Teacher Expectations and Performance

Numerous studies have indicated that teachers have expectations regarding how well their students will perform in school. In some cases, these expectations are based on reliable criteria, such as past academic performance or classroom behavior (Dusek & Joseph, 1983, p. 341). However, in many other cases, the expectations are based simply on appearances. Specifically, race and socioeconomic class are often used as the criteria for forming teacher expectations. Many teachers expect white children from upper and middle class homes to do well in their academic studies. By contrast, it is assumed that African-American or Latino children from lower class homes will do poorly in their school work. Such expectations have a subtle effect on the teacher's behavior within the classroom. As a result of this behavior, the expectations of the teacher are communicated to the students. In most cases, the students react to this communication by performing in the manner that the teacher expects of them. This process is referred to as being a "self-fulfilling prophecy" in education (Chunn, 1988, p. 95). The expectations of the teacher are also fulfilled by the system of ability grouping and tracking which exists in most American schools. In this system, the students who are expected to perform poorly are placed in special learning groups. Unfortunately, this system does little to help the students overcome their educational disadvantages. In fact, it tends to reinforce those disadv

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ns of classroom interaction established by the teacher [has] inhibited the low-status children from verbalizing what knowledge they had accumulated" (Rist, 1970, p. 86). Because of the teacher's expectation that such students can never learn anything, the lower ranked children are "shut out" from contributing to the educational process that they are supposedly participating in. There are many examples in the literature regarding the ways in which teacher expectations are conveyed to their students. For example, Jonathan Kozol concerns himself with some of these methods in his book Death at an Early Age (1967). This book is based on the experiences that Kozol had while teaching in a black-majority school in Boston. According to the notes on the cover of the book, a major theme of the work is "the ease with which a child may be persuaded of his own inferiority." In Death at an Early Age, Kozol describes many episodes in which teachers either inadvertently or purposefully transmitted negative expectations to the black students. For example, when an art teacher saw a young student looking at himself in the mirror instead of doing his classwork, the teacher pulled the student to the front of the room and ridiculed him in fron

Category: Economics - T