There's nothing new about the "school crisis." Almost every American community experiences the annual school budget problem. But now there is a new twist emerging. Traditionally, the "anti- school" forces were the narrow-minded, those who were unconcerned about advancing the social good, while the "pro-school" forces were armed with all the socially good arguments. Recently, the anti- school forces have taken the offensive, basing themselves on the "latest" in educational research.
Educational research findings rarely make front page news in the New York Times, but in its issue of August 8, 1967, a front-page headline announced: "Study Indicates Pupils Do Well When Teacher is Told They Will." The Times article reported a piece of research by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson which was later published in book form under the title Pygmalion in the Classroom (Holt, 1968). An article on the same subject was featured in Scientific American, and hundreds of articles on education now use their conclusions on this research.
In Pygmalion, Rosenthal and Jacobson described how they administered the "Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition" to students in a California school. Teachers were told that the test showed an inflection point for students at which it was possible to predict which children were about to "bloom" or show an unusual spurt in academic progress. (The test was actually a widely used IQ test.) Pygmalion then recounted that teachers were given the names of those students who were going to "bloom" and that, even though these students were selected on a random basis, the mere fact that the teachers expected them to "bloom" brought about spectacular results.
The learning process in children was thus found to fall within the concept category of the "Self- fulfilling Prophesy" developed by the sociologist, Robert Merton. Merton has pointed out that, in some social situations, holding a belief actually made the belief come true. If bank depositors believed a bank was about to fail, their run on the bank would bring about the failure. The Rosenthal-Jacobson research has been used to buttress the argument that greater educational expenditures are not essential and that academic qualification of teachers is irrelevant because, if teachers believe a child can learn, the child will learn. The culprit is therefore the teacher: If thousands upon thousands of children are not learning to read, write, speak and compute, it is not because of overcrowded classrooms, the effects of poverty and social conditions, poorly developed educational programs and materials and inadequately trained teachers. No, the children are not learning because the teachers don't expect them to learn.
"When the Clock Strikes 14,,,"
The argument is certainly dramatic, but is has not been able to withstand careful examination. Dr. Robert Thorndike, Columbia University's testing expert, correctly predicted that Pygmalion in the Classroom would become a classic even though it was "so defective that one can only regret that it ever got beyond the eyes of the original investigators!" The authors' research conclusion rested on the test data, but Thorndike found that the test results reported one class with a mean IQ of 31 ("They just barely appear to make the grade as imbeciles!" said Thorndike.) While the mean IQ of all the students entering first grade in this ordinary school was an incredible 58! Pygmalion was so loaded with such impossibilities that Thorndike concluded, "When the clock strikes thirteen, doubt is cast not only on the last stroke, but also on all that have gone before ... When the clock strikes 14, it is time to throw away the clock!"
More recently, in the March 1971 issue of the American Education Research Journal, Elyse Fleming and Ralph Anttonen, researchers at Case Western Reserve University, after experimenting with nearly 1,000 students, concluded that " ... the self-fulfilling prophesy does not operate as Rosenthal hypothesizes," and that teacher expectations for students were not based on IQ tests (whether given true or false test information) but rather on the actual functioning level of students in the class.
The New York Times' front page report on Pygmalion did much to reduce public support for education and to focus attention on teacher attitudes. Now that Pygmalion, while provocative, has turned out to be false, I would hope the Times would give equal prominence to newer, more truthful findings, so that public policy does not continue to be based on the fiction that Professor Higgins made a lady out of a flower girl merely by treating her as one. Fleming and Anttonen had good reason to ask "Professor Higgins, how did you really do it?"
If research which attacks teachers and the public schools is persistently given prominence in the press, while research which supports the role of teachers and our public schools is screened out (whether as a result of deliberate bias, journalistic sensationalism or plain carelessness), public education is in serious danger.