The title of this slim, engaging book of essays tees up a question about which there is very little disagreement. Of course character matters. “Character skills matter at least as much as cognitive skills,” writes Nobel laureate James Heckman in the lead essay, summarizing the literature. “If anything, character matters more.” Since cognitive and non-cognitive skills can be shaped and changed, particularly in early childhood, he writes, “this suggests new and productive avenues for public policy.” It may indeed. But the journey from good idea to good policy is a minefield for both parties, as Third Way policy analyst Lanae Erickson Hatalsky notes in her essay. If Democrats talk about character, “it runs the risk of sounding like apostasy, blaming poor children for their own situation in life and chiding them to simply have more grit and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” (Likewise, the Left dares not invoke the miasma of family structure.) Character talk may feel more at home in Republican talking points, but it carries the risk of foot-in-mouth disease, “setting the stage for politicians to inadvertently say something that sounds patronizing to the poor, demeaning to single women, or offensive to African Americans (or all three).” Just so.
Educators will be particularly interested in the essay contributed by Dominic A.A. Randolph, the head of the elite Riverdale Country School in New York City. He is almost certainly correct that countries like Singapore, which dramatically outperform us in math, may do so precisely because “strengths like self-control and perseverance may be cultivated more intentionally, and more successfully, in cultures other than ours.” But his solution, a “comprehensive international effort in institutions and in governments to develop intellectual, character and community standards of growth that can be embedded in the ‘curricula’ of schools, universities, workplaces” will surely bring gales of laughter from those battered and bruised in fights over Common Core. As Randolph himself acknowledges, “While measuring math skills seems a viable objective public pursuit, measuring character seems a personal, subjective, and private endeavor.”
Non-cognitive character skills may “lie at the very center of human flourishing,” in Heckman’s phrase, but one of the volume’s few disappointments is its failure to include an essay on school choice as a means of giving educators permission to focus on character development. When parents are voting with their feet or their tuition dollars, an explicit effort to build character can be one more reason to choose a school like Randolph’s or KIPP, which has for years worshipped at the altar of “grit” as the key to student success. For K–12 education at large, the pitfalls of education for character development are surely insurmountable. Brookings’s Stuart Butler observes that discussions of character and virtue tend to fall on critics’ ears “as a moral judgment about poor people.” He prefers the term “culture,” which connotes “a web of influences in a neighborhood.” (Psst: “Culture” is even more of a fighting word than “character.”) UCLA’s Mike Rose sums up the difficulty of making character development an explicit, measurable goal of public education anytime soon. “As a matter of public policy, it would be counterproductive, and ultimately cruel, to focus on individual characteristics without also considering the economic and social terrain on which those characteristics play out,” he writes. Allow me to translate: The “fix schools” versus “fix poverty” debate, as it pertained to cognitive skills, has been exhausting and unsatisfying. In non-cognitive domains, it’s unthinkable. Don’t expect Common Core character standards any time soon.
SOURCE: Richard V. Reeves, ed., Does Character Matter?: Essays on Opportunity and the American Dream (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2015).
