Measuring Character Education

After reading the article Teaching for Hope by Werner (2008.) I was left with several questions. Two of those questions were the following:

You mention that it is the role of the teacher is to discern what inferences students draw from conversations and text are reasonable - how do we do this without expressing our own potential bias?

As a teacher in an international setting, there are certain topics that are taboo within  the culture of the country in which I teach - How do you build and instill confidence in learning about global issues when administration calls upon teachers to avoid certain  topics due to cultural sensitivities?

Recently, I came across an article in a Maclean’s magazine that touched on parts of the aforementioned questions and left me asking even more.  

Campbell (2017), in the article Schools are teaching values. But whose values?  addresses the challenges with teaching character education  in schools when the value systems of all stakeholders  are not so easily defined nor shared by everyone.  While many teachers see the necessity in this type of education, “critics wonder if character is even teachable, let alone measurable” (Campbell, 2017). Teachers that were interviewed believed that this type of education “aims to create helpful citizens”, but this begs the question...helpful global citizens or helpful citizens within the context of where the values being taught are shared? Does this teach students to think that a certain way of thinking is better than another?

The article goes on to discuss the possibility of beginning to “incorporate character assessments into school accountability, affecting their funding” (Campbell, 2017).  This begs yet another question … how would such a scoring system account for cultural biases?

While I work at a school that practices character education, I am not convinced that attributing a score to reflect one's ability to imbue each value is the right way to go.  What do you think?

Image retrieved from:
Character Education — The Official Website of the Arizona State Department of Education. (n.d.). Retrieved March 4, 2017, from http://www.azed.gov/character-education/
References:
Campbell, M. (2017, February 28). Schools are teaching values. But whose values? - Macleans.ca. Retrieved March 4, 2017, from http://www.macleans.ca/society/schools-are-teaching-values-but-whose-values/

Werner, W. (2008). Teaching for hope. In R. Case & P. Clark (Eds.), The anthology of social studies, volume 2: Issues and strategies for secondary teachers (pp. 193–197). Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press.