Education: conclude 425

1
Education conclude (4/25)

• Self-fulfilling prophecies
• Leave no child behind
• Markets and choices

2
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.
• Rosenthals 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?

3
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

4
Feedbacks

• All education involves cumulations e.g.

Identity, motivation, skills, life plans
How well a student performs
What the teacher expects and percieves
Biases, opportunities, stereotypes, tracking,
attention etc. affect what he or she does
5
Why isnt 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.

6
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.

7
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.

8
Double-blind experiments

• One of the main implications of Rosenthals 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.

9
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.

10
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.

11
Is it possible for a school system to expect all
students to succeed

• The tables at the end of ch. 17 (pp. 582-3) 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?

12
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?

13
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.

14
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?

15
Possible explanations

• Culture and student/family attitudes
• Failure of family and community
• Segregation and concentrated poverty
• Overloaded schools (e.g. Shootings)
• 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?

16
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

17
(No Transcript)
18
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.

19
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 Ritas own fault but it feels more
  like a trap to her.
• And if she leaves, what happens to those left
  behind?

20
21st century Issues

• The main political and social issues of the 20th
  century involved the appropriate mixture in
  economy, health, education, housing and other
  social areas.
• The end of the 20th century 1989-2000, saw a
  large increase in unfettered capitalist
  arrangements.
• The balance between social and private provision
  is one of the key issues of the 21st c.

21
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.

22
Vouchers

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

23
Some arguments

• PRO
• It is cheap
• It promotes competition
• It gives poor students middle class advantages

• CON
• It increases segregation
• It takes resources away from the neediest schools
• Inequality and giving up would increase.