Behavioral Study on Students Stirs Debate

The Fairfax initiative, prompted by the board, comes as schools nationwide are pushing to enhance character education, emphasizing the teaching of social and emotional skills. The thinking is that students need more than reading and math skills mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

"More districts are finding that just focusing on [test scores] is not getting them there," said Merle Schwartz, director of education and research at the Character Education Partnership, an advocacy group in Washington. "There is something missing. But how to do this systematically and how to measure it? We don't have all the answers yet."

In 2006, after 33 public meetings, the board approved the goals for life skills and sought to define behavior that reflects sound moral character, such as "Model honesty and integrity" and "Respect people, property and authority." School officials, at the board's direction, then hunted for relevant indicators to measure progress and analyzed them.

In some cases, sufficient data were not available to make a meaningful analysis of some goals. Officials said they intend to revise report cards and create surveys for teachers, students and high school graduates to assess life-skills goals.

School Board Chairman Daniel G. Storck (Mount Vernon) emphasized that the analysis is preliminary and acknowledged that the board needs to evaluate whether a race-based analysis is appropriate and helps the board further its goal of helping every child in the school system acquire these skills.

"What we are doing [now] and we are doing three years from now will probably be pretty different," he said.

Schools Superintendent Jack D. Dale said some administrators were "surprised" by the findings that emerged from the analysis. He said looking more deeply into the data could lead to new understanding about social and cultural differences in students, something he views as critical in a system with students from about 200 countries.

Board member Ilryong Moon (At Large), a Korean American, said he was "perplexed" that disparities in measures of character education seemed to echo academic achievement gaps.

Educators typically examine racial and ethnic patterns in academic data to spot problems and direct resources to students who need them most. Members of the NAACP's Fairfax chapter criticized the school system's use of such methods for the character education analysis.

"I don't think you can classify a whole group and say they have lower character or morality," said Janice Winters, a member of the chapter's education committee. "It sends a poor message to the students: 'Oh, I'm black, and they don't expect me to behave.' "

Winters said the school system should take steps to ensure that teachers are unbiased in their assessment of students. "That has been an issue over time," she said.

Some school officials agreed with the importance of teacher training. They said, for example, that there should be a more uniform definition of disruptive behavior.

Moon and some other board members said it is valuable to learn about differences in the way students are being assessed.

"Do we just brush this aside as if it never existed or do we do something constructive?" Moon said.

Moon said he wants school officials to study whether teachers "have a full understanding of whom they teach, and their different learning styles and family backgrounds."