Paul Tough’s article for the New York Times Magazine Special Issue on Education (What if the Secret to Success is Failure, 9/14/11) chronicles the efforts of administrators at two schools to implement a character education program. Teachers at KIPP charter schools in New York City use a character report card (pdf) to grade students on 7 character traits: zest, grit, self-control, optimism, gratitude, curiosity, and social intelligence.
The report cards are essentially a middle-school version of the personality tests corporations use to pre-screen potential hires (and to effectively exclude autistics, introverts, pessimists, authority-questioners, union organizers, and other neurodivergent “undesirables” from the interview process). Assessing an employee’s social communication style may be relevant when choosing candidates for a sales or customer service position, but there is no evidence that personality tests effectively predict an applicant’s qualification for, say, an engineering or data entry job. Yet approximately 30% of American companies use personality tests, in a wide variety of industries.1
I see a lot of problems with KIPP’s attempt to assign a numeric value to children’s social intelligence. I don’t believe social intelligence can be accurately or objectively quantified, and I am particularly concerned about the way this evaluation will unfairly penalize kids with autism and other disabilities affecting social communication.
Is social intelligence measurable?
I owe most of the ideas in this section, as well as the title of this essay, to Amanda Forest Vivian’s brilliant Social skills don’t exist series (summarized in the final post: Social model of social failure). Amanda argues that social “skills” depends on context (and don’t exist outside the context of a specific interaction). Social success (or failure) is nothing more than the match or mismatch of the temperaments, interests, values, moods, and goals of the interacting individuals.
People who are routinely rejected, excluded, and bullied are often described has having “poor social skills.” Every social interaction they attempt seems to go wrong, so it must be their fault. We say “the common denominator is you,” or “If you meet one asshole, you’ve met an asshole. If you meet 10 assholes, maybe you’re the asshole.”
But as Emily at Mosaic of Minds explains (in her post Why Social Success is not a “Skill”), there is no way to separate out and measure each individual’s contribution to a social interaction. And maybe the real common denominator for people perceived as “social failures” is our society’s acceptance and promotion of bullying.
We assign the “poor social skills” label to the people who are excluded and rejected; the bullies and bystanders are inevitably the kids labeled “socially successful.” This system neatly blames the victims and justifies the bullying: socially isolated people deserve to be alone because they have bad social skills.
The KIPP report cards use three “indicators” to measure social intelligence, all of which ignore power imbalances inherent in social relationships and rely on teachers’ ability to observe and interpret other people’s behavior:
Able to find solutions during conflicts with others: Kids who are always on the losing side of the power balance are simply not in a position to negotiate the kind of solutions that I suspect teachers are looking for here. My childhood “solution” to conflict with others was to avoid others whenever possible.
Knows when and how to include others: How do you assess this for a kid who is systematically excluded by peers? You have to have something to offer: a conversation, a party, a game — something that is appealing to other people — and then you can invite others to join you. Without that, “including others” is meaningless.
Demonstrates respect for feelings of others: This one depends on teachers’ ability to guess at the intent behind behavior and body language (what counts as a successful “demonstration”?), and is subject to misinterpretation and abuse. Neurotypical teachers will inevitably misinterpret autistic behavior more frequently than the behavior of NT kids, because they are less likely to understand it.
When middle school teachers assign social intelligence scores, they are not using laboratory observation to quantify thousands of individual social interactions. They will most likely assign high scores to the kids with a lot of friends; the ones who appear likeable, popular, and charismatic; the ones whose temperaments and social communication styles mesh best with the style of the teachers doing the evaluating.
Teachers, like everyone else in the world, come to the table with some amount of unexamined racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. Many are completely ignorant about neurological differences that affect social communication. The best we can hope for is that teachers work to become aware of and acknowledge their biases. But I don’t see any evidence that that’s happening in a systematic way in the schools implementing character education programs.
Even if we could objectively measure social intelligence (or any other “character trait”), should we?
KIPP school administrators’ justification for the character education program is that “character” is a good predictor of which kids will finish college. KIPP schools in New York serve low-income kids; the student body is 95% African American or Latino. These kids face significant barriers to college entrance and completion, and some research shows that students with high grit, optimism, and social intelligence scores are more likely to get a college degree.
I have no doubt that this is true. The kids who are likely to be assessed as “socially intelligent” are the ones at the top of the pecking order (within this group of low-income students of color). This is inherent in the way “social intelligence” is defined. The kids with poor social intelligence grades are at the bottom. They might be fat, or queer, or disabled, or ambiguously gendered; they might speak English with an accent or show other evidence of imperfect cultural assimilation; they might have physical or behavioral peculiarities that mark them as outcasts. At school, they are bullied by classmates and teachers. Outside of school, they are bullied by cops, health care and social service gatekeepers, random people on the street, and often their own parents.
These kids are less likely than their peers to complete college, not because they have poorer “social intelligence” or some kind of character flaw, but because they are victims of additional layers of institutional oppression, beyond the race and class oppression they share with their classmates.
Character report cards contribute to a feedback loop: kids who are incorrectly labeled as having “poor social intelligence” are already struggling. They are then further penalized when the report card is passed on to college admissions departments or potential employers. Codifying and assigning a grade to these traits just reinforces existing discrimination.
What might character assessment look like in practice?
As a high school student, I was never diagnosed with anything other than Bad Attitude (or Emotional Problems, if people were feeling generous). But my perpetual flat affect, poor eye contact, social isolation, and notable lack of school spirit would have guaranteed me a failing grade on the KIPP character assessment.
Although I’m mostly concerned with the “social intelligence” part of the assessment, I also scored my middle school / high school self on a few other KIPP character traits:
Zest (“Actively participates, shows enthusiasm.” This one seems to be code for “extroversion”): Fail. I slouched, sat in the back row, spoke in a barely audible monotone, and avoided participating whenever possible.
Curiosity (“Asks and answers questions to deepen understanding”): Fail. I never asked questions in class, because I am introverted, have a high level of social anxiety, and am rarely able to find an opening in the conversation. None of this has anything to do with my level of curiosity.
Optimism (“Believes that effort will improve his or her future”): Fail. While I agree that effort matters, even my 13-year-old self knew that it mattered much less than everybody pretended it did. Grading kids on their belief in the “bootstraps” myth of American class mobility is another way to say that anyone who fails just didn’t try hard enough.
If you fail an employer’s personality test, you don’t get hired. Students who score poorly on a character report card still have to go to school every day. But now they are subjected to a specific curriculum that aims to improve their “character flaws.”
Many of these “indicators of poor character” are hard-wired aspects of personality (introversion, pessimism, social anxiety) or coping mechanisms (my tendency to hide in the back row, my aversion to pep rallies and team projects) developed over a lifetime of social rejection.
No amount of “turn that frown upside down” will make an introvert into an extrovert. Threats of job loss or academic failure may inspire some people to fake optimism and enthusiasm, but they do nothing to fundamentally “improve” someone’s character. On the contrary, these threats hurt kids’ self-esteem and spark long-simmering resentment of authority. Anyone forced to fake it finds ways to rebel beneath the radar.
For people like me, “social intelligence” report cards are a bad idea. They reinforce existing power imbalances and load an extra layer of discrimination on kids already at the bottom of the pack.
Who benefits from character education?
The two schools compared in the New York Times Magazine story present very different justifications for their character education programs. KIPP schools serve poor students of color, and KIPP administrators believe that character education will help these kids complete college.
The other school implementing the program is Riverdale, a private prep school for the very rich (pre-K tuition starts at $38,500 a year). The title of the article (What if the secret to success is failure?) refers to the Riverdale headmaster’s concern that rich kids have too few opportunities to fail. Their success is preordained by their race and class privilege, but they lack a sense of accomplishment and the ability to recover from setbacks.
Character education, the theory goes, might help rich kids learn “grit” by introducing some contrived obstacles (such as receiving a less-than-perfect score on a character report card). The headmaster believes that learning to bounce back from failure is a more important skill for lifelong happiness than anything in Riverdale’s elite academic curriculum.
This may be true, but the possibility that Riverdale students may lack some sort of self-actualization despite their near guaranteed academic, financial, and social success does not strike me as the most compelling problem of our time. I can’t support an educational experiment that marginally increases the happiness of a tiny group of elite prep school students while heaping additional discrimination on neurodivergent kids of every color and class. And yes, I’m aware that I just lost some zest points for that attitude.
- The Autistic Self Advocacy Network is investigating employers’ use of personality tests to screen job applicants as part of applications for employment and the broader hiring process. If you live in the United States and have recently been turned down for a job that used personality tests as part of the application process, please share your story here. [↩]