Emphasizing the so-called soft skills has troubling implications for the education of low-income children.
Probably one of the surest claims one could make about how to lead a successful life, in or out of school, is that qualities such as determination, perseverance, self-control, and a degree of flexibility matter a lot. In today’s education lingo, these qualities get labeled as “character” or “social-emotional learning.” Whatever the label, there is a rapidly growing interest in how to teach character and measure it. Conferences, consultants, and special issues of journals focus on character. In late 2012 journalist Paul Tough wrote a best-selling book, How Children Succeed, that garnered a lot of attention because it nicely summarizes the various bodies of research behind the current boom.
As I watch the latest version of character education take off, I worry about how we define these qualities, and I worry that so much of the discussion focuses on the education of low-income children.
Many of those who advocate character education believe our current educational focus on cognition has been misguided. They’re right to object to the way cognition has been reduced to a shadow of its former self under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Increasingly, cognition has been defined by the subset of skills measured by standardized tests in reading and mathematics.
In an attempt to counterbalance that narrow cognitive focus, educators have begun to emphasize developing qualities of character, arguing that, as much or more than cognition, these qualities account for success in school and life.
Being reminded that education is more than tests and grades is a healthy move, but I worry that advocates for character or social-emotional learning accept without question the reductive notion of cognition that runs through our education policies and, by accepting it, further affirm it. Economists exacerbate the problem with their methods for carving up and defining mental activity. If scores on ability or achievement tests represent cognition, then anything not captured in those scores — like the desired qualities of character — is, de facto, noncognitive. We’re left with a skimpy notion of cognition and a reductive dichotomy to boot.
Downplaying the cognitive and constructing the cognitive/noncognitive binary has some troubling implications for education, especially for the education of the children of the poor.
Labeling character qualities as “noncognitive” misrepresents them. Self-monitoring, for example, has to involve a consideration and analysis of one’s performance and mental state — a profoundly cognitive activity. Flexibility demands weighing options and decision making. This is not just a problem of terminology, for if you don’t have an accurate description of something, how can you help people develop it, especially if you want to scale up your efforts?
Furthermore, students develop these desired qualities over time in settings and relationships that are meaningful to participants, which most likely means the settings and relationships will have significant cognitive content. Two of the classic preschool programs that have provided a research base for the character advocates — the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian Projects — were cognitively rich in imaginative play, language use, and activities that required thought and cooperation.
The focus of the current character education movement is on low-income children, and the cold, hard fact is that many poor kids are already getting terrible educations in the cognitive domain.
A very different example comes from a study I just completed observing community college occupational programs as varied as fashion and diesel technology. As students developed competence, they also became more committed to doing a job well, were better able to monitor and correct their performance, and improved their ability to communicate what they were doing and help others do it. You could be by inclination the most determined or communicative person in the world, but if you don’t know what you’re doing with a garment or an engine, your tendencies won’t be realized in a meaningful way in the classroom or the workshop.
We also have to consider the consequences of this cognitive/noncognitive binary in light of the history of American educational practice. We have a powerful tendency toward either/or policies — think of old math/new math or phonics/whole language. Given this tendency, we can predict a pendulum swing away from the academic and toward character education. And over the past 50 years, attempts at character education as a distinct pursuit haven’t been particularly successful — in some cases, student behavior is not affected, or changes in beliefs and behaviors don’t last.
Finally, the focus of the current character education movement is on low-income children, and the cold, hard fact is that many poor kids are already getting terrible educations in the cognitive domain. There’s a stirring moment in Paul Tough’s book where a remarkable chess teacher decides she’s going to try to prepare one of her star pupils for an admissions test for New York’s selective high schools. She finds that this stunningly bright boy has learned pitifully little academic knowledge during his eight years in school. It would be tragic to downplay a strong academic education for children like him.
When the emphasis on character focuses on the individual attributes of poor children as the reason for their subpar academic performance, that can distract us from making bigger and deeper policy changes that will address poverty and educational inequality.
One of the powerful strands in the current discussion of character education is that it might succeed where academic interventions have failed to reduce the achievement gap. Perhaps psychological and educational interventions that focus on developing perseverance, self-control, and the like will help poor children succeed in school. Such qualities are indisputably key to a successful life, and they’ve been part of our folk wisdom about success well before Dale Carnegie made millions by promoting the power of positive thinking. But they’ve gained luster via economic modeling, psychological studies, and the technological advances of neuroscience. Because brain imaging allows us to see how the frontal lobes light up when someone weighs a decision, these claims about character seem cutting edge. This aura of the new contributes to a belief that we might have found a potent treatment for the achievement gap.
A diverse group of players is involved in this rediscovery and championing of social-emotional learning. Nobel Laureate in economics James Heckman advocates early childhood intervention programs for poor kids. Charter schools like KIPP infuse character education throughout the school day. And a whole range of smaller extracurricular and after-school programs — from Chicago’s OneGoal to a chess club in a public school in Brooklyn — focus their efforts in helping the children from low-income homes develop a range of mental strategies and shifts in perception aimed toward academic achievement. I’ve worked with economically and educationally disadvantaged children and adults for 40 years, and I know the importance of efforts like these. They need to be funded and expanded. Poor kids carry big burdens and have absurdly limited access to any kind of school-related enrichment, especially as inequality widens.
We seem willing to accept remedies for the poor that we aren’t willing to accept for anyone else.
But we have to be very careful, given the political tenor of our time, to not assume that we have the long-awaited key to helping the poor overcome the assaults of poverty. I worry that we will embrace these essentially individual and technocratic fixes — mental conditioning for the poor — and abandon broader social policy aimed at poverty itself.
Given a political climate that is antagonistic toward the welfare state and has further shredded our already compromised safety net, psychosocial intervention may be the only viable political response to poverty available. But can you imagine the outcry if, let’s say, an old toxic dump was discovered near Scarsdale or Beverly Hills and the National Institutes of Health undertook a program to teach kids strategies to lessen the effects of the toxins but didn’t do anything to address the toxic dump itself?
We seem willing to accept remedies for the poor that we aren’t willing to accept for anyone else. We should use our science to figure out why that is so — and then develop the character and courage to fully address poverty when it is an unpopular cause.
Citation: Rose, M. (2013). Being careful about character. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (2), 44-46.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mike Rose
MIKE ROSE is a research professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and author of Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education . Copyright © 2014, 2009 by Mike Rose. This excerpt originally appeared in Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
