This opinion article appeared in the New York Times several months ago, and I sent it right off to my son and daughter-in-law, who had just given birth to our first grandchild. I think it's fascinating, and based on what appear to be very solid studies. Here's a snippet, but I'd recommend reading the whole thing if this issue interests.

Not many parents would say "you got C's on your report card, but were kind and helpful to you classmates. Here is a 10 spot." Just not happening. I think expecting good grades and being helpful to others can be demanded by parents concurrently.

See the NYT article I posted above: neither rewards nor praising behavior makes kids kinder, studies show. Surprisingly, those tactics, which may work for achievement, have the opposite effect on moral behavior. What works is praising character, not behavior. What works is "You're a really kind person," not "That was a kind thing to do." And rewards don't work at all.

It's very interesting.

I would hope parents wouldn't reward for being kind or even volunteering.

K - 12 they, their schools, and their teachers are all under enormous pressure to show "achievement" on high-stakes tests doesn't help. It means that they hear that message all day, every day.


That said, I find that the vast majority of young people have a well of empathy to draw on; they just need the right environment to bring it to the forefront of their lives. I know that my little school has worked very hard to balance achievement mandates with developing whole people, and it shows. It's also, frankly, a real, exhausting, and demoralizing struggle, working against the overall environment, in the system and in the general population, that we are all incompetent, overpaid, lazy jerks who have to be bullied into doing our jobs, constantly threatened, and constantly micro-managed to make sure we don't do anything that doesn't directly address test scores.

When their kids are threatened with not graduating from high school without demonstrating "achievement" on high-stakes tests; when the job market is bad, and they see all the competition out there, it's no wonder they, as well as teachers, hammer that "achievement" mentality into kids.

Perhaps the first step might be families, all of the general public, supporting us and allow us to deliberately create school environments focused on whole, healthy development instead of high-stakes tests. Of course, to do that, the nation en masse would have to reject the deform movement, the privatization movement, the high-stakes testing movement, and those politicians taking money, casting votes, and creating policy for those movements.

she had to complete 150 hours of community service, in addition to having very tough academic hurdles to pass (it was an International Baccalaureate program at an inner-city public high school). She chose to volunteer at a hospital and at a nursing home. Yeah, it was forced on her, but she truly liked it and learned from it, and I liked the idea that public service was treated as an (almost) equal with academics.

My son had to do "Mitzvah Corps" in 6th or 7th grade (can't remember) at our temple for a year. (A "mitzvah" is a good deed.) Because he was so painfully shy, I often went with him: to a nursing home, to a food kitchen at a homeless shelter, to a home for mentally disabled adults. It was kind of scary for him. When he had to do a year of community service at his high school (now in a different state), he chose to work at a local historical society, doing cataloguing, etc. That way, he didn't have to interact with people as much--he was the opposite of our daughter. Later, when he was in college, he did work with kids teaching math during the summer. He took on one particularly bright kid from a very impoverished inner-city middle school, and this one-on-one really worked for him: he was really determined that this promising young kid's potential not be stifled or wasted by a system that couldn't nurture his abilities.

All kids need to find their niche, depending on their interests and abilities, in helping their communities or fellow citizens. I was lucky that my kids' schools put an emphasis on this.

an IB school for a few years; have sent my students into IB programs when they left our school, and have invited them back to do some of their community service in my classroom. Unfortunately, my district dropped the small IB offering it had, saying that "Common Core is enough like IB that it can just replace it." Which, of course, is ludicrous.

My little school has all kinds of opportunities for public service, and our kids are really active. Some of the activities are organized and run by teachers from the classroom, and some by our full-time counselor. We're lucky to HAVE our counselor; he helps us step outside the "achievement" bubble. Many schools and districts across the nation don't fund a full time counselor at every small school site.

along with art, music, and athletics as part of a well-rounded education. IB is of course exemplary, but it could serve students across the board. I think this could be especially true in poorer communities ... Working with the elderly or younger children a few hours a week develops empathy and insight into one's own life.

I know all that is hard to fit in when basic reading skills are at stake. But perhaps one could help lead to the other.

districts and schools are threatened with take over, and admins and teachers are threatened with poor evaluations and firing based on those test scores. When the people writing the laws and paying the bills define the job as producing test scores, and lay out punishments, our whole lives revolve around documenting proof that we spend public time and resources on test scores, and nothing but test scores.

So I'm not going to lay the blame on the usual whipping boy.

It's about money, and it's about doing anything outside the basic curriculum: things like art and music have been the first cuts made for several decades, and service programs never existed. Back in the early 90s our school district was trying to cut all kinds of programs. We had to raise a ruckus to save "real" art versus "art on a cart" for our elementary school. And, aside from the IB program housed within the one high school, there were no service requirements, ever.

As for IB, it's an expensive program to administer; we had to go to the State Capitol a number of times to save it. The teacher training alone is costly, but we were able to convince the legislature that it was a valuable asset worth saving.

when the high-stakes testing movement began at the state level, and when neoliberalism gained purchase in the Democratic Party through Bill Clinton.

I started working in public education in 1983. It's been a long, slow, frog-boiling experience.

high-stakes testing wasn't introduced in my state until the latter years of the 1990s (I know because I began to tutor high-school kids then, so they could pass them). I was talking about cuts in the very early 1990s, and not to high-schools, where the testing was introduced, but to a K-3 elementary school, where nothing but the same kind of once-a-year basic skills tests that I myself had in the 1950s were the norm.

No, the budget crunches that occurred in the 90s were due to other issues, in my area most notably due to transportation costs, and to huge huge increases in things like health insurance premiums for employees. (There was also the "culture wars," that made arts a dirty word all around.) Sadly, saving on transportation costs led to one of the most deleterious changes to the system of all--far more serious than testing: the return to "neighborhood schools" (read: "separate but equal&quot and a retreat from the integration measures that had led to highly innovative programming and economic diversity in the student bodies.

We can't blame everything on "testing." It's an issue, but focusing on it exclusively obscures the many other important issues that have impacted education over the years. I fear that the left's rabid, single-minded focus on testing (and labor issues)—as if getting rid of it will somehow lead to the restitution of some golden age that never existed—is allowing significant other issues to be sidelined or totally ignored.

It incubated in Texas, CA, and a few other places in the 90s. In CA, it got started under Pete Wilson. We had high-stakes STAR tests and API well before AYP, then we had BOTH.

As far as budget cuts go? I can't speak to what was happening in other states. In the state I did most of my teaching in, CA, those education cuts started when Prop 13 was enacted in 1978.

Of course, it's not like everything was immediately cut; it was, as mentioned before, a long, slow process. Passage of Prop 13 in CA is thought to have helped elect Reagan, who was NOT a friend to public education.

"Ranking" is by context and predicts how often a given value will be displayed. Everybody's empathetic. Some have it more highly ranked, so it's shown in more contexts.

It's not a "yes or no" thing. Stalin was caring and compassionate--in the right circumstances. So was Hitler. Monsters just have a lot of other values more highly ranked. I've seen very kind people screw over their kids because they ranked.

Most rankings are set by peers and by parents. Teachers don't have much to say about this if the parents are doing their job. They hand out As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs. And parents get to put the spin on them. "You got an F because you didn't do your homework. If you want to get an A, work hard and be content with the time left over." Instead, parents mostly say, "My kid's smart and deserves an A." They don't want the substance of achievement; they want the outward trappings. It's all socially constructed. You know algebra if the report card says you passed. And if you didn't pass, well, then you'd better have documented all the ways you tried to help the kid, esp. if the parent is (a) loud, (b) well-connected, (c) if the parent has a lawyer.

The problem with "achievement" is that it's all come to be external-based. Most kids I know don't care about achievement--they care about grades. That A is all the achievement they need to know. They get a 50 on the test, if they're given points to bring their grade up to a 90 so they get an A they're happy as punch. You can't fail a kid if he passed the standardized test for your topic; the test is wrong if you passed the kid and he failed the test. All that matters is the outward trappings. "Ignorant dolt with a gold star" = "I'm high achieving, I have a gold star." "Cruel monster wearing a cross" = "I'm morally high achieving, I have a cross." They look to external things instead of internal things. "Happiness" is an achievement; achievements are always indicated by external properties.

Good kids are nearly always happy adults because they carry their morality inside of them and judge themselves by that morality. Happy kids are frequently unhappy adults because they judged themselves by stuff and what others say, and that is often superficial. We make hay by telling kids and their parents why, exactly, they should focus on what they have and why they should be unhappy and be grasping or be resentful. There's a fine line between contentedness and complacency, between aspiring to be better or more prosperous and being greedy or self-centered. Just as there's a fine line between being "happy" over the long term and smiling/laughing in the short term.