college-admissions director or a corporate human-resources manager selecting entry-level employees, wouldn’t you like to know which ones had scored highest in grit or optimism or zest? And if you were a parent of a KIPP student, wouldn’t you want to know how your son or daughter stacked up against the rest of the class in character as well as in reading ability? For Levin, the answer to all these questions was a clear yes, and as soon as he got the final list of indicators from Duckworth and Peterson, he started working to turn it into a specific, concise assessment that he could hand out to students and parents at KIPP’s New York City schools twice a year: the first-ever character report card.
Back at Riverdale, though, the idea of a character report card made Randolph nervous. “I have a philosophical issue with quantifying character,” he explained to me one afternoon. “With my school’s specific population, at least, as soon as you set up something like a report card, you’re going to have a bunch of people doing test prep for it. I don’t want to come up with a metric around character that could then be gamed. I would hate it if that’s where we ended up.”
Still, he did agree with Levin that the inventory Duckworth and Peterson had compiled could be a useful tool in communicating with students about character. And so he took what one Riverdale teacher described to me as a “viral approach” to spreading the idea of this new method of assessing character throughout the Riverdale community. He talked about character at parent nights, asked pointed questions in staff meetings, connected like- minded members of his faculty and encouraged them to come up with new programs. In the winter of 2011, Riverdale students in the fifth and sixth grade took the twenty-four-indicator survey, and their teachers rated them as well. The staff discussed the results, but they weren’t shared with students or parents, and they certainly weren’t labeled report cards.
Randolph’s deliberate pace is in part a consequence of his personal style—he enjoys what he calls the dialogic process, meandering conversations that gradually change people’s minds. It also has a lot to do with the culture of Riverdale, a school where teachers are hired not for any particular interest in pedagogy but for their mastery of the content of their field. “Teachers come here because they want to have a level of independence,” Randolph explained. “In theory, I could probably say, ‘We’re just going to do this, and that’s the way it is.’ But everybody would say, ‘Get lost.’”
As I spent time at Riverdale, though, it became apparent to me that the debate over character at the school wasn’t just about how best to evaluate and improve students’ character and how quickly to adopt new ways of doing so. It went deeper than that, to the question of what
When I asked Randolph about CARE, he grimaced, a revolutionary forced to tip his cap to tradition. “I see the character strengths as CARE 2.0,” he explained delicately. “I’d basically like to take all of this new character language and say that we’re in the next generation of CARE.”
In fact, the character-strength approach of Seligman and Peterson isn’t an expansion of programs like CARE; if anything, it is a repudiation of them. In 2008, a national organization called the Character Education Partnership published a paper that divided character education into two categories: programs that develop “moral character,” which embodies ethical values like fairness, generosity, and integrity; and those that address “performance character,” which includes values like effort, diligence, and perseverance. The CARE program falls firmly on the “moral character” side of the divide, but the seven strengths that Randolph and Levin chose for their schools leaned much more heavily toward performance character: while they do have a moral component, strengths like zest, optimism, social intelligence, and curiosity aren’t particularly heroic; they make you think of Steve Jobs or Bill Clinton more than Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi.
The two teachers Randolph chose to oversee the school’s character initiative were K. C. Cohen, the guidance counselor for the middle and upper schools, and Karen Fierst, a learning specialist in the lower school. Cohen was friendly and thoughtful, in her mid-thirties, a graduate of Fieldston, the private school just down the road from Riverdale. She was intensely interested in character development, and, like Randolph, she was worried about the character of Riverdale students. But she was not convinced by the seven character strengths that Riverdale had chosen. “When I think of good character, I think, ‘Are you fair? Are you honest in dealings with other people? Are you a cheater?’” she told me. “I don’t think so much about ‘Are you tenacious? Are you a hard worker?’ I think, ‘Are you a good person?’”
Cohen’s vision of character was much closer to moral character than performance character, and during the months I visited Riverdale, that vision remained the dominant one. When I spent a day at the school in the late winter of 2011, sitting in on a variety of classes and meetings, messages about behavior and values were everywhere, but those messages stayed almost entirely in the moral dimension. It was a hectic day at the middle school—it was pajama day, plus there was a morning assembly, and then on top of that, the kids who were going on the two-week class trip to Bordeaux for spring break had to leave early in order to make their overnight flight to Paris. The topic for the assembly was heroes, and half a dozen students stood up in front of their classmates— about three hundred and fifty kids in all—and each made a brief presentation about a particular hero he or she had chosen: Ruby Nell Bridges, the African American girl who was part of the first group to integrate the schools in New Orleans in 1960; Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor whose self-immolation had helped spark the recent revolt in that country; the actor and activist Paul Robeson; the boxer Manny Pacquiao.
In the assembly, in classes, and in conversations with different students, I heard a lot of talk about values and ethics, and the values that were emphasized tended to be social values: inclusion, tolerance, diversity. (I heard a lot more about black history at Riverdale than I did at the KIPP schools I visited.) A photo exhibit at one end of the school’s gorgeous sunlight-drenched cafeteria featured portraits of pointedly diverse families—gay couples, blind parents, mixed-race families, adopted kids. One eighth-grade girl I asked about character said that for her and her friends, the biggest issue was inclusion—who was invited to whose bat mitzvah; who was being shunned on Facebook. Character, as far as I could tell, was defined at Riverdale mostly in terms of helping other people—or at least not hurting their feelings. I heard much less talk about how possessing character strengths might help a person lead a more successful life.
Yet Randolph told me that he had concerns about a character program that didn’t go beyond those kinds of nice-guy values. “The danger with character is if you just revert to these general terms—respect, honesty, tolerance—it seems really vague,” he said. “If I stand in front of the kids and just say, ‘It’s really important for you to respect each other,’ I think they glaze over. But if you say, ‘Well, actually you need to exhibit self-control,’ or you explain the value of social intelligence—this will help you collaborate more effectively—then it seems a bit more tangible.”
When I spoke to Karen Fierst, the teacher who was overseeing the character project for the Riverdale lower school, she said she was worried that it would be a challenge to convince the students and their parents that there was anything in the twenty-four character strengths that might actually benefit them. For KIPP kids, she said, the notion that character could help them get through college was a powerful lure, one that would motivate them to take the strengths seriously. For kids at Riverdale, though, there was no question that they were going to graduate from college. “It will just happen,” Fierst explained. “It happened to every generation in their family before them. And so it’s harder to get them to invest in this idea. For KIPP students, learning these strengths is partly about trying to demystify what makes other people successful—kind of like, ‘We’re letting you in on the secret of what successful people are like.’ But kids here already live in a successful community. They’re not depending on their teachers to give them the information on how to be successful.”
12. Affluence
Dwight Vidale teaches English to middle- and high-school students at Riverdale. He is a Riverdale alumnus, class of 2001, and as an African American, he is something of a rarity in the Riverdale faculty lounge; when I met
