Education: conclude ( 4/25 ) Self-fulfilling prophecies Leave no child behind Markets and choices

Expectancy Effects Yes, master Students get labeled and sorted. Many of the effects of privilege on resources, facilities, networks, quality of teachers, scholarships, etc. are well-understood. Rosenthal’s Pygmalion in the Classroom (1968) demonstrated a more pervasive and subtle set of effects. Teachers were given an expectation that randomly selected students would bloom. The students bloomed. Why?

Why do students conform to teacher expectations? The finding has been replicated in many countries, at many ages, in many subjects. Teachers who expect a student to succeed unintentionally and powerfully reinforce and encourage that student. Thus, a great deal of the apparatus of tests, student records and tracking in American schools serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy

Feedbacks All education involves cumulations e.g. How well a student performs What the teacher expects and percieves Biases, opportunities, stereotypes, tracking, attention etc. affect what he or she does Identity, motivation, skills, life plans

Why isn’t the expectation disconfirmed? It is not simple bias. Bias is created, but the students really did do better on objective tests. A teacher who believes that lower class students, African American Students, Hispanic students, or Mulsim students are unmotivated, unintelligent, undisciplined, etc. will find his or her expectations objectively confirmed. Such a teacher will be very resistant to the idea that he or she had any role in the behavior.

Expectancy effects with rats Rosenthal showed that even the minimal contact of an experimentor with a rat can produce powerful expectancy effects. He hung the signs “maze bright” and “maze dull” on two cages of rats. The maze bright rats, though they were no different, were liked better, handled more, and their measured intelligence increased.

Expectancy effects in psychological experiments. When an experimenter expects subject to do something Even if the experimentor is reading identical instructions, And neither wishes nor intends to convey expectations (e.g. to choose a certain kind of picture as more “successful”) His or her expectancy is conveyed in many ways, and subjects conform to it.

Double-blind experiments One of the main implications of Rosenthal’s work is that psychological experiments must be ‘double-blind’ Not only is the subject not told the hypothesis, But the experimenter must conceal from the person administering the experiment, whether the subject is a control.

Is it possible or desirable to eliminate teacher expectancies? In a school classroom, teachers have expectations. Moreover, no-one believes that students would learn more from a TV screen Some kinds of subtle communication are intrinsic to the teaching/learning process Nevertheless, much labeling in schools is probably pernicious.

Implications Merely changing expectations had a more powerful effect than immense investment in school plant. There is great conflict over who can teach, and considerable increase in teacher academic proficiency requirements. But may communities and teachers maintain that it is the teacher attitudes and biases that are most important. Such biases are not a disaster if different teachers have different, counteracting biases; They are if the biases conform to institutional sexism, racism, etc. and are reinforced by other structures.

Is it possible for a school system to expect all students to succeed The tables at the end of ch. 17 (*pp ) show that US students, on average, learn less, particularly less math and science, than many countries that spend less than ¼ or 1/10 as much on education, Such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Switzerland. Could our society expect everyone to succeed? Why or why not? How?

Change in the variation and change in the mean We shall see that in the Asian school systems there is a reduction of the variation from school to school and from student to student over the educational process, and there is a sharper increase in the mean performance. What is the relation between these?

The Learning Gap By Stevenson and Stigler Analyzes the structure and assumptions of Asian education (Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China) It is possible to assume that every child can learn algebra or calculus, just as anyone can learn French or Latin, and for the class to not go forward until every student has done so.

School and Society In some ways, the school is never separate from the society, and the relative success of Chinese education and relative failure of East LA is evident and easy to explain. The educational system of the middle class and the upper class in the US is still at least comparable to any in the world, but the education of the 1/5 to 1/3 of US children growing up in poverty is not. Why?

Possible explanations: 1. Culture and student/family attitudes 2. Failure of family and community 3. Segregation and concentrated poverty 4. Overloaded schools (e.g. Shootings) 5. Commitment (length of school year) But what is the contribution of school policy to each of these? Is the reality that we “leave no student behind?”

What is the effect of raising the floor on the mean and the ceiling? In the United States, the procedures of Asian education would be viewed as holding back the “quick” students for the “slow” ones. But it is an empirical question what would be the effect of a less tracked and sorted system. And the evidence is that it increases the score of the best students by raising the “floor”

Culture Culture always reinforces social structures and vice versa. In Japan, the parents of a student who goes to school 6+ days a week, 45 weeks a year, doing well, will insist on math tutoring. Why? That student needs the calculus to do well on the exam to get into university to get into the big firms. The US student does not.

Competition and Freedom Is there greater freedom of choice in the US? For whom? It is possible for someone outside of East LA to say, “it is Rita’s own fault” but it feels more like a trap to her. And if she leaves, what happens to those left behind?

21 st century Issues The main political and social issues of the 20 th century involved the appropriate mixture in economy, health, education, housing and other social areas. The end of the 20 th century , saw a large increase in unfettered capitalist arrangements. The balance between social and private provision is one of the key issues of the 21 st c.

Markets and Choices The notion that markets promote competition and freedom is central to proposals in education, health, etc. But some institutional schemes purchase the increased choices of some are at the cost of decreased choices for others.

Vouchers Allow Rita to take her funding with her to a private (often religious) school Legal and constitutional issues: 1. Public support of religious education 2. The erosion of the common school effect 3. Dismantling of the public school system or ghettoizing it.

Some arguments PRO 1. It is cheap 2. It promotes competition 3. It gives poor students middle class advantages CON 1. It increases segregation 2. It takes resources away from the neediest schools 3. Inequality and giving up would increase.