TEACHERS AND “STANDARDIZED” TESTS
The SAT and its competitor, the ACT, are the last “standardized” tests taken by most K–12 students. Even more damaging can be the “Iowas,” the “Metropolitans,” the “Californias,” the “Stanfords,” and of course, the grandfather of them all, the “IQ test,” because children take these tests much earlier. Not only do they affect students’ self-esteem, but also how students get treated. From kindergarten to 12th grade, most teachers subtly expect more from students who score higher. Sometimes these expectations are not subtle. Many school systems use scores on the exams mentioned above to group and track students, encouraging high scorers to take advanced placement courses and suggesting “general” classes for low scorers. Using these scores is only slightly better than setting different expectations based on first impression or even mere photographs. Indeed, although the correlations between test scores and ensuing performance are typically weak, what relationships we do see may derive from differential teacher expectations—high for students with high test scores—rather than from genuinely low aptitude.
Different expectations aren’t all teachers’ doing. Students participate. We all can remember that day or school subject that caught us unprepared. How we hunkered down behind the student in front of us, avoiding eye contact with the teacher, hoping and praying not to be called upon! We were signalling our teacher that to expect much from us, at least that day or in that subject, would be a waste of time. Some students behave that way all the time, sending out vibrations to their teachers and fellow students that they are incapable. Others strain to get called upon, implying that they are capable. After only a short while, these behaviors become mutually agreed upon, creating a classroom hierarchy that seems “right” to teacher and students alike. Indeed, that may be why the Rosenthal and Jacobson study did not generate an expectancy effect in grades 3–6. After all, the researchers conveyed nothing directly to the students about their performance. Unless turned around by teacher expectations, students who had been selected randomly never knew they were supposed to excel. They probably continued to show the same behaviors they had used in the past to cue their teachers with regard to their performance level. After a few attempts at expecting more from them, based on the false information leaked by the researchers, teachers may have given up and let “nature” run its course.
At the beginning of this chapter, we noted that the performance gap between have and have-not students is larger in history/social studies than in any other subject. Now we have uncovered part of the reason why. In history and social studies classes, teacher expectations as well as student self-expectations play a particularly large and unfortunate role. More than chemistry or geometry, more even than English literature, history is tied to everyday experience and the potpourri of knowledge that children pick up more or less automatically from living in mainstream America. Unfortunately, the degree to which children live in mainstream America varies widely.
Journalist Susan Eaton showed that many black and Puerto Rican 3rd graders in Hartford, the capital of America’s richest state, live so constricted by poverty and race that they have never seen the Connecticut River, which forms the eastern boundary of the city. On a field trip, seeing it for the first time from the windows of their school bus, the children give it a standing ovation! Although they live in New England, these children have never been sledding or even seen a sled up close. What chance do such children have to pick up, semiautomatically, useful facts about historic sites, the president, or anything else in mainstream culture? The “new math” is new to nearly everyone, which is one reason why the gap between have and have-not students is smallest in math. Students like those that Eaton observed signal to teachers that they don’t know the basics in social studies, the things that teachers want to assume so they can go further.31
TEACHERS CAN CREATE THEIR OWN EXPECTATIONS
Such children are not stupid. They are merely ignorant—ignorant of many of the things needed to do well in school. What they have not learned, they do not know.32 Teachers must not be swayed by what children like these do not know. They must see beyond their low scores on IQ tests and other “standardized” exams. Betty Hart and Todd Risley recorded the behavior of parents in different social classes as their children grew from age 6 months to age 3. Poor parents talked much less with their babies and used shorter sentences with fewer modifiers. Such patterns then made a huge difference to the children’s vocabulary growth by age 3, their measured IQs, and their scores on the Test of Language Development at age 9.33 Moreover, they do know lots of stuff. Many children of poverty are put into positions of major responsibility at young ages. They prepare supper, care for younger siblings, translate for mom at the doctor. It is not poor children’s fault that they were talked with less. Teachers must expect them to be adequate first—and excellent later on—even though they seem to know so little of the knowledge they need to do well in school.34
Absent such intervention, differential expectations often get written in stone by the time students reach high school. Sections at Woodrow Wilson Jr. High School in Decatur, Illinois, were numbered 7.1, 7.2, and on down to 7.8, when I attended. Section 7.1 one was the “smartest,” 7.8 the “dumbest.” Two criteria mainly explained who got assigned to which section—ability, measured by teacher recommendations and “standardized” test scores, and the music group one was in. Being in the band played a key role, as did being in the best choral group. In 9th grade came another choice point: whether the student chose a foreign language—and which language—was key. Students in 9.1, by my memory, chose Latin; many were in the band. I remember pondering for a long time the choice between Latin and auto mechanics. Since then, owing to a fondness for old sports cars and pickup trucks, I have spent many roadside hours regretting my choice of Latin. It did get me into the college of my choice, though. Not the language itself, of course. Except for “habeas corpus, Corpus Christi,” I’ve forgotten all that. High teacher expectations resulting from being in section 9.1, continuing into high school the next year, did the trick.
What happened to me was no isolated anecdote. The same thing happens all around the U.S. Sociologist James Rosenbaum showed the process in a wonderful book on a working-class city near Boston. Because this city was overwhelmingly white and working class, Rosenbaum did not have to deal with the claim that differences in race or socioeconomic status lay behind the school system’s decision to track its students. He found that, like Decatur, the choice of foreign language in junior high school “determines both the group of students that a student is placed with for all his classes and the level of difficulty of all his classes.” Rosenbaum describes how it worked:
There are actually nine tracks in each of the junior high years. The choice of a foreign language leads to placement in one of the first five tracks (labeled A to E); any other elective leads to placement in the last four tracks (F to I). Tracks are ranked within these two groups according to teachers’ assessments and IQ scores.
Students in each track have all their classes together and even sit together at lunch and in assemblies. Furthermore, each class is paced by the ability level of the section. Thus the top language group has the most difficult history class, English class, and mathematics class. The second-highest language group has a slightly easier class in each of these subjects, and so on. Moreover, language tracks have more difficult classes than nonlanguage tracks.35
Admittedly, I attended junior high school in the 1950s and Rosenbaum studied his Massachusetts city in the 1970s. No longer are school systems so insensitive as to label the “smartest” section “7.1” or “7-A.” No matter. My mother tutored math at Woodrow Wilson two decades later, after the system had progressed to numbering its still-tracked sections randomly. She was helping the “slowest” section in mid-September when a student complained about the workload. “You expect too much from us, Mrs. Loewen,” said the boy. “You know we’re the dumbest section in the school.” “Oh, no, you aren�
��t,” she assured the lad. “Then name a dumber one!” he replied. Although his section was now arbitrarily designated 7.4 and school had been in session for less than a month, students already knew exactly how they and everyone else ranked.
Today, most school systems have done away with junior high schools. Many have formally abandoned tracking in middle school. Nevertheless, some schools that no longer overtly divide students into “ability-based” groups have let tracking sneak back in through the rear door. Strong performance in gateway courses like algebra are legitimately required for advanced math. First-year French is legitimately required for advanced French. By the time students reach 11th grade, sections of American history are inadvertently programmed by the scheduling computer into ability groups to accommodate students who must take advanced math and foreign language at certain hours. Other schools test in math and group students in math courses by achievement level. Either way, inexorable demands of the schedule mean that courses in history (and other areas) wind up also grouped. History teachers can unwittingly accept labels like “slow” or “smart” that students themselves apply to these sections, even though such labels may derive from proficiency in algebra long ago in 7th grade. Teachers must expect students to be excellent, even students in the “slow” section.
Many high schools offer IB (International Baccalaureate) or APUSH (Advanced Placement U.S. History) classes, “regular” U.S. history, and history for students in the “general” or vocational curricula. Doing so overtly divides students into three groups and inevitably expects more from the first. However, research shows that when students are lifted from “slow” classes to “average” classes and then to “high” classes, their performance often increases to match their new environment.36 A given student might do B– work—just below average—in “slow,” “regular,” and AP classes. Of course, it would be better if these students performed at the A– rather than B– level. Nevertheless, they do much more work and do it much better when they earn a B– in APUSH compared to a B– in the slow track.
LouAnne Johnson (played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie Dangerous Minds) made this point anecdotally:
Inside the classroom I learned that the more difficult the material I presented, the harder my students worked, especially students who had been labeled underachievers. They might moan about having to read the classics, but they didn’t want to read “dumbed down” versions of the books. They wanted to suffer like the “smart” kids in regular classes.37
History courses taught in innovative ways can challenge students to do excellent work, some for the first time. All people have strengths and weaknesses. The excellent student, always prepared, a sponge for information, a whiz on multiple-choice tests, may be only ordinary when challenged to represent an event—for example, the Depression, and FDR’s response to it—as a graphic poster. The slow reader who performs poorly on timed multiple-choice exams may come up with fine ideas for a group project outlining a museum exhibit about the women’s movement of the 1970s with its successes and failures. A teacher can quietly point out to an underperforming student that this next task is different—“you are good at this skill”—whether it is art, music, talking, or even physical prowess. For perhaps the first time, that student may believe that s/he will excel, or at least do adequately. Then the teacher builds from there.
An increasing number of teachers, high schools, and entire school districts are making AP and honors courses open enrollment, available to all. Some teachers and districts have taken the next step and explicitly recruited students of diverse racial and class backgrounds to their fast-track courses. “Personally, I cast a wide net when it comes to letting kids take the course,” wrote one teacher of the Advanced Placement history course in 2004. “I love the fact that I can get some kids with lower abilities into my class and watch their writing improve and contribute to their understanding of U.S. history.” Another teacher agreed:
I have an open enrollment position regarding students who want to take my APUSH class…. For whatever reason—students’ parents take little interest, the students don’t think it’s a “cool” thing to do, they doubt themselves, nobody has ever suggested it to them—many students in my high school never even consider an AP class.
He went on:
Many times students have never really thought that they could succeed in an AP class. Many times these students internalize the message that they will never succeed in a course filled with the “brains” from their class. Even worse, many of these students have been institutionalized into self-identifying mediocrity through the shortsightedness of counseling advice. But when I have been able to encourage these students to accept the challenge of AP, almost always they surprise themselves with how capable they really are.38
These teachers have recruited students with low self-expectations into their Advanced Placement classes. They then expected them to succeed, taught them effectively, and gave them bad grades if they did not perform well. From their own responses, doing so seems to have worked.39
Another way to handle the problem of tracking while making honors available to all students is by adding an optional honors component to regular courses. Having students do history, discussed in Chapter 4, is a good way to add such an element into U.S. history courses. Also, whenever a class does a good job, whether a “regular” or honors class, teachers can call them “scholars” or “intellectuals.” Maybe no one has ever called them that before. Maybe it will even be believed.
Forming quick assessments of children’s abilities or tracking them on the basis of test scores would be fine if the underlying theory were correct—if children really possessed markedly different aptitudes for school, probably genetically determined, and surely fixed by the time they enter school. Rosenthal and Jacobson show these assumptions to be false. If merely being observed by a team from Harvard can raise 1st graders’ IQ scores by an average of 12 points (the Hawthorne effect), and if merely leaking the “fact” that students A, B, and C are likely to spurt can cause randomly selected 1st graders to raise their scores by another 16 points, then IQ can hardly be either innate or fixed.
Even within homogeneous white upper-middle-class classrooms, some students give off the aura that they don’t like history and are not prepared in it. “I don’t do well in history,” they say, as if that explains anything. To this, teachers must reply, “Until now.” Allowing students to admit they are bad at history gives them permission to be bad at history. Withhold that permission! The sentence “I never did well in history until now” sends quite a different message.
We must conclude from the research summarized in this chapter that teachers must not let pupils’ appearance, their own self-expectations, or low “standardized” test scores influence what teachers expect from them. If a teacher cannot convince herself that a student has any ability, s/he (the teacher) can fake it. Besides, every student is good at something, or at least less bad at it. Build on students’ strengths. Herein lies another benefit of the 30–50 topics regimen. Teaching topics in very different ways during the school year lets students excel in at least some of the activities that are assigned. A boy may shine in debate who had previously not finished his written assignments. A girl who had been quiet in class discussions and inattentive to lectures may conduct and write up a terrific history of her grandmother. A student who does little homework on his own may work well with others on a project. Experiment with different groups. A have-not student may hold her own when grouped with privileged students, working at their level, thus performing at a higher level than she had reached before. Or, grouping have-not students together may coax at least some of them to do good work, just so their group can complete the assigned task and report to the class. A student whose background is problematic—perhaps a recent immigrant, with inadequate command both of English and of general knowledge about the United States—can make use of precisely that background when asked to learn about and write up the history of his/her family.
&nbs
p; If, well into the school year, some students have not responded to their teacher’s expectations for them, the teacher might show the class the first half hour of the PBS video A Class Divided. This video reviews the now-famous “Iowa eye-color experiment” devised by Jane Elliott. She divided her all-white 3rd graders in Riceville, Iowa, on the basis of eye color. She then told them that blue-eyed children were smarter than brown-eyed ones; within minutes they believed her. More astonishingly, the next day she reversed the expectations, telling the children that she had lied to them; in fact, brown-eyed children were superior. Among other outcomes, on that 2nd day the brown-eyed students whipped through a flash-card exercise in 2.5 minutes that had taken them 5.5 minutes the day before, when Elliott had expected them to be slow. Before showing the video, ask students to watch for the effects of the teacher’s expectations on the children. (In a sense the entire film is about her expectations and their impact.) After viewing, and after a discussion that notes the impact of expectations on flash cards performance, the teacher can turn the discussion to her own classroom. Do students see their teacher as having different expectations for different students? Do students have different expectations for themselves? By talking about the expectations elephant in the classroom, a teacher may be able to challenge those self-expectations—or perhaps learn something about how s/he helps maintain them.
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 10