Why all teachers need training in bias

by Courtney Luce

Several years back I was an instructional coach for a large school district. As a coach, I spent my days in classroom after classroom working with teachers with different levels of experience. That’s where I met Kim. Kim had been teaching for over 20 years, and was truly wonderful to work with. She understood wholeheartedly the importance of teaching diverse texts. She was open and warm, and the students all thought she was “nice.” And she was. Students ate in her room at lunch, they came to find her talk about their problems, and she saw them, all of them, as filled with great potential. This is the classroom where I learned my greatest lesson about bias.

During my second semester at the school, this thing happened. All of the middle schools in our district had cut out honors’ classes that fall because it seemed teachers were teaching all of the good content to just these classes, but boring stuff to the other classes (a classic case of bias). However, during the spring semester, one school decided to label just one class honors. There were two parents who were threatening to pull their kids from the school district; these kids were both in Kim’s 4th period class, so the principal decided she would fix this by simply labeling this class the honor’s class. Granted there were at least two kids in this class who had traditionally been in honor’s course, but that was about the same number as the other classes since the schedule was fairly randomly assigned.

I worked pretty consistently with Kim, and she really had no idea that it wasn’t actually a real honor’s class. That was between the principal and just a few other people. Over time, though, I began to notice some pretty consistent patterns. When I asked her how her day was going, she would talk about how great her honor’s class was that day. If her day had been going poorly, she would tell me that she was looking forward to seeing her honor’s class. She gave the hard books to the honor’s class and had the students read on their own, but she would choose low level books for her other classes and only read them to them, explaining that if she assigned the reading, “these kids wouldn’t read.” She assigned homework to her honor’s class but none to her other classes, because “these kids won’t do homework.” And If a kid fell asleep in her honor’s class, she would ask why and feel empathy for the reasons, in her other classes she would get agitated.

This was Kim, the caring teacher that students loved, but the contrast was very apparent for me. All of this ended up being an interesting case study. Kim was definitely not a bad teacher, and I imagine she fell victim to something to which many of us fall victim: bias. In fact, research shows that as humans we fall victim to it even when our pupils are not children. In 1963, Robert Rosenthal ran a study using some of his research assistants to look at research bias. The students were working on an experiment with albino rats and Rosenthal told them that some would be working with rats who were “maze-bright” and some would be working with rats who were “maze-dull.” They were supposed to train the rats to get a piece of food in a maze and record the number of times they did it correctly and the speed with which they performed the task.

The truth was that Rosenthal wasn’t recording the rats at all; all of the rats were randomly chosen and distributed to have an equal mean age. There was nothing remarkable about one group or the other. What he really wanted to measure was how the researchers handled the rats differently based on their expectations, and well, it turned out just as he had hypothesized. The researchers found that the “maze-bright” rats were faster and more accurate than the “maze-dull” rats by statistically significant amounts. The “maze-bright” rats learned the maze quicker and with more accuracy. But the thing that really struck me was that the researchers reported being happier, calmer, and more professional with the “maze-bright” rats, and they said their rats were smarter, more pleasant, and they liked working with them more. They even reported being less loud with their rats.

As teachers, think about this. I mean really…think about this! This research has been repeated with teachers and classes and the results were the same. The classes with “bright” students performed better, faster, and the teachers were happier working with their students. Now think about what happens over time. If you have a student who has been in honor’s or the advanced section since elementary school, imagine how their behavior and performance may be exponentially better than a student who has been in remedial or intervention classes up through high school. Years of teachers expecting more, treating them better, and giving them more complex work, while also enjoying them more, creates a chasm that is hard to traverse.

As educators, we need to be aware of this potential. We need to rage against it if we see it happening in our schools. We need to attend training, advocate for training, provide training for our schools and district. There have been decades of school reform to try to impact the achievement gap in education (the disparity that exists between different groups) with just a tiny bit of success. In the Rosenthal study, the “bright” rats performed 30% – 100% better at accuracy, time, and overall performance than the “dull” rats. Imagine if suddenly your lowest performing students were performing 30% – 100% better? Could that change the achievement gap?