Really tough ethical dilemmas in a school community come about when core values conflict. So everyone can benefit from paying attention to ethics as both an urgent literacy requirement for students, and as a unifying force in developing positive school culture. Both those reasons lay behind the founding of The Institute for Global Ethics (IGE), an international, non-partisan and non-sectarian charity with offices in Canada, England and the U.S. IGE's president, Rushworth M. Kidder, said that what began as a conceptual framework for determining the core, shared values of a group and for addressing their ethical dilemmas has evolved into a dimension of learning that most educators now recognize as imperative. This new dimension is called the "ethical literacy." Ethical literacy forms the bedrock for the broadest aims of education. The survival may depend on educating the next generation to reason morally whenever they solve problems, and to consider the greater good at every opportunity. This lens of ethics always accompanies their thinking, their behavior, and their perspective of the world and their future. School communities are using IGE's conceptual framework as the centerpiece for system wide approaches toward this end goal of ethical literacy. (Contains 2 notes.)