WHENEVER TEACHERS COMMUNICATE with their students, they are conveying expectations to them. What are those expectations? In every subject, from kindergarten through 12th grade, there are gaps in performance between “haves” and “have-nots” (white students compared to blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans; rich compared to poor). Students of color do somewhat worse than white students in mathematics. The same is true for children of poor parents, compared to those from affluent families. In English, the gap widens. It grows largest by far in history. African American, Native American, and Latino students view history with a special dislike. They also learn it especially poorly.
Why is this? Surely history is not harder than trigonometry! Than Faulkner!
One reason for these gaps stems from teacher expectations. Most children of affluent white families give off an aura of competence and confidence that prompts most teachers to infer that they can do the work. Usually they can do it. But so can others—kids from poorer families, nonwhite children, recent immigrants who are not so proficient in English. Before these nonelite students can do well, however, they have to believe they can. Sometimes, before that can happen, their teacher has to believe they can.
Racial and socioeconomic characteristics affect teacher expectations
Several social processes conspire to cause many teachers to conclude that most nonelite students cannot do outstanding work. First among these is how the children present themselves. Sociologists Dale Harvey and Gerald Slatin showed photographs of children to teachers. Nine children were white, nine black. A prior panel of teachers had judged three photos of each race lower class, three middle class, and three upper class, solely on the basis of their appearance.3 Then they asked some 96 elementary school teachers to agree or disagree with eight statements about these 18 photographs, such as, “Read a good many books independently” or “Has been diagnosed as emotionally unstable.” Like these examples, some of the statements were positive, some negative.4 They took care to give the teachers the option to say that they could not predict which children might perform in a certain way based solely on a photo. Harvey and Slatin also asked the teachers to rank the children’s IQs as high, medium, or low.
Initially, Harvey and Slatin were concerned “that teachers would be reluctant to make either positive or negative judgments about children on the basis of their photographs alone.” They need not have worried. Based solely on one picture of each person, teachers eagerly applied the eight positive and negative statements to the children, although they showed some reluctance to apply negative statements to white kids, even “lower-class” white kids. Without objecting, they classified student IQs as high, medium, or low. Experienced teachers were even more willing to categorize children on the basis of a photograph than were new teachers.
We call this the “file folder phenomenon.” We all do it, all the time. Someone asks a question after a public lecture, then perseveres with a followup, and we crane our necks to get a view of her—to learn her race, age, perhaps her ethnic group, and to divine what we can from her appearance. Until we get to know someone, they are their categories: female, 40ish, possibly Latino, frumpy, to continue our example. All too often, we never get beyond the categories. The teachers in this research never got to know the students they ranked—perhaps a good thing, because when the rankings were tabulated, the results were heartbreaking. Without exception, children whose photographs had previously been judged “lower class” were ranked less inclined to do anything good—like read a book independently—and more inclined to do something bad—like get in trouble with the law. IQ (as guessed by teachers) also correlated strongly and positively with social class. Race mattered, too. Regardless of social class, white “children were more often expected to succeed and black children were more often expected to fail.”
These teachers were not unusual. Nor were they bad people, consciously working to maintain America’s racial and socioeconomic hierarchy in the next generation. The researchers had asked them to participate in a study of “the ability of people to make accurate estimates of the characteristics and performance capabilities of others on the basis of first impressions.” They complied. Like all of us, they had a sense for the “right order,” the way things should be, or at least the way they usually are. Unfortunately, the way things usually are is unfair to poor people; unfair to racial minorities (especially African Americans); unfair to children who don’t read, write, and speak well in English; and in some subject areas, unfair to females or to males. The process can be circular. Anthropologist John Ogbu found that some black students in Shaker Heights, Ohio, cited general societal unfairness and specific teachers’ biases to rationalize bad grades, even when they failed to do their work well. In turn, poor performance convinces some teachers to expect less next year from students who look like those who performed badly this year.
If mere photos can have such an impact, we should not be surprised to learn that the way children speak can make a big difference in what teachers expect from them. Between 1890 and 1940—the Nadir of race relations—segregation increased in the North as well as the South. Black English grew apart from white English, because blacks increasingly lived apart from whites. Today most African Americans sound identifiably “black” on the telephone. Their accent, dialect, and even the timbre of their voices differ from those of whites. This difference is not genetic; historian Barbara J. Fields points out that no such thing as “black English” exists in England. There, West Indian immigrants’ children learn the English of their class and region. But in America, as a result of the Nadir, “black English” has intensified. In turn, this black English then persuades many teachers to expect less from those who speak it.
Excerpt From: James W. Loewen. “Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History.”