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60   A Test of Classroom 'Bloomers' 
     New Key to Education Research
     The Washington Post - Saturday, September 2, 1967

     Since the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial
segregation in public schools, educational theory has become ever
more closely entwined with the halting progress of the law to meet
the most urgent of our social problems.  The priority given to school
desegregation as a social objective, however, may be attributable
more to its symbolic role, and to the hope that it might be reachable
by an act of law, than to any scientifically justified confidence that
desegregation, by itself would solve any educational problem.

     Research in education hardly provides the atmosphere of
dispassionate criticism and reflection needed for good science.  Most
such research is observation, like the survey of American education
that led to last year's Coleman Report from the U.S. Office of
Education.

     Human beings are quite ornery about being neatly pigeonholed
and their various activities are most intricately confounded with one
another.  Economically depressed localities, whose citizens are
themselves poorly educated, rarely oblige the investigator by
providing many examples of excellent as well as dilapidated school
plants, or by showing high as well as poor levels of racial
acceptance.

     The Coleman report did conclude that no single factor was better
correlated with a student's academic performance than his
self-concept: his sense that he has some command over his environment,
that anything he does will matter.  But we have to ask whether this is
more a cause of, than a response to, school failure.

     Another line of research, hopefully regarded as more rigorous, is
the controlled experiment: the comparative performance of groups of
children exposed in parallel to different educational environments.
Most such reports can be disregarded at the outset because the
difficult requirement of comparability of the control and experimental
groups simply could not be met.

     Small differences in pupil achievement, though statistically
significant, will be meaningless in comparisons of segregated and
desegregated schools when the communities are different in untold
ways.  Within a given community, social attitudes rarely allow a
school to be used for a rigorous educational experiment with blind,
unbiased assignment of pupils to one or another regime.  If there
is a well-founded conviction about the advantages of one regime,
it may be immoral to contemplate, and impolite to enforce, the placing
of students under a predicted handicap.

     Psychologists Robert Rosenthal (Harvard) and Lenore Jacobson
(South San Francisco School District) have, however, reported an
experiment that cleverly and humanely meets these criteria.  In each
of 18 classes, about 20 per cent of the pupils were singled out as
having scored high on a "test for educational blooming" indicating
that they might show unusual intellectual gains over their previous
performance.

     After a school year, the children were retested; the "bloomers"
did indeed show a startling improvement compared to their classmates.
The youngest children showed the greatest relative improvement in IQ,
15 points more than their fellows.  The class as a whole also
improved somewhat more than expected.

     The main point of the experiment is that the "bloomers" had been
chosen at random.  They differed from their classmates only in the
teacher's expectations.

     This kind of result is not new in social psychology but it has 
not been emphasized enough in educational research.  It does pose
an almost impossible dilemma over how to obtain scientific validation
of educational theories, since the investigator's expectations can
hardly ever be extracted.  We could, however, learn more about the
ways such expectations are communicated, for example, the student's
awareness of them and his own participation in a virtuous cycle of
achievement.

     We can hardly hope to exploit the effect by systematic deception
of teachers about their young students' capabilities.  But is it just
a coincidence that the global achievement lag of Negroes is about 15 
units?  Could we not then exploit the expectancy effect by
systematically erasing negative prejudgments, which are exacerbated by
unintelligent inferences from intelligence tests?

     Needless to say, this is not a responsibility just for teachers.
Across the whole community, our expectations about the potentialities
of minorities are likely to be deadly accurate because they are
self-fulfilling.

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