If you teach kids to pay attention to character, then their character will transform.”
Perhaps more than any other teacher at the school, Witter had made a concerted effort to get his students to pay attention to character. I visited Witter’s class one morning that winter to observe something that David Levin called dual-purpose instruction, teachers deliberately working explicit talk about character strengths into every lesson. Levin wanted math teachers to use the character strengths in word problems; he explained that history teachers could use them in classes about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. And when I arrived in Witter’s class, he was leading a discussion on Chinua Achebe’s novel
“Sure, a trait can backfire,” Witter said. “Too much grit, like Okonkwo, you start to lose your ability to have empathy for other people. If you’re so gritty that you don’t understand why everyone’s complaining about how hard things are, because nothing’s hard for you, because you’re Mr. Grit, then you’re going to have a hard time being kind. Even love—being too loving might make you the kind of person who can get played.” There was a ripple of knowing laughter from the students. “So, yes, character is something you have to be careful about. Character strengths can become character weaknesses.”
When I spoke to Witter after the class, he told me that some teachers at KIPP Infinity still weren’t convinced of the essential premise behind the report card: that character can change. “That has been part of the process, teachers getting comfortable with this idea. In order to really buy into the character report card, you have to believe in malleable character, and I don’t know if every teacher is there yet. I mean, how many times have you heard a grownup say, ‘That’s just how I am! That’s me. Get used to it!’? But if you don’t believe that it applies to you, then how can you believe that it applies to children?”
I saw Witter again on report-card night, which at KIPP Infinity middle school fell on a chilly Thursday at the beginning of February. Report-card night is always a big deal at KIPP schools—parents are strongly urged to attend, and at Infinity, almost all of them do—but this particular evening carried an extra level of anxiety for both the administrators and the parents because students would be receiving their very first character report cards, and no one knew quite what to expect.
Logistically, the character report card had been a challenge to pull off for Brunzell and his colleagues. Teachers at three of the four KIPP middle schools in New York City had to grade every one of their students on each of the twenty-four character indicators, and more than a few of them found the process a little daunting. And now that report-card night had arrived, they had an even bigger challenge: explaining to parents just how those precise figures, rounded to the second decimal place, summed up their children’s characters. I sat with Witter for a while on a bench down the hall from the band room, listening as he talked through the character report card with Faith Flemister, an African American woman wearing dark red lipstick and a black knit cap, and her son, Juaquin Bennett, a tall, hefty eighth-grader in a gray hooded sweatshirt.
“For the past few years we’ve been working on a project to create a clearer picture for parents about the character of your child,” Witter explained to Flemister. “The categories that we ended up putting together represent qualities that have been studied and determined to be indicators of success. They mean you’re more likely to go to college. More likely to find a good job. Even surprising things, like they mean you’re more likely to get married, or more likely to have a family. So we think these are really important.”
Flemister nodded, and Witter began to work his way down the scores on Juaquin’s character report card, starting with the good news: Every teacher had scored him as a perfect 5 on “Is polite to adults and peers,” and he did almost as well on “Keeps temper in check.” These were both indicators for interpersonal self-control.
“I can tell this is a real strength for you,” Witter said, turning to Juaquin. “This kind of self-control is something you’ve developed incredibly well. So that makes me think we need to start looking at, What’s something we can target? And the first thing that jumps out at me is this.” Witter pulled out a green felt-tip marker and circled one indicator on Juaquin’s report card. “‘Pays attention and resists distraction,’” Witter read aloud; this was an indicator for academic self-control. “That’s a little lower than some of the other numbers. Why do you think that is?”
“I talk too much in class,” Juaquin said a little sheepishly, looking down at his black sneakers. “I sometimes stare off into space and don’t pay attention.”
The three of them talked over a few strategies to help Juaquin focus more in class, and by the end of the fifteen-minute conversation, Flemister seemed convinced by the new approach. “The strong points are not a surprise,” she said to Witter as he got up to talk to another family. “That’s just the type of person Juaquin is. But it’s good how you pinpoint what he can do to make things easier on himself. Then maybe his grades will pick up.”
17. Climbing the Mountain
If each student’s first character report card represents the beginning of a conversation he’ll have with teachers and administrators at KIPP about his character and how to improve it, then a woman named Jane Martinez Dowling is responsible for the other end of that process. Dowling runs the New York office of KIPP Through College, KIPP’s alumni support program, overseeing twenty or so counselors working out of shared office space on the eighth floor of a tall stone building a block from Wall Street. In all, New York KIPP Through College is responsible for about seven hundred KIPP graduates, half still in high school and the other half making their way, with varying degrees of success, through college.
The official KIPP goal for college completion is to have 75 percent of all KIPP middle-school graduates complete a degree from a four-year college within six years of graduating from high school. If you recall that the actual six-year college-graduation rate for Tyrell Vance’s class was 21 percent, you get an idea of the challenge Dowling faces. When I visited her office on a cold morning in February of 2011, she handed me a detailed spreadsheet that showed college-attainment data for each KIPP cohort. The numbers were definitely moving in the right direction: the six-year graduation rate had gone up from 21 percent, for the Class of 2003, Tyrell Vance’s class, to 46 percent, for the Class of 2005. On the day I visited, Dowling was focused especially on the Class of 2007, which was just about to reach the four-year mark—four years out of high school—the point when the first students could, in theory, be graduating with BAs. Only 26 percent of the students were on track to graduate in four years, according to the spreadsheet, but another 18 percent were still enrolled in college, meaning that they still had the potential to graduate in five or six years.
The Class of 2007, Dowling told me, was academically more talented than the ones that had come before. Many of the students had gone to exclusive boarding schools for high school, and the list of colleges they were attending included Vanderbilt and Columbia. “What we have found is that it’s the character piece that has held some of them back,” Dowling explained. “There are students who have incredible intellect but don’t necessarily channel it in the right direction. There are lots of kids who struggle with procrastination issues, even though they have the ability to get their work done. There are students who are dealing with real social and emotional issues.” Seven of the fifty-seven kids in that graduating class, Dowling told me, had experienced serious depression in college. “It’s especially pronounced in that class,” she said. “They’re dealing with family issues, or they have issues just dealing with their peer groups, and that has really held some of them back.” Dowling emphasized that most if not all of the kids she was talking about were still on track to graduate. “They’re good kids,” she said. “But the impact of poverty catches up even with children who are resilient.”
She gave me a copy of KIPP’s seventy-six-page
