charter schools | The Quirky Minority

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written. I was off traveling to see family over the summer in my beloved Bahamas and Switzerland. More about my experiences and thoughts about my time between my worlds later.

In the meantime, a very good friend shared a recent article from the New York Times about character education programs developed from the perspective of, on the one hand, a very prestigious private school, and on the other, a very successful charter school. I was intrigued at the way in which the journalist, Paul Tough, was able to express the differences and the linkages between the two types of schools in their pursuit of character education programs. In many ways, each principal’s ideals originated from a very similar place of wanting to have character education have just as an important position in education as the fundamentals, skills, and subject area content deemed valuable for educational success. However, each school’s distinct association with place (affluent vs. lower-income) led to varying results of how their character education programs played out in the “real world” of schools. For the charter school, it was character report cards and for the wealthy private school character education led to wider curricular aims and more open-ended discussions, for example.

This NYT article highlights the implication that character education should not be viewed from a values-free perspective. In fact, character education programs should include an assessment of the differences that play out for the wide variety of students who belong in the distinct social spheres in our society. To my mind, education seeks to assist/ instill values of citizenship in children. That, I think, is the ultimate goal of education. In order to be a good citizen, you must be productive and give something of value and use to the society, you must adhere to righteous laws, and you must be able to critique actions that would move society further away from an equitable and just one. Schools and learning must have this as their ultimate mission and vision.

Hannah Arendt says (according to Melissa Harris-Petty in her book Sister Citizen (an amazing read, btw, and a book review to follow) that “the public realm was reserved for individuality”. People want strive toward citizenship because it permits them public recognition. This fact, Petty says, encourages pro-social behavior like following rules without draconian measures (This full participation is what I think they should mean in the NYT article when they refer to good character leading to ‘happy lives’). The premise of Petty’s book describes that this path of public and social recognition is not always readily given to some citizens, and in her book she particularly focuses on how this lack of recognition impacts black women (who are misunderstood and not fully recognized and furthermore placed in these main lenses— poor, the mammy (all giving, self-sacrificial), the seductress, the angered (at anything and everything).

So, if the goal of education is to produce citizens, and it is a dominant perspective that some citizens are not viewed as fairly as others, then shouldn’t character education foster citizenship while simultaneously identifying the barriers hindering some from attaining full participation in this society? Character education should teach students that there are pro-social values that allow you to participate meaningfully in society. Additionally, character education must in some ways attune itself to the unfairness that exists in society when it comes down to this notion of public recognition. It should first provide an understanding that even when some people are at their best (character-wise), they are still misunderstood and misrepresented and specifically speaking, poor people, immigrants, the homeless, the disabled, and minorities have to deal with this non-recognition on a daily basis. How then can we create students that work to ensure their own public recognition as citizens while they concurrently think and act to ensure that others are not hindered from attaining that same opportunity?

For me then, two important character traits are public recognition and justice, no?