The idea is to teach values such as honesty and self-discipline as part of every class, says Dot Woodson, who was a University of Houston basketball coach before coming to HISD to head the program. In a decade, Houston has trained 16,000 of its teachers in character education and bought or written character-education curricula for all its schools. Certainly, compared with hiring policemen, character education is cheap. Chief Marquis says his spending, which comes from several budget pots, actually is at least a third more, and even that doesn't include what the schools individually spend on security hardware. Herbert Karpicke, principal of the 700-student High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, offers a tour while Chief Marquis is giving an interview in the school's video lab.
Doors open onto a choir practice, a jazz band, a corps of ballerinas, dramatic soliloquies.
He is lobbying to hire 40 more.