Smart & Good High Schools - The Flippen Group

CHAPTER 2: Performance Character and Moral CharacterAn Ethic of ExcellenceGiven that character, rightly understood, includes thequest for excellence as well as ethics, the literature onexcellence becomes essential for guiding a charactercenteredapproach to school reform. 1One important resource in the recent educational literatureon excellence is Ron Berger’s An Ethic of Excellence:Building a Culture of Craftsmanship With Students. 2 Bergerwas a public school teacher in a small, rural communityin western Massachusetts for 25 years and has worked withHarvard’s Project Zero and the Carnegie Foundation forthe Advancement of Teaching. He argues that “an ethicof excellence” must be at the very center of the educationalenterprise. When it is, students of all ages do amazingthings.Across the country, Berger points out, there are schoolswhere students are remarkably good at something. Forexample, he cites tiny Cuba City High School (Cuba City,Wisconsin), with a graduating class of 75, which has arecord in athletics that’s hard to believe: In the past 30years, it has won 14 state championships in a wide rangeof boys’ and girls’ sports. There are other public schoolsthat dominate state competitions in orchestra, chess,wrestling, visual arts, debate, and essay contests, and havedone so for years, sometimes generations.Every year, these schools take whatever students they happento get and make them stars. And, as Berger notes,this phenomenon isn’t limited to special areas. “CentralPark East High School in Harlem and the Fenway Schoolin Boston work with urban students, almost all of whomare low-income and non-white, and for whom the predictedgraduation statistics are dismal. Both of these schoolsgraduate 95% of their seniors and send about 90% on tocollege.” 3 When students enter a culture thatprogram serving urban youth, whose reading and writingrequirements would be daunting to most college students,and so on.What is the secret of success for these schools and programs?Berger’s answer and ours: Excellence is born from a culture.The way to develop excellence and ethics in the characterof individual students is to create a school culture thatembodies those qualities.The character of a school’s culture—the norms thatdefine how everyone is expected to work and behave—has a huge impact. All students, especially teenagers, wantto “fit in,” and when they enter a culture that demandsand supports excellence, they do their best work in order to fitinto it.Schools must create a peer culturewhere it’s cool to care about excellence.Individual students may have different potential, but ingeneral, as Berger argues, their attitudes and achievementsare determined by the culture around them.Schools, therefore, must do everything possible to createa school culture “where the peer culture celebrates investmentin school,” where it’s cool to care about excellence. Thenschools must reach out to families and the community toask them for help in supporting this norm. 4demands and supports excellence, theydo their best work in order to fit in.In our research on high schools, we encountered thesame phenomenon: a forensics team that worked feverishlyto hone their research and speaking skills and yearafter year won national or state championships; choirswhose diligent pursuit of excellence led to consistent tophonors at state and national competitions; an academicLearning is not attained by chance. It must be sought for with ardor and attendedto with diligence.Smart & Good High Schools—ABIGAIL ADAMS