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West Newsmagazine / Feb. 27, 2008
Post Dispatch / Nov. 25, 2004

Studies Show Signs of Success in Diversity Education
By Diane Plattner of West Newsmagazine / Feb. 27 2008

Christian, Muslim and Jewish third-grade students are working together in joint projects in a process that develops cooperation and bonds that cross racial, gender and other lines.

On Feb. 5, 2008, several dozen students from Al-Salam, Solomon Schechter, St. Monica and The Principia schools came together at Solomon Schechter in Creve Coeur to participate in Operation Cooperation. The seventh annual event is held four times each year, once at each school, with a field trip for all students culminating at the end of the year.

Developed by the non-profit EnTeam Organization, Operation Cooperation began in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks with the mission of increasing cooperation and raising academic achievement, said Ted Wohlfarth, founder of EnTeam Institute.

“Our culture gives kids the win-lose contest idea,” Wohlfarth said. “Win-win is not well received. But all children should understand that win-win is as real and as practical and as measurable as win-lose. We create that concept by working together and helping each other build strategies across racial, abilities, gender and other lines.”

Students in small groups participated in various games and activities that build communication, cooperation and teamwork by challenging students to solve problems collaboratively. For example, students held hands in small groups while trying to keep a balloon from falling to the ground and strategizing how to improve their performances.

“I like it because it is fun and I like the games,” St. Monica student Nick Plassmeyer said. “I also make new friends.”

Plassmeyer’s mother, Debbie, echoed her son’s sentiments.

“It’s neat because they get to work together with people from different backgrounds to problem solve and make new friends,” Debbie said. “My older son participated in the program a few years ago (and) he made a really good friend.”

Teacher Lois Fekete said she witnessed the birth of such a friendship between a Solomon Schechter girl and an Al-Salam girl.

“The Solomon Schechter girl was watching as the students from the other schools came into the room,” Fekete said. “She saw an Al-Salam girl she had met earlier this year. Both of their faces lit up.”

Fekete said the students make such great connections without trying.

“The kids don’t see their differences,” Fekete said. “They’re just kids. Because they engage in cooperative, not competitive games, they understand the idea. That is really shown at the end-of-the-year field trip when there is no pressure, just all fun.”

Teaching Diversity And Character
Several education experts said that while they are still fighting an uphill battle toward a peaceful society in which discrimination still runs rampant, recent studies show that students of diversity and character education are improving not only their attitudes, but also their achievements.

Following tragedies that seem to pit one race against another, it is easy for some to unfairly blame the group for the act of one misguided person. Those prejudices are not unlike those of Nazi German Dictator Adolf Hitler, who caused the massacre of 6 million Jews during World War II in his attempt to create a so-called pure master race. Those prejudices also are not unlike those of James Earl Ray, who in 1968 assassinated African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. King spoke of a dream about a society in which people do not judge each other based on race.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” King said in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

The day following King’s murder, Jane Elliott, a white elementary school teacher in the small, all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, decided to teach her third-grade students about discrimination by giving them a firsthand taste of it through a controversial exercise.

Elliott told all of her blue-eyed students that they were smarter, nicer, neater and better than their brown-eyed counterparts. She praised the blue-eyed kids who also received special classroom privileges. Alternatively, Elliott forced the brown-eyed students to wear collars around their necks and criticized their behavior and performance. Elliott then reversed the students’ roles by making the blue-eyed children feel inferior and designating the brown-eyed kids as the dominant group.

In both cases, those students designated as “inferior” behaved and performed poorly on their school work, while the “dominant” students began to enjoy discriminating against their inferior counterparts. Fourteen years later, Elliott’s students discussed the long-lasting impact of her lesson in bigotry on their lives. Elliott, who quickly realized she had created a microcosm of society in her third-grade classroom, continued her program for decades with children and adults worldwide.

She said the exercise, unfortunately, is just as necessary decades after it first began because of the continued prevalence of discrimination in various forms in our cities and schools.

That is evidenced by statistics from the Cimarron Alliance Foundation Inc., which in 2007 found that:
• Approximately 65 percent of teens nationwide report that they have been harassed or assaulted because of perceived or actual appearance, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, race/ethnicity, disability or religion.
• Approximately 48 percent of teens frequently or sometimes hear racist remarks.
• Approximately 28 percent of teens are harassed often or very often because of their race.
• Approximately 10 percent of teens are harassed often or very often because of their religion.
• Approximately 33 percent of teens are harassed often or very often because they are or are perceived to be lesbian, gay or bisexual.
• Approximately 50 percent of students said their schools have an anti-harassment policy that specifies sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.

Area school district officials and patrons have debated the idea of including in district anti-harassment and discipline policies specific categories that get special protection from discrimination. While some said certain groups need special protection, others said language-specific policies unfairly discriminate against unlimited other categories that are not listed in those policies.

Such discussions in recent years come amid complaints about discrimination by some students in the Parkway and Rockwood School Districts.

However, school student populations, locally and nationally, are becoming more diverse, mirroring an increasingly diverse society overall. The Condition of Education in 2005 found that 42 percent of public school students were racial or ethnic minorities in 2003, markedly up from 22 percent in 1972. The report attributed this increased diversity to the proportionate growth of Hispanic enrollment, from 6 percent in 1972 to 19 percent in 2003.

The increasing diversity of student populations has prompted local, state and federal school officials to address the wide academic achievement gaps that exist among white students and certain minority groups.

Some said increasingly diverse student populations have sparked another disturbing trend, locally and nationally, in which some schools are replacing traditional holiday celebrations in public schools with non-denominational themes.

“Some schools are trying to eliminate some holidays kids have always enjoyed, like Halloween and Christmas,” West County resident Brenda Wilson said. “They’re trying not to offend students who don’t celebrate those holidays. But they are sweeping under the rug all the wonderfully diverse cultures that make this country so great.”

Both Parkway and Rockwood do offer various staff development programs aimed at addressing their increasingly diverse student bodies.

For example, Parkway offers the “Honoring All Voices” program, which helps teachers build better relationships with students, with program topics including sexism, racism and religious oppression. In addition, Parkway administrators participate in a social justice retreat to create a more tolerant, understanding climate of students, district officials said.

Rockwood offers staff workshops, such as “Creating Equitable Classrooms” and “How to Teach Students Who Don’t Look Like You.”

Parkway and Rockwood also are among many area school districts that practice Character Education through the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis Inc. (CSD). CSD, a non-profit consortium providing educational and business services to 62 public school districts in Missouri and Illinois, focuses on promoting a caring environment for everyone, said Liz Gibbons, CSD’s director of CHARACTERplus.

Gibbons cited two recently released, four-year studies involving more than 100 Missouri schools and more than 45,000 students which show a positive correlation between using character education and improved student achievement

“The results of these two studies are truly significant,” Gibbons said. “In order for character education to work effectively in schools, it has to be much more that just a ‘ word-of-the-month’ or a 10-minute, standalone lesson. These studies prove that when schools integrate character education into the entire school community, the rewards will include increased student achievement, improved student discipline and
better school-parent relations.”

In the first study, called the Missouri Show Me CHARACTERplus Implementation Study, the CHARACTERplus program was implemented in 64 randomly selected schools in Missouri which had not previously used the CHARACTERplus process. Study results showed that student achievement in communication arts increased as much as 17 percent for schools in the program for at least one year and student office referrals decreased 41 percent.

The second study, called the St. Louis Caring School Community Implementation Study, sought to improve student achievement and reduce discipline problems by enhancing school culture. It involved a sample of 40 randomly selected St. Louis-area public schools that currently implement the CHARACTERplus process. This study
focused on enhancing teaching procedures through implementation of the California-based Caring School Community project, which involves class meetings, buddies (cross-grade student pairings), school-home activities and school-wide activities.

Results from this study showed that student achievement increased as much as 47 percent in communication arts and as much as 54 percent in math for schools in the program for three years. In addition, student office referrals decreased 19 percent.

“We now have valid data that supports what character education does in the classroom every day,” Gibbons said. “We are very proud that CHARACTERplus an Cooperating School Districts in Missouri played the key role in proving the positive effects of character education in the classroom.”

Moreover, studies on the positive impacts of diversity at the college level showed similar results.

Studies conducted at the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) found that socializing with someone of a different racial group or discussing racial issues contributes to the student’s academic development, satisfaction with college, level of cultural awareness and commitment to promoting racial understanding. The studies showed that a diverse student body
has positive impacts on student retention, overall college satisfaction, college grade point average (GPA), intellectual self-confidence and social self-confidence.

Another study, which used additional survey data collected five years after college graduation, found that interacting with students of color during and after college has a positive affect on white males’ post-college sense of social responsibility and participation in community service activities.

Those results are sought as well for younger students by the non-profit EnTeam organization, which follows a Gandhi-like philosophy about the importance of teaching children the values of respect and acceptance to maintain peace in a diverse society.

EnTeam offers the Operation Cooperation program cited earlier.

“We create a concept of working together and helping each other build strategies across racial, abilities, gender and other lines,” said Wohlfarth, the founder of EnTeam. “We’re a nation of immigrants and hopefully we can have a more peaceful, respectful society than prior generations. We want to get away from the jungle mentality of ‘I’ll get mine, you get yours.’”

Wohlfarth said EnTeam measures the success of Operation Cooperation through productivity by reviewing students’ ability to accomplish tasks. The second measure of success is analyzing students’ attitudes and beliefs as reflected by their behaviors in school.

“Some preliminary signs are showing by both measures of productivity and peacefulness that we are seeing some data that supports success of the goals of the program,” Wohlfarth said. “We have seen those students who participated years ago are retaining these ideas and implementing them in daily lives. These students appear to feel better about themselves and do better in everything.”

Those results are similar to Elliott’s blue-eyed, brown-eyed student exercise, he said.

“Her exercise shows that we must have a sense of justice to be functional as people,” Wohlfarth said. “If you feel beaten down, you will not do as well academically or otherwise in life.”

Wohlfarth said Elliott’s exercise, EnTeam and other similar programs are helping people be more accepting of each other in a diverse society. Still, Wohlfarth and other experts said much work is still needed to become a generally accepting society.

“White Christians still tend to be less receptive to working with other faiths,” Wohlfarth said. “Is it just those in the dominant position who don’t want to compromise their advantage or is something else going on? We are not sure. We would just hope that people will consider how we can create a more respectful community now and for the future.”

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Teaching kids that it's not always win-lose
By Renee Stovsky of the Post-Dispatch/Thursday, Nov. 25, 2004

Youngsters from four faiths learn to cooperate in program run by educational team

Close to 120 third-graders sat huddled in groups of eight around the cafeteria tables at St. Monica School in Creve Coeur, looking at poster boards that spelled out the word "Thanksgiving," one letter at a time. Their assignment? To find things for which they were grateful that began with an assigned letter. The "T" group quickly filled in their thoughts: trees, teachers and turtles. The "H" group came up with horses and hockey. The "A" group was good for apples and armadillos. Down at letter "N," peals of laughter erupted after group members wrote down Nickelodeon and Nintendo.

In each group, the children dressed differently. Some wore red-plaid school uniforms, others were garbed in long dresses and chadors, still others had brightly embroidered yarmulkes atop their heads. All seemed to understand the meaning of the lesson in progress—that people of different traditions value many of the same things. It's a lesson that four area parochial schools—Al-Salam Day School, the Principia, St. Monica and Solomon Schechter Day School—have been actively reinforced since 9/11 through a program called Operation Cooperation.

Four times each school year, the students meet to play games that teach them to work collaboratively, instead of competitively, in everything from relay races to construction projects. The program, run by an educational firm called EnTeam, is the brainchild of Ted Wohlfarth. Until 10 years ago, Wohlfarth was involved in commercial real estate and taught college-level economics. But as he watched his four children grow up, he says he was struck by the fact that our culture teaches kids that "life is always a win/lose concept."

"I knew from both my studies in economic game theory and my business experience that a successful deal is one in which everyone involved in a transaction—buyer, seller, lawyer, banker—walks away feeling like a winner," Wohlfarth said.

"Kids learn about life through the games they play, yet we never expose them to a win-win kind of scoreboard," he said. "The message we give them is that cooperation is either immeasurable or simply not important." His observations were rebuffed by his children's various sports coaches with remarks such as, "That's just not how games work." But Wohlfarth refused to be deterred. "Games are just inventions. We can invent them anyway we want," he said.

So he set about doing exactly that. During baseball practices, for example, he would put a bucket in the outfield and see if opposing pitchers and batters could work together to increase the number of times a ball could be hit toward the target. During carpool rides to camp, he would experiment with games of thinking skills for kids to solve together as partners. And over the course of a decade or so, he became more and more confident that his theory of win-win gamesmanship could be taught to the young in fun, interesting ways.

"Different kinds of behavior began to emerge. Kids were who athletically strong learned that they could not perform well in these games without everyone's participation. And conversations began to change. Instead of razzing the competition, children began talking together to reach a common goal," he said. "So I became convinced that my idea was more than mere foolishness. "

In 1994, Wohlfarth quit his job and set up a nonprofit organization dubbed EnTeam that would allow him to devote his life to teaching his theory of
collaborative play. "I thought about the relationship between words like courage and encourage, joy and enjoy. And I decided 'enteam' would be construed to mean creating a team that puts people together, instead of pitting them against each other, to solve problems."

Today EnTeam, based at Wohlfarth's house, has evolved from a one-man band to an organization with a 12-person board of directors and a network of 20 people who work on contracts with school districts across the area to provide opportunities for students to learn to win together through a wide range of physical and mental games.

Operation Cooperation is a logical extension of EnTeam's guiding philosophy, he said. "The fundamental cause of events such as 9/11 is the huge clash of cultural and religious thinking around the world," he said. "The only way to breach that chasm may be by giving kids ways to see that they can uphold their own faith traditions and be successful while working with those who have different beliefs and customs."

To that end, three years ago, Wohlfarth began offering workshops to parochial school teachers to help them initiate such "mental modeling" in their classrooms. Operation Cooperation is an outgrowth of that initiative—a consortium of schools, one Muslim, one Catholic, one Jewish and one Christian Science, that is dedicated to teaching tolerance through cooperation. Today the program, in addition to hosting game days at each school, has expanded to include joint field trips, family potluck dinners and more.

"This is such an important project—to bring kids of different faiths together so they can see that we are all created equally under God," said Rabbi Brad Horwitz of Solomon Schechter. He watched the teams of students try to beat their score at a relay race that involved scoring goals by moving a small straw pumpkin from towel to towel across the St. Monica cafeteria and into a paper bag.

"It's critical to teach children to interact with and love everyone," he said. It's a skill that is taught covertly, rather than overtly, through Operation Cooperation. As 9-year-old Faye Kilby of St. Monica School and Paige Krug of Solomon Schecter excitedly measured the 66-centimeter-tall tower they had managed to build out of blocks and folded index cards, for instance, they were focused on their common project, not their different faiths. But they were clearly enjoying the challenge of working together to succeed.

"This is a wonderful way for children to learn about each other. It stresses commonalities, rather than differences, and the students really look forward to it," says Aaliya Iqbal, a teacher at Al-Salam. "After all, kids are kids—everywhere."

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