Rediscovering the lion
Effect' in American Schools
By Joanne Yatvin
" H igh expectations"
is the mantra of
today's school re-
formers, who are
convinced that the trouble with pub-
lic education is that students have
been allowed to slide by with little
effort. Their version of high expecta-
tions is requiring college-preparatory
courses, advanced subject matter,
more-diicult assignments, and a
longer school day and year for all
students. They believe that research
and the records of selected schools
show that demanding more of students
brings the desired results.
But do they understand the research, or
know what successful schools really do?
The original research on teacher expec-
tations tells a far different story from what
today's reformers are calling for. More than
40 years ago, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore
Jacobson conducted an experiment in a
California elementary school that produced
what they called, in a reference to Greek
mythology and George Bernard Shaw's fa-
mous play, the "Pygmalion Effect": the amaz-
ing transformation of an ordinary person into
someone special. In their book Pygmalion in
the Classroom, they described the study in de-
,iCulture' and the Plight of Today's Youth
tail and interpreted its lessons for education
and other human interactions.
The experiment consisted of giving false in-
formation to teachers about their students and
then sitting back to see what happened. On the
pretext oftesting the reliability of a newly devel-
oped test to predict future student achievement,
the researchers administered a traditional IQ
test to all students at the beginning of the
school year. Afterward, they reported to teach-
ers, based supposedly on the tests, the names
of students who were about to have a spurt in
academic performance.
In reality,these students were a randomly se-
lected percentage of the student body, and their
scores showed nothing but their current IQs. At
the end of the year, and again two years later, all
students were retested, and the results showed
that a significant number ofthe identified "spurt-
ers" had in fact made unusual intellectual and
performance gains and maintained them over
time. Teachers' grades and written reports also
recorded marked improvements in learning and
behavior for most ofthese students.
Although the researchers did not examine what
happened in classrooms that year, teachers' writ-
ten reports were clear about what did not hap-
pen: no extra time, no advanced curriculum, no
individual tutoring, no differentiated instruction
or assignments.
Rosenthal and Jacobson speculated that
what teachers gave their spurters-but not
their other students--were unmistakable sig-
nals of their faith in them: smiles, nods of ap-
proval, more opportunities to ask and answer
questions, and a kindly tone of voice. Teachers'
expectations of student success, and their un-
conscious communication of those expectations,
made all the difference.
In its time, this study, along with its repli-
cations in three other schools and similar be-
havioral studies, garnered widespread and au-
thoritative attention. Although there was some
criticism of methodology and score interpreta-
tion, critics did not contest the researchers' con-
clusion that the expectations in teachers' minds
were the determining factor in the success of
the identified children.
Now, 40 years later, the reality ofthe TPygmal-
ion effect" stands unrefuted by further research,
while it is supported by considerable evidence
from classrooms where poor and minority chil-
dren have made great strides in their learning
because their teachers believed they would. It is
also supported by countless stories of success-
ful people who were struggling in school and
life until some adult-a teacher, a boss, a family
friend-saw something special in them and en-
T
couraged them to make the most of it.
•he discrepancy between the Pygmalion
researchers' concept of high expecta-
tions and that of today's reformers
ýTstems from the multiple meanings of
 Quality education and student
self-esteem are not mutualýy
exclusive. We can have both, but not
until we understand the essential
nature of human behaviorand
leaming."
the word "expectation." To the researchers, it meant
the power of belief to influence the behavior of others.
To the reformers, it means the power of authority to
exact compliance from underlings.
As a lifelong educator, I am not so starry-eyed as
to think that believing in students is all that teach-
ers and schools have to do to enable them to succeed.
Every school needs a strong curriculum, high-quality
materials, well-planned instruction, extra-help options,
and meaningful assessments. But all those compo-
nents should be calibrated to the ages, interests, prior
learning, and physical and emotional capacity of the
students at hand, not to the illusions held by so many
pundits, business leaders, and politicians.
Quality education and student self-esteem are not
mutually exclusive. We can have both, but not until we
understand the essential nature of human behavior
and learning, recognizing that schools must appeal to
and support the strengths of students, not play on their
fears and weaknesses.
Schools are meant to be wellsprings of vigor,interest,
exploration, growth, and illumination. Rigor, the word
so often used by reformers to describe what schools
should emphasize, is more properly the companion
of harshness, inflexibility, and oppression. It is time
to change the current conception of high expectations
back to its original meaning. m
JOANNE YATVIN, a former school principal, is an adjunct
professor at Portland State University, in Portland, Ore. She is a
past president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
being ignored. Some estimate, for example,
that 46.4 percent ofAmericans will meet the
criteria for a mental disorder-half of these
by the age of 14.
In my seminars over the past 35 years, I
have constantly dealt with parents who are
successful in life but don't understand who
they really are. Their unresolved childhood
issues have adversely affected not only
their own lives, but also their children's.
American schools need to initiate an en-
tirely new education system, one that fo-
cuses on the heart and soul as well as the
mind, and that involves each student's fam-
ily in doing this.
If it sounds too complex, think again.
Speaking as the founder of a network of
private and public schools that has been
developing this concept over the past 43
years, I can testify to the fact that, once you
tap into the deeper, heart-and-soul under-
standings of students, you can generate the
kind of motivation that helps them create
a new and more positive peer culture. Thi
in turn, unites a powerful teacher-and-stu-
dent team. Add the unification of family and
school, and the stage is set for each student
to become truly prepared for life.
This isn't merely a high-flown ideal. It
is an active rediscovery of what our fore-
fathers put in place more than two centu-
ries ago. The only thing missing today is
the vision and courage to pass it on to our
children. m
JOSEPH W. GAULD is the founder of Hyde Schools,
headquartered in Bath, Maine (www.hyde.edu).
Lives on the Bound
20 Years Later
By Jessica Siegel
his is a hopeful book about those who
l wrote Mike Rose in the preface
to his powerful, evocative, and, at the th
" T sametime,.el-rge book Lvson
Boundary, wihwspublished 20yasago thisyer
The book, which has sold over 200,000 copies, is not
only discussed in education schools. It is read in English
summer institutes, and college-orientation classes, and is
anthologized widely
My copy from 1989 is now yellowed, with a coner of
the cover missing and the last few pages slipping out.
Yet it remains one of the few books rve read that really
get inside the heads of students seen as "remedial,"
"disadvantaged," "at Wris"lJliterate,- "intellectually
deficient," or whatever new term is coined for young
people who struggle in school And it remains a central
part of howlI teach high school teachers at Brooklyn
College, part of the CityUniversity ofNewYork,which,
for the most part, prepares students to work in the New
York City public schools.
But if it is "a hopeful book about those who fail"
-and it is-that isnt because Rose, now a professor
at the University of California, Los Angeles, but once
categorized as one of those kirds of students himseK has
written a pedagogical how-to in reaching disadvantaged
learners. No, the book is inf ct unclassifiable: a memoir,
ahistory ofAmeiican education, a description of learning
processes, an expos6 of false notions of intelligence, and a
call to arms for a humane vision of education.
The book is effective partly because it is an amalgam.
But it also is beautifully written and on target about
what itis like for kids struggling in school. Rose should
know He grew up in Los Angeles, the only child of two
Italian-American working-class immigrant& His mother
quit school in 7th grade to care for her.sickly younger
brothers. His father went through a year or two of Italian
elementary school before coming to this country, and was
disabled for much of Ross youth. His mother supported
the family as a waitress in a coffee shop.
It is through Rose's own eyes that a good chunk
of the book is narrated, first as a student in the
vocational track, which was used as a dumping
ground for students seen as "not college material"
at his Catholic high school; later, in the college-prep
track, when he was switched there in 10th grade;
and then afterwards, as an underprepared college
student. He nails the experiences of someone trying
to keep his head above water in school, as in this
description of what it's like encountering a difficult
word problem in math:
"The basic elements are as familiar as story
characters:trainsspeeding so many miles per hour
or shadows of buildings angling so many degrees.
Maybe you know enough, have sat through enough
explanations,to be able to begin setting up the
problem: 'Ifone train is going this fast ... 'or'This
shadow is really one line of a triangle.....'Then:Let's
see ... "How did Jones do this? "Hmmmm."No. "No,
that won't work.' Your attention wavers. You wonder
about other things: a football game, a dance, that
cute new checker at the market.You try to focus
on the problem again.You scribble on paperfor a
while, but the tension wins out and your attention
flits elsewhere. You crumple the paper and begin
daydreamingto ease the frustration.
The particularswill vary, but in essence this is
what a number of students go through, especially
those in so-called remedial classes. They open their
textbooks and see once again the familiar and
impenetrable formulas and diagrams and terms that
have stumped them for years. There is no excitement
here. No excitement. Regardless of what the teacher
says, this is not a new challenge. There is, rather,
embarrassmentand frustration and, not surprisingly,
some anger in being reminded once again oflong-
standing inadequacies No wonder so many students
finally attributetheir difficulties to something inborn,
organic:'That part of my brainjust doesn't work."
As he does there, Rose is constantly pulling back to
comment on his own experiences, to explain things
or to give the reader the background to understand
them. But the book is not just his own story; he
describes teaching elementary school students,
adolescents, Vietnam veterans, second-language
adults, and grandmothers learning to read for the
first time. All these people, characters in a rich
patchwork quilt of experiences of his own and others'
time in school, become vivid to us. There's Laura, a
daughter of a food vendor in Tijuana, who signed up
for and dropped a remedial English course at uCLA
four times during her freshman year because of her
fears that she was "a crummy writer."
There is Olga, an older student in heavy mascara
and with hair teased, who finished reading
"Macbeth": "You know, Mike, people always hold
this shit over you, ... make you feel stupid with
their fancy talk. But now I've read it, I've read
Shakespeare, I can say I, Olga, have read it. I won't
tell you I like it, 'cause I don't know if I do or I don't.
But I like knowing what it's about"
And then there is Willie Oates, who is one of
my favorites, a student in Rose's class of Vietnam
veterans who served time injail and, thanks to the
prison library, got turned on to reading everything
from Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm
X to Sense and Sensibility and The Mill on the Floss.
As Rose says: "As I paged through [his journal], I
saw black, working-class experience fused with the
language of teapots and Victorian gardens. ... It was
a remarkable book, the record of a clash of cultures
and a testament to the power of Willie's desire."
A ti
Iermg, a turn
i~g edaforwth"ers,aprto
student's desi
ina piecn riddl of phrase
a student's writing that is particularly
revealing, an insight that comes tumbling out
when conversing with a student-through all of these
Rose sees evidence of possibility. Possibility is a word
that comes up a lot in his writing. What is possible?
Are we missing possibilities in students who seem like
lost causes? These are questions he constantly raises.
He was treated as a lost cause when he was in the
vocational track-before a few insightful teachers, and
later professors, noticed him and gave him the support
he needed.
This is partially why I think it is so important for
the preservice and working teachers in my class to
read this book. Rose believes in the power of teachers
to make a difference, even if he is critical of the way
the educational enterprise is working.
What he offers as well in Lives on the Boundary
is something called "binocular vision," a concept he
learned from Ben Campos, a seasoned teacher and
a mentor with whom he worked when he was in the
Teacher Corps. "Ben possessed the kind of binocular
vision I needed so badly," Rose writes. "He was able to
see head-on the community's poverty and despair, yet
saw as well the many points of desire and possibility."
That's what I want my students to develop: an
ability to see clearly their students' strengths and
possibilities as well as their weakness and issues.
That's what I want to share with them. And I offer it
to them, thanks to Lives on the Boundary.m
JESSICA SIEGEL is an assistant professor of education and
journalism at Brooklyn College, in New York City. She was,
with her high school students on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan, the subject of Samuel G. Freedman's Small Victories
(HarperCollins, 1990).
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TITLE: Rediscovering the ‘Pygmalion Effect’ in American

Schools
SOURCE: Educ Week 29 no9 O 28 2009

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