Pygmalion, in the Classroom, Again
President Obama stepped off a bus today, to address an audience at the University of Buffalo, about, among other things, the need to lower the cost of education for the middle class (Mr. Obama nearly always describes his policy initiatives as good for the middle class, even though, four years into his presidency, his cherished class is worse off). He could have done much more, for his new policy thrust to improve America's dismal educational system, had he simply stayed in Washington, and directed the mass circulation - or at least a distribution to the teachers' unions - of a new book on the matter.
"Simply put, when teachers expect students to do well and show intellectual growth, they do; when teachers do not have such expectations, performance and growth are not so encouraged and may in fact be discouraged in a variety of ways". So wrote James Rhem, a reviewer of the 1968 book, Pygmalion in the Classroom, by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. The book investigated the importance of teacher expectations on student performance. In describing their thesis as having "Pygmalion" in the classroom, the authors were recalling a Greek mythological character, much later popularized in George Bernard Shaw's 1912 play, and then on a (much) simpler basis in the 1956 musical, My Fair Lady, in which a bet is made that a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, can be trained to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility. In the myth, the play, and the musical, it worked.
According to a fascinating new book, "The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way", by Amanda Ripley, educational excellence really is all about expectation - specifically, what teachers convey to their students as expected. And, according to the research, this is especially true when teachers exude, and are perceived by their students as having, an aura of professionalism. Ms.Ripley is on about the schools, in various countries, that are working - and is withering about those that are not. The trick, it seems, is to teach kids to think critically, rather than to memorize material. But, far more importantly, the idea is to simply expect the very best from every pupil in the classroom, with no regard to, or sympathy, or excuses made, for students' relative wealth, or race, or even daily circumstance. Thus, for example, she cites the extraordinary case of Poland. In 1997, the Minister of Education, Miroslaw Handke, introduced a dramatically new core of school reforms, including both curriculum and testing, and made it mandatory that all teachers demand rigorous work, and that students stay in the same school until they were at least 16, even when some parents and/or administrators were suggesting that some move to vocational training. Within a few years, Poland has jumped hugely in the internationally-accepted PISA rankings, significantly as a result of high scores from who would have been described in earlier Polish regimes as "non-academic" children.
Ms. Ripley is, nonetheless, quick to note that not every country example of remarkable educational achievement produces happy students. The poster child for the exception is South Korea, nearly illiterate in the 1950's, now regarded as an extreme, educational meritocracy, with one of the highest school-graduation rates in the world. but where students at all levels are often miserable. The pendulum can swing too far, especially when parents are complicit.
Yet, against such an example of educational extremism, Ms. Ripley cites public school systems not only in Poland, but in Finland and Japan and Canada - though not in America, where sports' achievement is often the goal, or a child's socioeconomic background is given as an excuse for failure - that are exhibiting a simple truth: students rise to rigorous standards.
At least President Obama, in Buffalo, is correct to focus on the essence of education in economic development and prosperity - how else to explain, for example, that tiny Finland (5th in the PISA ranking) sits comfortably in third place in the World Economic Forum's latest ranking of global competitiveness, well above America's seventh, and declining, place.