What Kind of Schools Matter?

March 24th EDU 101 talk: What Kind of Schools Matter
Schools that matter: Then

“What kind of schools matter?” probably wasn’t a question anyone was interested in 50 years ago. Most young people in the US did not need an academic education to get and keep a job that would offer a middle-class standard of living. Schooling was compulsory, but not so much because an academic background was thought to be essential to enter the middle-class. Schooling was perceived as much as a means of teaching young people personal skills as it was to provide young people with essential intellectual skills.

From WWI on, in fact, insofar as kids went to public school beyond 8th grade, they were grouped according to “ability” as defined by IQ tests. Tests intending to separate kids going to college, then a very small proportion of the population compared to today, from those going into the factory or small business worlds.

These tests, along with SATs after WWII, were accepted, by and large, as legitimate indicators of innate abilities and students were “tracked” in public school accordingly: generally as college bound or technical, although there were often as many as 5 or 7 separate tracks in high school.
It is hard to imagine now that 50 years ago nobody thought much about the psychological effects of tracking on student engagement in learning. Teachers, parents and students accepted the assumption of IQ tests: there is but a small percentage of kids in any generation that has any important talent, while most kids are—and should be – destined to work in factories, family businesses, on farms. Tracking made sense in those days because so many people accepted the claim that tracking captured objective realities like the distribution of innate talent. Few people argued that talent is also shaped by the encouragement or discouragement that children receive as they grow.

But when the Supreme Court held in 1954, in Brown v Board of Education--that social and psychological factors affect learning--it inadvertently supported a more general sociological truth then gaining ascendancy in American society: that expectations people in authority have about subordinates’ abilities translate into real behavior. If authorities say that a child is smart, that child is likely to behave that way because those authorities will nurture, encourage and train such a child to succeed. And succeed could be defined as doing better on the very tests that these same authorities create to separate “smart” and “not-smart” children. This simple discovery—that a teacher’s beliefs about the abilities of his or her students translate into real advantages given to “smart” children, not to mention the effect of convincing certain children that they were in fact smart (or not so)—introduced an implicit challenge to the tracking system based on IQ or other tests of so-called innate abilities.

The belief that there is an identifiable ceiling on innate abilities was challenged in part by the political and social upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s. For example, social scientists argued that the legal as well as social separation of the races had negative psychological effects on black children (and White children) which inhibited the educational process and thus argued that blacks should be educated along with their white peers if equality of education was to become a reality. So, if it is true that teachers’ beliefs about the intellectual abilities of blacks, or immigrants, or of women, or kids who score in the 5th stanine on an IQ test, affect how these teachers actually teach—how they inspire kids, how they speak to kids, whether or not they encourage kids, discipline kids, advise kids and so forth – then it may not be so true that a score on a standardized test is a reliable objective indicator of what that student is actually capable of accomplishing.

This conflict between the underlying assumption of so-called meritocratic education—IQ and standardized testing—and the findings of social psychology about self-fulfilling prophecies lay largely dormant as long as the only children who suffered from the negative effects of teachers’/ parents’/administrators/ low expectations were black or female or poor.