girls.” Harrington was unusual in recognizing and talking about boys, their insufficiencies, and how badly we neglect them. He was doing what he could to help them, but in too many schools the moral needs of boys are disregarded and unmet.
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