Teachers Apparently Expect Less from Their Low-Income, Minority Students
Poor minorities have the short end of the stick when it comes to education in the United States. From bullying to out-of-date technology, the struggle to learn is real when you’re not affluent and white.
And a new study shows even more disparaging news for minorities. The study, released this week by the Center for American Progress, found that educators expect their students of color and low-income students to graduate at lower rates than than white students. In order to reach those conclusions, the CAP researchers analyzed data from 2002-2012 wherein teachers of nationally representative groups of students were asked which of their students each year were most likely to graduate. Results showed that teachers believed their Hispanic students were 42% less likely to graduate than white students, while African-Americans were 47% less likely.
Some of those expectations might be due to teachers’ awareness of the realities faced by low-income students of color, such as lack of access to educational materials and issues in the home environment. But what many of those teachers don’t realize is that their expectations can have a serious impact on their students’ performance. Students in the study whose teachers had higher expectations of them were three times more likely to graduate college than students whose teachers had poorer expectations.
The phenomenon has been studied and proven before in other circumstances in both educational and social realms. In educational circles it’s referred to as the “Pygmalion” or “golem” effect and is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy whereby expectations can greatly determine success (Pygmalion) or failure (golem). In one project referenced by the CAP study, for example, it was found that “teacher expectations of a pre-schooler’s ability was a robust predictor of the child’s high school GPA.”
Similarly, parental expectations can make or break a child’s success levels. While having no expectations of a child can set them up for a lack of motivation and/or interest in accomplishment, having too high of expectations can be detrimental and crushing to a child’s need for goals and exploration of their own abilities. The trick, then, is to find a middle ground in which parents are able to foster their child’s abilities and push them to want to do better, without setting them up to fail if they don’t achieve a specific outcome every time.
If there’s something to be learned from both this study and the wisdom of many movies, it’s to not brush off the importance of believing in someone. As psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once said, "If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him [...] You know what happens? We promote him to what he really can be."
[Pic via Flickr - Chicago 2016]
