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The recent attention given to the character report cards being developed in KIPP charter schools raises yet another set of important questions about the wisdom of reducing human potential to a set of measurements. The report cards, based on character strengths identified by two prominent psychology professors, purport to gauge a student's strength of character in seven areas - self-control, optimism, grit, gratitude, zest, curiosity and 'social intelligence' (sample).

Recently, there's been controversy over the motion picture "The Hunger Games" and the casting choice for Rue, a character that the book's author, Suzanne Collins, intended to be dark-skinned at the very least. Amandla Stenberg, a young black actress, plays Rue in a cast that also includes rocker Lenny Kravitz and actress Kimiko Gelman. Some fans expressed disappointment all over social media that they didn't think the character should be black and that they hadn't envisioned a black child as this character to whom they gravitated to so ardently in print. One search on Twitter for Rue leads to a set of tweets ranging from subtly questionable to strangely racist. Teens are the predominant target group for this movie. At some point, don't we as a society have to step in and question what we're teaching our children about race?

I read this New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tough about character education at KIPP middle schools in New York City and at Riverdale Country School, an elite private school also in New York City, expecting to be aggravated by it, but I wasn't at all. It was a solid piece of journalism--nuanced, thought provoking, and objective. That being said, I see some real problems in the approach being described.

The school reform movement is obsessed with quantifying outcomes. Whether through standardized test scores, dropout rates or college acceptance rates, the coin of the realm is measurement. Yet there is another side of the story that is largely overlooked. It was highlighted in a cover piece in The New York Times Magazine on Sept. 18. In "What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?," Paul Tough focuses on the importance of developing character. He quite correctly recognizes that without it, students are shortchanged.

"But to apply a letter grade or a numerical ranking to a professional is to radically misunderstand the complex set of qualities that make someone good at what they do. It is an effort by economists and statisticians to quantify activities that are at heart matters of judgment, not productivity. Professionals must be judged by other professionals, by their peers. Nowhere is this more true than among educators, whose success at teaching character, wisdom, and judgment cannot be measured by standardized tests. "

Even beyond grades, I want my students to know that what they're learning is valuable and can be fun. From playing games to reviewing parts of speech and subject-verb agreement to talking about film adaptations and exploring plot and character development, getting creative with the way we teach will be key to fighting end-of-year distractions. What's more important than the grades on my students' report cards or the score on their standardized tests is helping them see the true value of education. We may only have five weeks left, but a lot can happen in that time. My team and I are going to make sure we make the most of it for all our students.

In the years since the publication of "Silenced Dialogue" and the 1995 book it inspired, Other People's Children, the standards-and-accountability school reform movement rose to prominence. Its focus on closing the achievement gap through skills building echoed many of Delpit's commitments, but she found herself troubled by the movement's discontents. Many low-income schools canceled field trips and classes in the arts, sciences and social studies, for example, in order to focus on raising math and reading standardized test scores. Now Delpit is responding in a new book, "Multiplication is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children. (The title quote comes from an African-American boy who, bored and discouraged by the difficulty of his math assignment, proclaimed the subject out-of-reach for kids like himself.) "I am angry that the conversation about educating our children has become so restricted," Delpit writes in the introduction. "What has happened to the societal desire to instill character? To develop creativity? To cultivate courage and kindness?" Here, in an interview with The Nation, Delpit discusses the intelligence of poor children, how she would reform Teach for America, and why college professors should be as focused on closing the achievement gap as K-12 educators are. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

"One can't help but be moved by the characters and story portrayed in Walden Media's film "Won't Back Down." The film is successful in driving home the sense of urgency parents and educators feel to do everything they can to provide the best possible education for their children. That is abundantly evident in this film-it's what I hear as I visit schools across the country, and it's what I heard when I sat down with parent and community groups from across the country last week. We share that pain and frustration. And we firmly believe that every public school should be a school where every parent would want to send his or her child and where every teacher would want to teach. Unfortunately, using the most blatant stereotypes and caricatures I have ever seen-even worse than those in "Waiting for 'Superman'"-the film affixes blame on the wrong culprit: America's teachers unions."

"Would I send my child to this school?" This is a question I asked myself every day while working at Achievement First and helping to build their first high school in Brooklyn, NY in 2009 and 2010. I served as the Director of Student Life at Achievement First Crown Heights High School (now called AF Brooklyn High School), which entailed developing and managing all after-school and summer enrichment programs, building the advisory system for both college skills and character development, counseling students, and organizing and leading community events each week to contribute to school culture. As a member of the founding team, I was involved in almost every aspect of the school, from hiring, to behavior management, to building systems for school culture and discipline, to working with others in the Achievement First network to find and implement best practices for our new school.

"In a conversation about the intractable problems of the Middle East, one of David Grossman's characters in his compelling novel, "To the End of the Land," says, "Who could possibly come up with a new, decisive argument that hasn't been heard?" An equal sense of frustration must lurk in the efforts to construct a reasonable, fair way to assess the performances of public school teachers."

"Recent days has seen a nasty tweet fight break out, as Mayor Bloomberg's proxies - Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, StudentsFirst honcho and former Bloomberg Albany lobbyist Micah Lasher, and former television anchor Campbell Brown - have used the 140 character forum to launch a vicious slander that the UFT protects sexual predators, defending their return to the classroom.  Their argument is that since arbitrators who decide dismissal hearings against tenured teachers are jointly selected by the Department of Education and the UFT, they split the difference in decisions and do not fire teachers who have engaged in sexual misconduct or sexually inappropriate behavior. The only solution, they argue, is to overturn tenure and give the DoE the power of judge, jury and executioner. The UFT has a position of zero tolerance on sexual misconduct, and we have negotiated in our contract the strongest penalties for sexual misconduct in any collective bargaining agreement in the state of New York. If an adult violates the trust that is at the heart of the educator-student relationship with an act of sexual misconduct or with sexually inappropriate behavior, dismissal is the only appropriate response."

But cheating also means that public schools finally care enough about student performance that some ethically challenged educators have chosen to cheat. This is far better than the alternative, where learning is so incidental and non-transparent that people of low character can't be bothered to lie about it. Blaming cheating on the test amounts to infantilizing teachers, moving teaching 180 degrees away from the kind of professionalization that teacher advocates often profess to support.

It is a dangerous and potentially failed thing to manipulate an audience by evoking our tendency to be compassionate for children. I have often used the documentary The Corridor of Shame, concerning the inequity in school funding in my home state of South Carolina, in my education courses both to highlight the corrosive power of poverty in the lives and learning of children and to confront the dishonesty of emotional appeals that do more to harm a valid message than reinforce it.

The book by Brill, who is best known in education circles for exposing New York City's "rubber rooms," is not a Race to the Top exposé, but is part history lesson, part character study, part political gossip column, and part policy analysis.

For those who don't remember the Bobby Ewing letdown in the Dallas television series, let me summarize: Back in the 1980s, the actor who played Bobby left the show and his character was killed, presenting a problem a year later when he decided to return. The writers dealt with the dilemma by declaring the entire 1985-86 season of storylines a dream sequence. In other words: Never mind. That's what came to mind when I got to the last chapter of Steven Brill's book "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools, " which has received a lot of attention in school reform circles because Brill - an author, entrepreneur and founder of the Yale (University) Journalism Initiative - is a significant presence in that world and because his narrative centers on the central reform movement players (Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, etc.).

A young charter school administrator named Jessica Reid (pictured) played a small but important role in Steve Brill's book, Class Warfare, both in illustrating how some of the higher-performing charter schools do things and in highlighting the wear and tear that such efforts can create. What's it been like for her to be part of the book - her second stint as a character in a nonfiction account of school reform - and what does she think about key issues such as sustainability, ending LIFO, and unionization? Read the interview below.  You might be surprised.

Last week I read Paul Tough's New York Times Magazine article, "What if the Secret to Success is Failure?," about the approach being taken by the KIPP schools and others, inspired by the work of Martin Seligman. Two big issues came up for me. The first were some practical concerns, regarding what happens when public schools attempt to implement a "no excuses" model. The second were some larger philosophical questions about the moral lessons being taught, and the roles our

Paul Tough, author of one of my favorite books about education (Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America), recently published two important essays on education reform. Tough usually writes for general audiences, transforming dry, wonky policyspeak into page-turners filled with rich characters. This time, Tough took a break from writing his upcoming book The Success Equation to pour some cold water on the overheated heads of education reformers.

Bad Teacher offers the most straightforward accounting of the underlying assumptions of paying-for-scores that I've yet seen, in print or on screen. A lousy, unmotivated teacher who desires breast implants is inspired to work much harder to earn the cash. There you go: honest, straightforward, incentive-driven--and utterly disinterested in social justice or the larger purposes of schooling. She changes her behavior because there are rewards for doing so. There's no expectation that the change is permanent, that it alters the content of her character, or even that she'll teach any better--only that she'll teach harder. And, it should come as no surprise that she looks for an opportunity to cheat when her other efforts aren't getting it done. At the same time, for all these thorny issues, I'd absolutely argue that her kids are better off after she learns about the bonus than they were before.

Although it may be satisfying to blame the individuals involved, doing so frames the problem as one of individual personality and moral character, ignoring a critical fact: These are examples of organizational misconduct-when individuals acting in their organizational roles violate internal or external rules, regulations or laws in furtherance of organizational goals.