Do We Care if Every Kid Succeeds?

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

The soft bigotry of low expectations, redux

With the public turn against No Child Left Behind, many of the sayings and idea surrounding the legislative push and ensuing policies have become sarcastic refrains tossed around by a public cynical of reform policies. Find a social media post about how difficult it is to teach right now, and you’ll see people in the comments joking that the kids were all left behind. “Is our kids learning?” is another perpetual joke that has outlived the NCLB disaster. Even though that law was superceded by ESSA and then ESSA curtailed in 2017, the shadow of NCLB loom large in today’s debates about education. It’s still crazy to think that two decades ago the right wing of America’s political system was laser focused on standards and accountability when today they’re tearing down any sense that schools should be responsible for some kind of minimum competency, preferring that parents make those assessments themselves.

Anyway, there’s another saying from this era that I want to meditate on for a bit today: the soft bigotry of low expectations. The idea George W Bush is pushing is that schools simply do not expect black students and students of color to succeed. Because they do not expect them to succeed, schools do to work to support those students or to offer them rigorous courses that prepare them for the future. Whatever you may think of the plan that became NCLB, the root of the idea is here in Bush’s speech to the NAACP. “While we have come so far and all can enter our schools,” he says, invoking the history of desegregation, “many, too many, are not learning there. There’s a tremendous gap in achievement between rich and poor, white and minority.” This is an attitude that simply doesn’t come up any more in discussions of education policy. As Matt Yglesias puts it, America stopped caring how poor kids do in school. I don’t think Matt expends any effort to understand why America stopped caring, but he’s dead right that the consensus has changed.

We simply cannot let this continue. As a nation, we cannot say that it is okay for some students not to learn but that really seems like where we’re going. Last week, I pointed to a commenter in a different part of the internet who argues that most kids can’t learn math up to the point of algebra and we shouldn’t try to teach them. Politicians are busy implementing voucher programs that will send taxpayer dollars to schools without any mechanism for determining if those schools are providing a decent education. Teachers are questioning the value of inclusive classrooms. We should return to thinking about the importance of having high expectations for our students and our schools. What can be different this time, however, is that we can turn from framing students’ failings as schools’ failing and from focusing on deficits to focusing on opportunities.

Teachers and students should expect more of each other

It turns out there’s a long and consistent literature finding that teachers’ expectations are an important component of students’ success. Because it is paywalled, let’s excerpt a bit from that first link, a 1987 review of the literature. There are two main kinds of teacher expectation found in this review. The first clearly follows along with the soft bigotry line: self-fulfilling prophesy. The teachers forms some kind of judgement about a kid based on erroneous or incomplete information and then behaves in a way that makes the erroneously expected outcome come true. To use an example from the article, a student may show up in high school with a thick disciplinary record and low grades. Her new teacher decides the best thing to do is be hyper vigilant and critical of that student’s behavior and ends up frequently sending that kid to the office. She misses lots of class and develops a relationship with her new teacher based on conflict and mutual dislike. By the end of the semester, she is failing the class and spends a lot of time in detention or in-school suspension because of behaviors in that class. The teacher, however, thinks she has been right all along. After all, isn’t the suspended student the problem? Isn’t she doing the things that get her suspended? Yes, but what Good (the author) points out from his review is that studies show there tend to be two opportunities to do this differently. First, the teachers do not tend to see the flaw in their more stringent application of discipline to some kids but not to others. Often times other kids will make the same disciplinary infractions but suffer fewer consequences because the teacher sees them as a “good kid”. This same thing can also happen with positive support. Teachers devote more attention to supporting students who are already successful in their classes while writing off kids who struggle.

That brings us to the second kind of expectation that can fail students: sustaining expectations. Under a sustaining expectation, teachers assume students can’t change. The effect here is less about misjudgement than it is about missed opportunities. When teachers expect students’ patterns of behavior to remain the same, they fail to notice opportunities to intervene and change those behaviors or head off declines in student performance. A teacher might, for example, write off that a star student failed a quiz and missed some assignments as just a rough patch. What if it’s something else?

Let’s use an example from my work years ago as a literacy specialist in a middle school. There was a student in a 6th grade ELA class who performed well in elementary and at the start of the school year but was struggling to complete work in class, had difficulty focusing, and wouldn’t do any of the take-home reading or assignments. The problem had been going on for a bit and by February the teacher was getting ready to call a parent-teacher conference to see if they could develop a plan. I observed the teacher have a chat with the student, let’s call her Evelyn. The teacher asked about completing work, spoke about the importance of bring her grade up, and how assignments usually support learning the next thing and the next, making it too easy to fall behind and stay behind. All good points! I added another line of questioning. I asked Evelyn to walk us through her day once she left school. It turns out that she was the primary caretaker for her little sister. Her mother had just taken a second job and Evelyn’s role as oldest child was to take care of her two-year old sister until the mom came home late that night. She cooked, cleaned, bathed, and put the kid to bed, only getting a small amount of time to herself before going to bed. This meant she couldn’t finish most schoolwork but also that she was exhausted the next day because she also cared for the baby in the morning before school. With that understanding, the parent-teacher conference took on a new tone. Instead of being about what Evelyn lacked in terms of academic performance, it became about how to find time for Evelyn to do what she needed to do. To get there, we had to shake the sustaining expectation that Evelyn was just another high performer hitting a rough patch, and that the challenges were academic rather than familial.

Interestingly, the effects of expectations extend to groups of students, to entire classes, and even school wide. One of the main criticisms of the soft bigotry of low expectations was that, when combined with punitive accountability, it created its own self-fulfilling prophesy whereby struggling schools (of course this was the poor black ones) were made to struggle more as resources were withdrawn and staff fired, resulting in a spiral toward school closure or takeover. Meanwhile, schools that had always been “good” were expected to continue being good even as demographic and socioeconomic changes altered their student bodies. Larry Cuban reminds us, too, that students can have expectations and those expectations matter.

He’s pointing out that those sustaining expectations work both ways but, much like with any kind of innovation, sustaining a status quo is ultimately unsustainable in some way.

Expecting Scholastic Alchemy

To return to a point I made repeatedly at the outset of this newsletter blog thing I wrote, schools are complex spaces and our efforts to control, manage, and reshape them often go wrong for ways that, in hindsight, seem obvious but somehow were not at the initial point. Scholastic Alchemy tells us as teachers to be wary of our own assumptions about how students and classrooms work. We simply cannot know everything, and the appropriate stance is one of openness and curiosity toward each new kid, subject, and reform. Things may go poorly but expecting them to go poorly risks self-fulfilling prophesy. Likewise, expecting things to remain stable and function as they always have risks stifling kids just as much through Matthew effects and failures to intervene.

What I worry about, though, is that we simply stop expecting things from most kids. Rather than look at a kid and wonder if they could be better supported in a more rigorous academic pathway, if they need specialized services, or if there’s something going on at home, we’re starting to design policy around parents’ prerogatives. In these cases, we rely on their judgement, their expectations of their own kids, and their ability to navigate complex bureaucratic systems in order to have an educated citizenry. It’s not clear to me that all parents are going to be up to the task. I suppose I am expressing a kind of low expectation in this case.

Thanks for reading!