Although not necessitated by the federal government, CC! does comply with requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act.

The program was created at the nonprofit Josephson Ethics Institute in Los Angeles, the brainchild of founder Michael Josephson, an attorney famous for his bar exam review courses. Josephson sold the rights to the lucrative courses for $10 million, invested his windfall and then pulled $1 million out of his funds to start an ethics institution in honor of his mother and father.

“All the initial work was with adults–ethics in the workplace,” explained Jessica Ellis, associate director of Character Counts! for the Institute. One of the corporate contracts, a large aerospace firm, was having trouble not with existing employees but with new employees’ lack of ethics, and it was a problem never seen before by this particular company. They asked Josephson to do something about it. Perhaps, Josephson posited, the ethics problems stemmed from childhood.

“The idea came up to do a survey of American youth to see what their ethics looked like,” Ellis said. “The first report was dismal.”

Although the Institute was not geared toward working with children, Josephson took up the cause, and in 1992 he hosted a conference on ethics in Aspen, Colo., that produced the Six Pillars of Character. Ethicists, educators, character‑education specialists and ecumenical leaders (Christian), as well as Josephson (who is Jewish), were in attendance. Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Native American leaders were not represented at this meeting.

Ellis explained the predominantly Christian involvement as being “by default,” and added that “whoever wants to come to the table, that’s great. We’ve had some key rabbis on our advisory committee, but no Muslim leaders. There wasn’t a real focus on the faith side of it–there are some values that transcend that.”           

Following the Aspen conference, Josephson realized that the six pillars were not being integrated as much as they should have been to be effective. Instead, what he noticed was lip service. “That’s where Character Counts! came in,” related Ellis. She noted the program’s intensive three‑day course for instructors.

“It’s not just something you pull off the Web site. We recommend training 5‑10 percent of campus staff to infuse this through the (school’s) environment,” said Ellis, who described the training as “intense and experiential,” with instructors looking at their own behavior.

“The modeling (teacher to student) is essential,” Ellis said. “Buy‑in is key to making this program effective,” implying that the six pillars must become universal language in a school.

Boulder Creek Leadership Council came into existence “to ensure that the community has an understanding of what those six pillars are,” explained Kenna Hough, former principal at New River School and currently serving as Parent/Community Involvement Manager at DVUSD. “We need the common vocabulary of six pillars–so that everywhere children go, those ethical traits are enforced.”                   

“We’d like it to be something that’s inculcated into the entire community,” said Mai‑Lon Wong, Ed.D, principal at Gavilan Peak School.

Hough assures that it’s simply common sense to involve spiritual leaders. “The reason for reaching out to the ecumenical council is that respect is talked about in every ecumenical arena,” she said. “We’ve talked about character education–if you’re going to be talking about respect at Sunday school, then please tie it back into what they (students) are learning in school.”

“We do a lot of work in Native American communities,” Ellis said of Character Counts! “It works really well with their native values, bringing the kids back to their pride and tradition–to their core values.”

Because CC! deals in ethics, an area of study many consider subjective, one question that could be asked is, “Whose ethics?” One of the fundamental tenets of CC! is the idea that “adults and institutions have a duty to teach the young, in word and deed, that honesty is superior to lying, responsibility to dissolution, fairness to greed, and caring to callousness.” The organization cites its Aspen conference as the discussion from which those values that transcend religions originated. In other words, to CC!, there is no subjectivity to ethics.

“The program is meant to be adopted and customized by the community,” Ellis went on to say. She was referring to two specific programs, one at the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and one at a synagogue in the Los Angeles area. The Institute did a special CC! Catholic version for the archdiocese, and the Jewish version, Menschlekeit Matters, was begun at Kehillat Israel, a Reconstructionist congregation in Pacific Palisades, Calif., funded by the Covenant Foundation.

According to Ellis, CC! addresses an easily recognizable problem at many schools. “If you walk on a regular campus, you can just feel it–it’s in the atmosphere. Things look a little out of control. When you walk on a campus that’s using Character Counts! effectively, you can feel the difference immediately; you see kids being nicer to each other. Teachers say the whole environment shifts. Studies show teachers internalizing CC! into their own behavior.”

The first step, Ellis said, is to survey everyone–kids, parents, teachers–triangulating what they’re saying before CC! is implemented. Once you have a sense of the pre‑Character Counts! environment, the program is implemented and surveys are conducted again.

“However,” she admitted, “self‑reporting has its flaws, so you always back it up with other data. In other words, if you ask kids if they are cheating, then you have to look at what the teachers are saying about incidences of cheating.”

As a former principal, Hough spoke to these doubts easily. “The goal is to get the data that will confirm whether we are on the right track. We quantify in several ways.”

One of the ways the school looks at CC! is through discipline referrals and law enforcement. “What is the posse seeing?” Hough asked. “Are they seeing decreases in certain kinds of behavior?”

She also mentioned the importance of examining test scores and attendance: “If a student is being responsible, they’re going to be getting their homework done. If a student feels safe and secure in their school, where character is a priority, they will feel a sense of safety and security– they’re going to show up.”

Wong sees Character Counts! as simultaneous exercises in social studies and character building. “CC! is one reason we celebrate diversity–to get a wider perspective