(This commentary offset appeared in Elevation-Ed.)

My daughter's first-grade report card came in two sections, one related to her bookish work and the other for her teacher's feedback near the character she displayed in school. Did she play well with others? Did she participate in grade? Did she have risks?

In a few years, my girl's report cards will become less personal, and probably less interesting. Letter grades and test scores will assume for her the primal role that they play for only most everybody in education.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. – Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream, 1963.
"I have a dream that my four little children volition one twenty-four hours live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their pare but by the content of their grapheme." – Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream, 1963.

For the past decade or so, the virtually pursued goal of K-12 pedagogy in America has been pretty clear: Ensure that all children main essential academic content, and do so in a way that tin be verified through tests.

One premise of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was that predictable patterns of academic failure could exist disrupted through the transformative ability of measurement and scrutiny. NCLB set measurable, escalating test score goals for "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) for districts, schools, and subgroups, and established 2022 as the no-excuses borderline for all subgroups to rise to proficiency. Wherever academic achievement lagged, the hope was that "what gets measured gets managed." If districts were compelled to see the gaps, they would focus on the problems and address them. Lyric sheets for Kumbaya were to be made freely available at a tear-filled ceremony in 2014, which would surely exist sponsored by Kleenex.

Ten years on, no one is singing. Test scores have improved, but slowly and inconsistently. Achievement gaps on tests remain big, and they go along to correlate with race and income. With 2022 budgeted and AYP requirements rising, schools and districts are failing to run across their targets.

This wave of failure is driving some soul-searching. For i thing, dunce caps lose their meaning if everyone is wearing one. In the absence of guidance from Congress, the U.S. Department of Education is now hoping to depict some value out of the mess by granting selective waivers in a way that can drive focus on a smaller number of issues.

Meanwhile, some educators and reformers are questioning whether bookish results on their ain are a sufficient measure of success. Some are wondering whether a version of the first-grade written report card might exist a more useful approach than the letter of the alphabet grade. Dorsum-to-schoolhouse coffee gatherings are abuzz with discussion of a recent article in the New York Times Magazine by Paul Tough, titled "What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?" In this article, Tough brings focus to what could be the next frontier in education reform: graphic symbol education.

Formal grapheme educational activity and feedback beyond the earliest grades has traditionally been the stuff of aristocracy prep schools, military academies, and high-performing knowledge-sector businesses. In the arena of school reform, notwithstanding, possibly the most prominent boosters of character education accept been the KIPP lease schools, which from the start have famously emphasized values similar "piece of work difficult" and "be overnice."

Later on years of observing, KIPP's founders observed that "the students who persisted in higher were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character traits."

"Character" can exist a boneless construct, only Tough'due south article gives it a useful skeleton. Cartoon on the piece of work of the Character Teaching Partnership , he separates character education into ii categories: "moral character" qualities like honesty or tolerance and "performance grapheme" qualities similar social intelligence or zest.

The KIPP schools are putting these insights to work past trying to convert attributes of operation character from abstractions into things that students can focus on and brand progress against. Recently, KIPP has begun experimenting with a new report bill of fare that asks teachers to score their students on a 5-betoken scale on characteristics like "keeps temper in check." This framework is based on academic piece of work by Angela Duckworth. A full list of the character elements that KIPP is using, and the seven that they are prioritizing, can be establish hither and hither.

Tough'southward article includes snippets of conversations between students and teachers discussing "areas for improvement" on a pupil's character report card. These snippets reminded me strongly of operation reviews I delivered and received equally a immature manager at Microsoft. Years later, I remember some of those conversations quite vividly.

Similar whatever idea in educational activity change, a lot can be learned in implementation, and at that place are going to be some missteps. A unproblematic "character score" would exist of little utilize. The true point of this kind of evaluation would be to help drive conversations and self-reflection well-nigh things that actually matter.

If KIPP's experiments and Tough's writing help swing the pendulum toward more than formal attention to developing the content of one'south character, Dr. King's legacy may take on notwithstanding some other layer of meaning.

Jeff Camp chairs the Pedagogy Circle of Full Circumvolve Fund, an engaged philanthropy system cultivating the next generation of community leaders and driving lasting social change in the Bay Area and beyond. He is the primary author of Ed100.org, a primer on education reform options in California. Since leaving a career at Microsoft to work for education change, Jeff has served on multiple education reform committees including the Governor's Commission on Instruction Excellence.

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