Teachers: Blooming by Deception

Critics of the public schools, particularly in urban ghettos, have long argued that many children fail to learn simply because their teachers do not expect them to. That proposition is effectively documented in a new book called Pygmalion in the Classroom (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $4.95). The book tells of an ingenious experiment involving several teachers at a South San Francisco grade school who were deceived into believing that certain of their students had been spotted as “late bloomers.” Eight months later, the chil dren’s academic abilities showed dramatic improvement.

The deception was carried out by Pygmalion’s authors, Harvard Social Psychologist Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, former principal of South San Francisco’s Spruce School. They told the teachers that a new test could predict which slow-learning students were likely to “show an unusual forward spurt of academic and intellectual functioning.” The exam, actually a routine but unfamiliar intelligence test, was given to all pupils. Teachers were then told which students had displayed a high potential for improvement. The names were actually drawn out of a hat.

When tested later, the designated late bloomers showed an average IQ gain of 12.22 points, while the rest of the student body gained 8.42 points. The gains were most dramatic in the lowest grades. First-graders whose teachers expected them to advance intellectually jumped 27.4 points, second-graders 16.5 points. There were similar gains in reading ability. One young Mexican American, who had been classified as mentally retarded with an IQ of 61, scored 106 after his selection as a late bloomer.

Rosenthal and Jacobson politely refrain from moralizing, suggesting only that “teachers’ expectations of their pupils’ performance may serve as self-fulfilling prophecies.” But the findings raise some fundamental questions about teacher training. They also cast doubt on the wisdom of assigning children to classes according to presumed ability, which may only mire the lowest groups into self-confining ruts. If children tend to become the kind of students their teachers expect them to be, the obvious need is to raise the teachers’ sights. Or, as Eliza Doolittle says in Shaw’s Pygmalion, “The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.”