Consider this a postscript to yesterday’s post about the unequal prosecution of the drug war, and the effect of that disparity on public attitudes toward African-Americans.
A few days ago, a Brookings Institution study confirmed what many of us have suspected–
The 2015 recipient of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) National Teacher of the Year Award, Shanna Peeples, recently spoke about the importance of teachers believing in their students—and imparting their expectations to students—particularly students who doubt their ability to succeed academically. Students have similar feelings and frequently report favoring teachers who “believe in [students’] ability to succeed”. Teachers’ expectations may either counteract or reinforce negative expectations held by traditionally disadvantaged students who lack access to educationally-successful role models. To date, however, little is known about how teachers form expectations and whether their expectations are systematically biased.
Along with colleagues at American University and Johns Hopkins University, I begin to address these questions in a recent study. We find evidence of systematic biases in teachers’ expectations for the educational attainment of black students. Specifically, non-black teachers have significantly lower educational expectations for black students than black teachers do when evaluating the same students. …
For example, when a black student is evaluated by one black teacher and by one non-black teacher, the non-black teacher is about 30 percent less likely to expect that the student will complete a four-year college degree than the black teacher.
There is a fair amount of research confirming the belief that teachers’ evaluation of student capacities affect student performance. (This will hardly come as a shock to those of us who are parents.Kids live up–or down–to our expectations.)
It bears repeating–again–that these disparities in expectation are not evidence of conscious racial bias. I’d be willing to bet that most of these non-black teachers genuinely care about all of their students, whatever their ethnicity or skin color.
These lowered expectations are reinforced by multiple, ingrained cultural messages–they are part and parcel of social attitudes that become self-fulfilling prophecies.
The question is: how do we change those attitudes? How do we train teachers to base their demands for student performance on more appropriate criteria than skin color?
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