Why "High Expectations" Isn't As Simple As It Sounds

In 1964, Robert Rosenthal performed an experiment that has become quite famous. You’ve probably heard the gist of it even if you’ve never heard the name Robert Rosenthal in your life (which I hadn’t either until, like, five minutes ago.) Basically, he took a random sample of students and told those students’ teachers that these particular students had been identified as especially gifted. Over the course of the experiment, he found that those students, despite having been chosen at random, did come to perform better in school than a control group. Somehow (though it is a bit unclear exactly how this process unfolded) their teachers’ higher expectations of them led them to greater success.

When you hear this experiment mentioned these days, it is usually in the context of some inspirational speech: Have high expectations for all your students! Call them scholars! Insist upon excellence! Raise the bar and they will rise to meet it!

But I think what is at play here, really, is an equivocation on the word “expectations.” It is being used in two different senses.

Sometimes, we use the word “expectations” to mean the implicit, unconscious beliefs we hold about what is going to happen in the future. I expect that the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning; I expect that watching the latest episode of The Good Place is going to make me happy; I expect that my coworker Glen is going to walk over and make small talk about what day of the week it is. (“Almost Friday!” or “Monday again!” or “Looking forward to the weekend.") These types of expectations are usually based on past experiences. And often, we’re not even consciously aware of them - that is, until they are violated. Have you ever taken a sip of a drink that you thought was one thing but turned out to be another? You didn’t even know you were expecting water until you tasted coffee. And it can be a really nasty shock. Same thing when you are expecting there to be another stair and there is not and you end up slamming your foot down way too hard and feeling like an idiot.

Someday I'll write about the convoluted philosophy of this show, because
that's my idea of fun, apparently. 

Other times, we use “expectations” to mean something like “demands.” Think of a mother saying to her child, “I expect your room to be clean when I get home.” What she really means is that she demands that the child’s room be cleaned, implying that there will be some sort of punishment for the child if the room is not clean when she gets home. But it’s definitely possible that she actually expects the room to remain messy, that she anticipates having to give out that punishment. The moment the kid is out of earshot, she might say, “There’s no way he is cleaning that room.” So, clearly, there’s a difference between this way of using the word “expect” and the primary definition of the word.

(It kind of reminds me of when President Trump told FBI Director James Comey, “I hope you can let this go” about the Michael Flynn investigation and then some Republicans tried to say this wasn’t actually an order because Trump was just expressing his hope. Which everyone with any understanding of nuance and context and connotation - of language, that is - knew instantly was bullshit. Even Trump’s defenders were clearly being disingenuous.)

But when it comes to “expectations,” the distinction is never made quite so explicit. Rosenthal’s study was about “expectations” in the primary sense; its application is always about the other sort of “expectations,” the ones that we can actually control. Because as this article points out, no teacher - or other human being for that matter - is really completely in charge of his or her unconscious beliefs. If I expect that a particular student is going to be disruptive, that expectation is going to color the way I interact with that student. And as much as I remind myself to treat that student just like any other, to give him or her the benefit of the doubt, to be critical of my own assumptions and prejudices - that is only going to get me so far. At the end of the day, I am still going to be something of a slave to my own biases.

The NPR article (“NPR-ticle?”) acknowledges this - kind of. But then it weirdly comes to the conclusion that the best way to change one’s beliefs is by changing one’s behavior. This is ostensibly based on a study, but I feel like the study isn’t discussed in enough detail for me to really understand it. And the article doesn’t say much about how you could or should change your behavior. I am left feeling skeptical, left feeling as though our beliefs and expectations are largely out of our hands. The idealist in me wants to say that discussion and critical reflection are our best hope, but I also know that that’s a lame, cop-out answer, kind of like implying that “conversation” can heal our nation’s political divide.

It's amazing to me how many "inspirational"
quotes like this there are. 

But this has important implications, especially when it comes to the idea of social justice. It has been shown that white teachers, even those who support anti-racist causes, tend to have lower expectations of their non-white students. These are ingrained in us by our culture. And I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar is true along gender lines, although that might be less of an issue because education is not male-dominated the same way it is white-dominated (although STEM programs often are.)

Every article that I have found that discusses this subject always seems to fall back on that same idea that “being aware” of these biases is - while not sufficient - a good “first step” in the project of eradicating them. But I’m not so sure if I buy that. It sounds nice, but is there any real reason to believe it’s true? What if we can’t control our expectations at all? What then?

I have no goddamn clue. It’s a very unsatisfying and bleak premise, which is why I have been trying and failing to write a conclusion here for a solid fifteen minutes - some part of me can’t bear to end on such a hopeless thought. Some part of me has to believe that we can do something. Even if we must acknowledge that any project of this sort is going to contain an element of failure, I have to think or hope or believe that it could bring some success, too. To get a bit meta here for a second - I can’t help but to expect it to, and so that, in itself, kind of proves my point.

But either way, we should try to be clear about what we’re saying and, at the very least, recognize that “expectations” can mean two different things.