APS drops character education; no one cares

APS students started school yesterday. This year, as every year since 1994, students are led to believe that they are required to "model and promote the Pillars of Character Counts!"

The "Pillars of Character Counts!" is a set of standards of conduct. There are many sets of standards of acceptable conduct; professions write their own, industries write their own, boards of education write their own.

There is talk of "higher standards of conduct", and it begs the question; higher than what? The lowest standard of conduct is the law. On one side, conduct so unacceptable as to warrant fines and imprisonment; on the other side, every other behavior no matter how base, immoral or indefensible.

The law is clearly not a high enough standard of conduct for politicians and public servants. Everyone knows that, and that is why politicians and public servants talk so much about being accountable to "higher" standards of conduct and competence. The leadership of the APS talks about their accountability to the "highest" standards.

Surveys indicate an overwhelming percentage of parents and community members want public schools to teach children about character and honest accountability to higher standards of conduct.

The School Board, by unanimous resolution, link, promised the community that they would make character education a priority in the curriculum. They promised;

"... the core curriculum should continue to give explicit attention to character development as an ongoing art of school instruction..."

They made a solemn promise and commitment to the community, to use the Pillars of Character Counts! as their standards; both for students and for themselves as role models.

They later reneged on that commitment and removed from their own standards of conduct, the language that actually held them accountable as role models of the student standards by removing the role modeling clause from their own standards of conduct. It used to read;

In no case shall the standards of conduct for adults be lower
than the standards of conduct for students (the Pillars of Character Counts!).

They removed it and now there are two sets of standards in the APS; the lowest set of standards for adults including senior administrators and board members, and one of the highest sets of standards to hold up in front of students.

You can argue if you want, about the suitability of the Pillars of Character Counts!, link, as a set of standards in general, and as a set of standards for students (and their role models) in particular. That argument has already taken place and their unanimous decision was to adopt them as the standards of conduct for the APS.

The bottom line is, the Pillars of Character Counts! are the set of standards that the board bought into being through school board policy, and they remain the standards until some board action reverses them.

It not OK to simply ignore them. The morally courageous thing to do is to change them above the table; not to whittle away at them in secret; not to kill them surreptitiously by denying the resources to enforce them.

If you ask APS Communications Director Rigo Chavez about APS' investment in character education for the 90,000 of this community's sons and daughters in the APS, he will admit that they have not invested even one thin dime, in any district wide effort to teach students that their character counts!

That is likely the only thing he will admit about the district's abandonment of character education for students.

He will not, for instance, admit that no one in the entire leadership of the APS is actually accountable as a role model of the standards they establish and enforce upon students.




photo Mark Bralley