0.8 Mirci, p., loomis, c., & Hensley, p. (september 2011). social  (Page 6/19)

Citing these studies is not meant to vilify educators, many of whom are focusing on students and working in highly stressful contexts striving to promote their intellectual, social, emotional, and ethical development. Rather, these and other recent research studies were consistent with 30 years of research revealing the importance of how teacher perceptions influence their expectations regarding student achievement.

Good (1981) offered the following model describing how teacher expectations influence student learning:

1. The teacher expects specific behavior and achievement from particular students.
2. Because of these varied expectations, the teacher behaves differently toward different students.
3. This treatment communicates to the students what behavior and achievement the teacher expects from them and affects their self-concepts, achievement motivation, and levels of aspiration.
4. If this treatment is consistent over time, and if the students do not resist or change it in some way, it will shape their achievement and behavior. High-expectation students will be led to achieve at high levels, whereas the achievement of low-expectation students will decline.
5. With time, students’ achievement and behavior will conform more and more closely to the behavior originally expected of them (p. 416).

This describes the Pygmalion effect: a student fulfills the expectations of a teacher for his or her academic success (Rosenthal&Jacobson, 1992). The teacher not only conveys the expectations but also interacts with the student in ways that lead the student to mastery. Over time a person may internalize these expectations whereby they become self-expectations constituting the Galatea effect (McNatt&Judge, 2004).

Social justice and the achievement gap

The federal No Child Left Behind Act indicated that the achievement gap between Whites and traditionally underserved groups (e.g., African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and Native Americans) must be closed. Attempts to close the gap have ranged from intervention programs to increasing instructional time in language arts and math while decreasing time in the visual and performing arts. In some schools and districts attempts have included targeting students for instruction who could make the necessary gains in test scores to show schools were improving their effectiveness. These attempts have seemed to arise from “the obsession” with high-stakes testing and the pacing of curriculum coverage (Ravitch, 2010, p. 107). The fact that the “achievement gap” has existed for almost 100 years originating in beliefs about the intellectual inferiority of traditional underserved students needs to be considered. Is there an example of a school where students are succeeding but might not be if they were in the traditional large comprehensive high school?

Envision a high school where each student has a personalized education as a different social construction of reality regarding schooling than the one underlying traditional schooling. The Big Picture Learning Company founded in 1995 by Dennis Littky and Elliot Washer opened in 1996 in Providence, Rhode Island, The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (The Met). The students attending it were “at-risk.” The diversity of the student population was “41% White, 38% Latino, 18% African-American, and 3% Asian-American” and 50% were from low income families (Levine, 2002, p. xix). Every student graduated, was accepted into college, and some graduated with credits from college courses they passed while in high school. Compared to other secondary schools, The Met in Providence had one-third of a dropout rate and absentee rate, and “one-eighteenth the rate of disciplinary suspensions” (Levin, 2002, p. xix). This example has illustrated the need for professors of educational administration to not only prepare aspiring administrators for the existing reality of traditional schooling but also help them be adaptable to different conceptions of schooling. This might promote innovative alternative thinking about the future of schooling.