The Narrow Portrait of a High Achiever

"Teachers may reward students they view as high-achieving with a supportive environment, increasingly difficult course material, additional opportunities to respond in class and/or more frequent or informative academic feedback." Linda van den Bergh, et al.

One Portrait of a High Achiever

Let's start with an obvious statement: Students are highly influenced by their teachers. Students are influenced not just by what teachers are trying to teach, but also by what teachers think. And teachers think all kinds of things that are not in the curriculum. We all have our private thoughts. We all make private assumptions. Our private thoughts and assumptions do come out and influence people. And this is especially true for teachers. Most parents hand their young children off to teachers with tears and great hopes for high academic achievement. Sometimes the results are near tragic.

What does a high achiever look like? Each teacher has their own mental image of a high achiever. Each teacher has their own private idea of who will be most successful in their class. And again and again, they are right. They are right because they make it so.

As evidence of my last statement, here is one, classic study: Rosenthal, R., &. Jacobson, L. (1963). Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains. Rosenthal's work suggests that students perform better academically if their teachers expect them to perform better academically -- especially in the earliest elementary school years. Here is the summary of this paper:

Within each of 18 classrooms, an average of 20% of the children were reported to classroom teachers as showing unusual potential for intellectual gains. Eight months later these “unusual” children (who had actually been selected at random) showed significantly greater gains in IQ than did the remaining children in the control group. These effects of teachers’ expectancies operated primarily among the younger children.

And now comes a massive, tragic problem: What happens when African American students end up in first grade classes with teachers who expect European American students to perform better than African American students? What happens, speaking generally, is that the European American students do perform better than the African American students. Are there exceptions? Of course.

Much work has been done at Harvard University to shed light on people's private assumptions and preferences. Just as most people have a preference for either chocolate or vanilla ice cream, or coffee or tea, most people have a preference for either European American humans or African American humans. We know whether we prefer chocolate or vanilla ice cream. We know whether we prefer coffee or tea. And there is little social stigma attached to voicing our preference for ice cream flavors or beverage types. But there is social stigma attached to voicing a preference for either European American humans or African American humans. We are rarely asked to choose. Most of us are taught that it is best not to think about human preferences in those terms. And so most of us try not to. The very suggestion can trigger visceral defensive responses. But the preferences are there. The biases that we don't want to think about are implicit biases.

To test for implicit bias, Harvard researchers developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT). You can test yourself for implicit racial bias at the Project Implicit web site. Don't be afraid to do it! If you don't like your results, there are steps you can take. Here is a blog post I wrote to get you started: Prescriptive Action.

The IAT is widely used by other researchers for use as an independent variable in their studies. Here is the abstract of an important example, The Implicit Prejudiced Attitudes of Teachers: Relations to Teacher Expectations and the Ethnic Achievement Gap by Linda van den Bergh et al.:

Ethnic minority students are at risk for school failure and show a heightened susceptibility to negative teacher expectancy effects. In the present study, whether the prejudiced attitudes of teachers relate to their expectations and the academic achievement of their students is examined. The prejudiced attitudes of 41 elementary school teachers were assessed via self-report and an Implicit Association Test. Teacher expectations and achievement scores for 434 students were obtained. Multilevel analyses showed no relations with the self-report measure of prejudiced attitudes. The implicit measure of teacher prejudiced attitudes, however, was found to explain differing ethnic achievement gap sizes across classrooms via teacher expectations. The results of this study also suggest that the use of implicit attitude measures may be important in educational research.

This supports the work of Rosenthal, et al in their study, Teachers' expectancies: Determinants of pupils' IQ gains, which I mentioned earlier in this post.

Again, what does a high achiever look like? You could ask a teacher, but they may not be able to tell you. Their gut instincts on the subject, however, are powerful. Especially in the early years. This is typically when some students head onto the high achiever path, and others do not. Students who fall behind in reading and math in first grade have a very hard time catching up.

Last week I saw a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. They took data available from the US Census and state records to determine how well children fared in different states based on their continental ancestry. The study, "Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportunity for All Children" ranked states. The results turned up interesting facts like these two: Wisconsin was rated the worst state in the nation for raising African American children. Wisconsin was rated the eleventh best state in the nation for raising European American children.

What can account for the difference in experiences of African American children versus European American children in Wisconsin? Undoubtedly, there are multiple factors. I would argue that implicit bias is one of the largest.

Implicit bias is not just about teachers. It is about the person who dials 911 to report a suspicious person. It is about the police officer who responds to the 911 call and possibly overreacts to the situation. It is about the parent who determines which children can come over to play. It is about the employer who determines which candidate they will hire. It's about the woman in the elevator who determines whether the other passenger is a threat. It's about the store manager who decides which teenagers should leave their backpacks at the front of the store. It's about who comes to dinner.

Each of us paints our own portraits of who makes a good student or friend or employee or house guest. And we make decisions based on the portraits we paint in our minds of who is trustworthy, who is hard working, who is gentle, who is smart, and who is committed. Please keep all of this in mind as you read my next post (as yet unfinished), "The Narrow Path of a High Achiever".