<p>“Northstarmom, I’m not taking issue with the findings of the study you cite. But as I read your post, I wondered if the teachers’ were so much racist as they were channeling an unconscious experiential bias that their black students, as a group, had less support from home than their other students, thus limiting academic success. This concept is touched on peripherally in the synopsis of the study, but not as a direct causal agent.”</p>
<p>To me, the “why” is interesting, but irrelevant. The bottom line is that in the study, the teachers’ views of the academic potential of students was race based. </p>
<p>From the previously cited article: “Do teachers have different expectations for black and white students? Does this cause them to behave differently toward black and toward white students? Again, Ferguson says, the answer to the question of whether teachers have different expectations for black and for white students is ‘Yes.’ He also says that research supports the contention that teachers behave differently toward black and toward white students.”</p>
<p>There has been research that indicates that when teachers are told that students are high potential and will do very well in school assuming the teacher finds a way of encouraging them, the students indeed do very well even though their “potential” was randomly assigned by the researcher.</p>
<p>This is called the “halo effect.” </p>
<p>Presumably if teachers assume that black students won’t do well, then a reverse halo effect would occur. </p>
<p>Certainly in our society, there has been a longstanding belief that blacks are inferior. That belief after all is what supported the institution of slavery, which was based on the notion that black people were inferior human beings, incapable of high intelligence or morality, who needed to be controlled by white people. </p>
<p>Indeed, during the time of slavery, information about black slaves was recorded along with livestock records. Black people also were seen as incapable of having such emotions as love of their own children. Thus, it was considered fine to sell children away from their parents.</p>
<p>Given the hundreds of years that slavery existed in this country, and the prevalance of laws separating the races until about 40 years ago (Heck, at least one southern state – Alabama? – still has on its books a law preventing interracial marriage) – odds are that it would be difficult for any teacher in this country, regardless of their race, to be able to fairly assess the potential of a black child.</p>
<p>Below is info about research at Harvard demonstrating Americans’ implicit biases about others. The quote is from a Knight Foundation report on bias in journalism: <a href=“http://www.knightfdn.org/default.asp?story=diversity/lehrman2/index.html[/url]”>http://www.knightfdn.org/default.asp?story=diversity/lehrman2/index.html</a></p>
<p>I suggest that anyone curious about their own biases take the test that the below links to.</p>
<p>“While we may not notice our resulting preferences and distinctions, we act on them all the time. In 1998, social scientists now at Harvard University, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia designed the Implicit Association Test to learn more about unconscious bias and categorization. Available on the Internet to anyone, their quiz measures automatic responses to images and words. Over six years, visitors to the web site (<a href=“https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/[/url]”>https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/</a>) have taken about 2.5 million tests. People of all races show a more positive attitude toward whites …”</p>