The Longterm Damage of Labels

Our expectations create conditions for the children in our classrooms that can determine who they become

Shanna Peeples
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

I had heard about these kids. Everyone had. They lived on “the Northside” — an area in close proximity to both a large slaughterhouse and a maximum security prison. The Northside is neatly separated from the central and southwest parts of town by railroad tracks and a boulevard that is part of the old Route 66. Because the boulevard used to be a major conduit to California during the Dust Bowl and after World War II, it’s lined with decaying motels, which now shelter some of the saddest human activities.

These places are where you go when you run away from home, where you go when there are no more places to rent, where you go to hide from someone who wants to hurt you, or where you go to kill yourself with drugs and alcohol. The Northside is a place where people pay for a few minutes of human contact, and as such, is associated with other transactions that draw desperate people.

Before I was a teacher, I was a reporter for my town’s newspaper and sometimes I found myself driving around the Northside to track down witnesses, family members, or survivors. Later, as a teacher, I was assigned to one of its two middle schools. When people asked me, “Where do you teach?” and I said the name of my school, their faces suddenly took on shades of disgust or pity or even fear. “Oh,” they said in that tone of voice reserved for getting yourself out of an embarrassing conversation. And I heard that tone over and over and over.

It was easy to develop a sense of shame about where I worked. To feel that not only was I a bad teacher, but I must be a bad person to be assigned to work there. That attitude is how we often think about those who live in poverty: as if it is a moral failing and it happens to people who deserve it. And we extend that judgment to the teachers of children in poverty.

Those responsible for making things better — legislators, specifically — heap shame and blame upon those teachers with demands for what they call “accountability.” These demands center around various schemes and plans to tie test scores to teacher pay or teacher bonuses. Increasingly, entire schools are subjected to “grading” on a scale of A through F, with high poverty schools frequently receiving Fs.

This sometimes leads to decisions of whether the school can stay open. Teachers in difficult assignments can take in this judgment and decide either that they are not able to teach beyond scripts or worse, they surrender to the face-saving feelings of becoming jaded and cynical about their students and their students’ parents.

We Become Who People Say We Are

All of this affects how we “do school.” It affects students in schools without poverty and schools in good neighborhoods as well. Human behavior remarkably conforms to expectations, a truth most memorably demonstrated by Jane Elliot’s “Blue Eyes-Brown Eyes” exercise in 1970.

Elliott, then a third-grade teacher in Iowa, opened her class one day with the blunt statement: “Blue-eyed people are smarter than brown-eyed people.” She had children wear collars corresponding to the color of their eyes so their difference could easily be noted. Then she reversed the experiment the next day, telling the children she got it wrong and it was actually brown-eyed people who are smarter.

The children in the preferred group enthusiastically participated in class while the non-preferred group were listless and apathetic. Years later, the children who gathered to watch the filmed experiment could still recall what it felt like to experience discrimination. Elliott’s lesson shows the ease with which our self-concepts can be manipulated. Most painfully, her experiment shows how easily we can create shame in children.

Screen shot from PBS’s “A Class Divided”

Elliott’s lesson concretely demonstrates how social phenomena like the Pygmalion effect, where higher expectations are communicated, lead to higher performance. Her work also makes evident how its opposite, the Golem effect, determines that low expectations create low performance.

Put simply, we become who others say we are.

Students who find themselves in “good schools” often find that because their teachers know they will comply with expectations, they receive a different kind of meaningless work. As the parent of children who went to those kinds of schools, I know firsthand how many times they were given “grammar packets” full of worksheets, or assigned tests that had been used for a decade or more.

More often than not, students subjected to this kind of work discover the answers online and their “work” becomes an exercise in copying and pasting. The complacency that comes from believing that you are in a good school keeps students from taking risks or rocking the boat. If tests and grades are all a school is about, then many students quickly game the system.

For my oldest child, this meant she was lulled into believing that she could handle the reading and writing expectations of her college. She bought into the illusion of being a “good student” that her complacent school had given her because their “high performance” on accountability tests kept them from examining their practice or truly questioning if they were preparing students for college and career readiness.

Words Have Power

For teachers, this is borne out in research findings of how we create convictions about our students. The school begins to see its identity as one with students who score well on tests. The inverse is true for schools where students don’t perform well on tests, according to Susan H. McLeod:

Departments and institutions develop their own cultures; the prevailing attitudes of teachers toward students tend to become organizational norms. If most teachers in the department have a low sense of efficacy and tacitly agree that certain groups of students (sometimes even all students) can’t learn to write, then newcomers are pressured to accept the same low sense of efficacy and accompanying low expectations.

As teachers, we are often held hostage to the same forces that bind our students outside the classroom and have little to no power over them. Where we do have power is in the words we choose and in the learning experiences we create for our students. As we begin a new school year, it’s critical to remember the power we have to shape the beliefs students have about themselves.

Shanna Peeples

Written by

Pursuing learning as a doctoral student @Harvard | 2015 National Teacher of the Year | Author: Think Like Socrates | Otter enthusiast

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