The Nurture Assumption: Schools

The power of teachers:

To children in school, the most important people in the classroom are the other children. It is their status among their peers that matters most to them—that makes the school day tolerable or turns it into a living hell. A large part of the teacher’s power resides in her ability to put individual children in the spotlight, to make them the focus of their peers’ attention. She can, if she is so inclined, hold up a child to public ridicule or public envy. But a teacher can do much more than that. If, in this book, I seem to rob parents of much of their power and responsibility, I cannot be accused of perpetrating the same crime against teachers. Teachers have power and responsibility because they are in control of an entire group of children. They can influence the attitudes and behaviors of the entire group. And they exert this influence where it is likely to have long-term effects: in the world outside the home, the world where children will spend their adult lives. (p. 225)

Subgroups:

Social categorization is always at play in the environment of the school. Because there are so many children all in one place, there are many possibilities for forming subcategories. Big groups tend to fall apart into smaller groups unless there is something to hold them together... 

When teachers divide up children into good readers and not-so-good ones, the good readers tend to get better and the not-so-good ones to get worse. A group contrast effect at work. The two groups develop different group norms—different behaviors, different attitudes. 

Groupness makes people like their own group best. You may wonder whether that can be true even of the members of not-so-good reading groups. Yes, I believe it is true even of them. They might recognize that they are not very good at reading but think they are better at other things—that they are nicer or handsomer or better at sports. They might recognize that they are not very good at reading but devalue the importance of reading. They might adopt an attitude that school sucks and anyone who does well at it is a nerd, a goody-goody, or a brown-nose. The Eagles looked down at the Rattlers for being dirty-mouthed; the Rattlers looked down at the Eagles for being wimps. 

Attitudes such as those that I’ve posited for the not-so-good reading group—that reading is unimportant, that school sucks—have effects that compound themselves over the years. Being a poor reader may cause a child to categorize himself with the poorer students in the class even if the teacher doesn’t formally acknowledge such groups. The child then adapts to the norms of that group and takes on its attitudes, and the attitudes are likely. The consequences are harmful and they are cumulative. Group contrast effects between quick learners and slow ones result in the slow learners adopting norms that make them dumber—or, more precisely, norms that cause them to avoid doing things that might have made them smarter... 

It isn’t until high school that such groups acquire labels and develop a stable membership, but there are cliques operating on similar principles even in elementary school. Kids who hang around with the good students in the classroom tend to have good attitudes toward school-work; those who hang around with the not-so-good ones tend to have poorer attitudes. And if a kid shifts from one group to another during the course of the school year—something that still can happen in elementary school—the kid’s attitudes change to match those of his new group. (pp. 225-227)

Great teachers:

Miss A...had an extraordinary effect on her students. The fact that they made good grades in her class didn’t prove anything—perhaps she was an easy marker—but Pedersen noticed that Miss A’s students, on average, made better grades the next year too, even though they were split up among several second-grade teachers. Following them through their school careers, Pedersen discovered that the academic superiority of Miss A’s kids was still detectable in seventh grade. Intrigued, he extended his investigation to the world outside the school: he traced some of its alumni and interviewed them. He found that Miss A’s ex-students were doing better in their adult lives than those who had been taught by other first-grade teachers. In terms of upward mobility, they had climbed higher than their schoolmates... 

To explain it I must digress for a moment and talk about leaders. Groups sometimes, but not always, have leaders. The leader isn’t necessarily a member of the group; groups can be influenced from either inside or outside. A teacher is a leader who can influence a group even though she is not a member of it. 

Leaders influence groups in three ways. First, a leader can influence the group’s norms—the attitudes its members adopt and the behaviors they consider appropriate. To do this it is not necessary to influence every member of the group directly: influencing a majority of them is enough, or even just a few if they are dominant members, the ones at the top of the attention ladder. Cultural forces like television work the same way. According to group socialization theory, it is not necessary for every last boy in the group to watch a particular television show: as long as most of his peers watch it, the effect on the norms of an individual boy is the same, whether or not he watches it himself. 

Second, a leader can define the boundaries of the group: who is us and who is them. This was something that Hitler, for example, was very good at. 

Third, a leader can define the image—the stereotype—a group has of itself. 

A truly gifted teacher can exert leadership in all three of these ways. A truly gifted teacher can prevent a classroom of diverse students from falling apart into separate groups and can turn the entire class into an us—an us that sees itself as scholars. An us that sees itself as capable and hardworking. (p. 229)

Examples, Jaime Escalante, who, according to a biographer, made his students feel that they were “part of a brave corps on a secret, impossible mission”; Jocelyn Rodriguez, "a teacher at a middle school in the Bronx, New York. Rodriguez manages to form the students in her classes—mostly black and Hispanic—into a close-knit community. Each class thinks up a name for its community, designs a flag, and composes an anthem" (p. 230).

Positive peer pressure:

One of the things that characterize these exceptional classrooms is the attitude the students adopt toward the slower learners among them. Instead of making fun of them, they cheer them on. There was a boy with reading problems in one of Rodriguez’s classes and when he started making progress the whole class celebrated: “Every time he made a small step, the class would give him a round of applause.” 

You can see the same sort of thing in descriptions of schools in Asian countries—in Japan, for instance. Kids are criticized by their classmates for misbehaving and cheered for doing well. Misbehavior by one child is seen as a blot upon the entire class; one child’s improvement is seen as a triumph for everyone. It’s not because Japanese kids are nicer—out on the playground, bullying is as much of a problem there as it is in other countries. I don’t know how the teachers do it—whether it is their pedagogical methods, the culture, or a combination of the two—but I think their we’re-all-in-this-togetherness is a chief reason why Asian kids are ahead of Americans in many school subjects. With no group in the classroom adopting an anti-school, anti-intellectual attitude—with every kid working at maximum capacity—the teacher can go vroooming ahead. 

I think Miss A made her kids feel that they were in a special social category: “a brave corps on a secret, impossible mission.” This self-categorization stuck with them even after they graduated from her classroom; it buffered them from anti-school attitudes and made them feel superior to the other kids in their grade. (230-231)

Example:

When children in a classroom split up into smaller groups on the basis of race or socioeconomic class, contrast effects again act to widen the differences between the groups—or to create differences if there were none to begin with. If you randomly divided children in a classroom into the Dolphins and the Porpoises, and if it happened that the Dolphins had one or two outstandingly good students or the Porpoises had one or two who couldn’t keep up, the two groups might adopt group norms with contrasting attitudes toward school-work—even if the average IQs of the two groups started out the same. Now assume that over several years of schooling, the members of these two groups continue to identify themselves as Dolphins or Porpoises, associate mainly with their groupmates, and (depending on which group they belong to) either strive to do well in school or turn up their noses at schoolwork. What started out as a different attitude toward schoolwork might well end up as a difference in average IQ.

Race:

Sociologist Janet Schofield spent several years studying sixth- and seventh-graders in a school she calls “Wexler.” Wexler is a city school with a mixture of African-American and non-Hispanic white students in roughly equal proportions. The majority of the white children come from middle-class homes, the majority of the black children from working-class or low-income homes. Although the teachers and administrators are committed to the goal of promoting racial harmony, they haven’t come close to achieving it. Black kids and white kids eye each other with a wary distrust that is only one notch short of the open hostility between the Rattlers and the Eagles. At Wexler it is rare for a black kid and a white kid to play together on the playground or sit together in the lunchroom. 

The kids at Wexler come from different social classes but that’s not what they notice: what they notice is a difference between two social categories defined in terms of race. Both the black kids and the white kids in this school see the whites as academic achievers, the blacks as academic resistors... 

The differences between the groups are not just academic. Both the black kids and the white kids see the whites as soft and wimpy, the blacks as tough and aggressive...Attempts to cross the racial divide are likely to be met with disapproval by one’s groupmates... 

“For black students,” Schofield observed, “succeeding academically often means leaving their friends behind and joining predominantly white groups within their classes.” Black kids who do well academically are pressured by their peers not to work so hard. They are failing to conform to the norms of their group: they are “acting white.” These kids do not get their anti-school attitudes from their parents. Parents of all racial and ethnic groups think education is important and hold high expectations for their children’s academic success. Some researchers have found greater emphasis on education among black and Hispanic parents than among European Americans. 

Schofield’s work at the Wexler school dates from the late 1970s but things haven’t changed much. Twenty years later, a teacher in the Bronx told a New York Times journalist that some of her black students “would rather be paraded in handcuffs before television cameras than be caught reading a book.” And “acting white” is still used as an insult among black kids. The pressure on black kids to act black and on white kids to act white is of the same sort as the pressure on the Rattlers to refrain from crying and on the Eagles to refrain from cursing. It comes from within the group, not from outside, and it needn’t be overt. Children seldom have to be urged to conform to the norms of their group. (pp. 232-234)

See also difference between African American children and West Indian children.

Gender:

It turns out that if you make a young woman who is good in math more aware of being female, she does less well on tests of mathematical ability, and if you make a young African American who is a good student more aware of being black she does less well on tests of academic ability. Steele found that all you have to do to lower the score of a bright black kid on a test of academic ability is to give her, before she takes the test, a short questionnaire that includes the question “Race?”... 

Steele attributes the discomfort associated with “stereotype threat” to fear of failure. It could just as easily be attributed to what, thirty years earlier, psychologist Matina Horner called “fear of success”—a hangup she detected in bright young women.23 I believe the discomfort is caused by a conflict between the desire to do well and the feeling that doing well would conflict with the norms of one’s group. (p. 236)

Intervention programs:

For intervention programs to work, I believe they must modify the behavior and attitudes of a group of children.27 For such programs to have long-term effects, the children must remain in contact with each other so that they can continue to think of themselves as a group. Thus, I would predict that programs aimed at an entire schoolful of children should be more successful than those that pluck seventeen children from ten or twelve different schools. 

An example of the sort of program I have in mind is one that was designed to reduce aggressive behavior and increase mutual helpfulness among school-age children. Training sessions were administered to all the children in selected target schools and resulted in a small but significant improvement in their behavior on the school playground and in the cafeteria. What had changed was the norms of the group. As my theory would predict, there was no detectable improvement in how the children behaved at home. 

Interventions aimed at the parents can improve children’s behavior at home but not at school; school-based interventions can improve behavior at school but not at home. These results—which still hold true, ten years after the publication of the first edition of this book—provide powerful evidence against the nurture assumption. (p. 237)

Single-parent families:

In Chapter 9, I mentioned a study of African-American kids from “high risk” families—no fathers, low incomes. The ones who lived in low-income neighborhoods were more aggressive than their middle-class counterparts; aggressive behavior was the norm where they lived. But the ones who lived in mostly white, middle-class neighborhoods were not particularly aggressive. These black kids from fatherless, low-income homes were “comparable in their level of aggression” to the white, middle-class kids they went to school with. They had adopted the behavioral norms of the majority of their peers. 

Number counts. I mean, number is important. A few students from a different socioeconomic class, ethnic group, or national background will be assimilated to the majority, but if there are enough of them to form their own group they are likely to remain different and contrast effects may cause the differences to increase. At intermediate numbers, things can go either way: two classes with the same number of majority and minority students may in one case split up into groups and in the other remain united. It will depend on chance events, on the characteristics of the individual children, and, crucially, on the teacher. 

The teacher’s job is most difficult, I think, when her students come from widely different socioeconomic classes. A child born into a home where the only reading material is on the back of the Cocoa Krispies box, and where the television set is turned on at dawn and left on till midnight, is going to arrive at school with a different attitude toward reading than one born into a home filled with books and magazines. A child born to college-educated parents is going to have a different view of the relevance of education—of the normalness of spending the first quarter of your life working your butt off in school—than one born to high school dropouts. The children will bring these attitudes with them to the peer group and if their attitudes are shared by the majority of their peers they will retain them. The atmosphere in the classroom is likely to be pro-reading in a school that serves a homogeneous neighborhood where all the homes are full of books and magazines. It’s likely to be So what? Who cares? in a school that serves a homogeneous neighborhood where reading is something people do only out of necessity and never for pleasure. And a school that serves both kinds of neighborhoods is likely to split up into groups of kids with contrasting cultures. 

According to an article in the journal Science, children do better in school if they come from homes that have a dictionary and a computer. The writer evidently thinks that it’s the home that makes the difference. I think it’s the culture, not the home. Homes that contain a dictionary and a computer are likely to be found in middle-class neighborhoods populated by college-educated parents. Such neighborhoods foster a pro-reading, pro-education culture. The kids bring this culture with them to the peer group and the peer group retains it because it is something they have in common. Now you can see why kids who go to private schools and parochial schools do so well. These schools serve homogeneous populations: the children who go to them come from homes where the parents care enough about such things to actually pay for their kids’ education. Throw a few scholarship students into these schools, sink or swim, and they take on the behaviors and attitudes of their classmates. They take on their culture. Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Britain, was a scholarship student at a fancy private school. 

And now, perhaps, you can see why it might not work to send a large number of kids from low-income neighborhoods to a private or parochial school. They might form a group of their own and retain the attitudes and behaviors they brought with them to the school. (pp. 242-243)

Adoption:

A colleague wrote to me in e-mail, asking the rhetorical question, “Are parents important?” He immediately answered it in the affirmative. Adoption can raise a child’s IQ, he said, and that shows that the child can gain from a better home environment. 

Believers in the nurture assumption would like to attribute that rise in IQ to the family environment—to the adoptive parents. To the mobile over the crib, the books read out loud, the dictionary on the shelf, the computer on the desk. But the child raised in this home grows up in a middle-class neighborhood and goes to a middle-class school. His peers also come from homes in which mobiles are hung, books are read, and dictionaries and computers are purchased. This child is reared in a culture that considers reading and learning to be important, even enjoyable. He is part of a peer group that holds similar views. They look with favor on activities such as reading books, using computers, and going to museums. 

It makes sense to me that adoption would raise a child’s IQ, as long as the adoptive home is higher in socioeconomic status than the one his biological parents would have provided. If the adoptive parents are middle-class, they probably live in a middle-class neighborhood. If the adoptive parents are unskilled laborers, they probably don’t live in a middle-class neighborhood, in which case neither I nor anyone else would predict that adoption would raise the child’s IQ. This is exactly what was found in a study carried out in France: adopted children reared by middle-class adoptive parents had higher IQs than those reared by working-class parents. In fact, there was a difference of twelve IQ points between the averages of the two groups. 

Was it their experiences at home or their experiences at school and in the neighborhood that made the difference? The attitudes and activities of their adoptive parents or the attitudes and activities of their peers? My colleague would say “parents”; I would say “peers.” 

But there is another question to ask about the effects of adoption on IQ: Do the effects persist into adulthood? The French adoptees were only fourteen years old, on average, at the time they were tested. Evidence from other behavioral genetic studies suggests that such effects do not persist. In early childhood there is a modest correlation between the IQs of two adopted children raised in the same home, which is probably due to the intellectual climate of the home itself (the vocabulary used by parents, for instance). But this effect is temporary. By the time the adoptive siblings have reached college age, the correlation between their IQs has dwindled away. As kids get older, they become freer to follow their own propensities. Teenagers sort themselves out into peer groups that vary in their attitudes toward intellectual achievement. 

On the other hand, most behavioral genetic studies probably underestimate the long-term effects of adoption, because the researchers didn’t make a special effort (as the French researchers did) to find adoptees reared in homes that varied widely in socioeconomic status. Most of their subjects were reared in middle-class homes and middle-class neighborhoods. The dearth of adoptees reared in working-class environments makes it harder to get an accurate picture of environmental effects on IQ. 

Fortunately, there are other kinds of data. Studies in which adoptees of various ages are compared to their biological and adoptive relatives confirm that, as they get older, they become more similar in IQ to their biological parents and siblings, and less similar to their adoptive parents and siblings. However, even in adulthood they retain some advantage over biological siblings who were not given up for adoption and who grew up in the family they were born into. The adoptees don’t do as well as their adoptive siblings (the biological off-spring of their adoptive parents), but they do better than their biological siblings. So we can say that adoption does have a long-term effect on IQ, though it’s a small one. Not twelve IQ points, but perhaps seven. (pp. 243-246)

High school:

The neighborhood environment has effects during childhood because primary schools tend to be small and to serve homogeneous populations. One of the reasons these effects often fade in adolescence is that high schools tend to be larger. Number matters. Even if the population it serves is homogeneous, the larger enrollment in a high school permits the students to form more social categories and to divide up in more ways. Black or Asian kids reared in white neighborhoods, whose friends up till now had been white, might find a black or Asian peer group to identify with in high school. Kids who had trouble with their schoolwork in the early grades might get together and form anti-school—maybe antisocial—groups in high school. Once these groups form, whatever characteristics they started out with are exaggerated by group contrast effects... 

Once kids have split up into groups it is extremely difficult to put them back together again. It’s better to discourage them from splitting up in the first place. There are ways that educators might be able to do this. 

One way is to make the kids as homogeneous as possible. That is why—as paradoxical as it might seem—girls do better in math and science in all-girl schools, and why traditionally black colleges put out a disproportionate number of the nation’s talented black scientists and mathematicians. It is why school uniforms just might work. I would be very interested in the outcome of an experiment that put primary school girls and boys into identical unisex uniforms. 

Another way is to create new groups that cross-cut the other ones. It means giving kids harmless ways to split up—Dolphins versus Porpoises—rather than harmful ways—girls versus boys, rich versus poor, smart kids versus dummies. As the Eagles and the Rattlers demonstrated, this method has its risks. What starts out as a harmless way to split up can escalate to socks filled with stones. The trick is to keep the social categories in balance so that they cancel each other out. If a child can’t decide whether she is a girl, a Dolphin, or a dummy, she may end up categorizing herself simply as a member of Ms. Rodriguez’s sixth-grade class. 

If all else fails, a surefire way of uniting people is to provide them with a common enemy. It works for chimpanzee groups; it works equally well for sports teams or, for that matter, chess teams. In my high school, Mexican-American and Anglo kids joined together to cheer for our school when Tucson High competed against Phoenix. The Robbers Cave researchers got the Rattlers and the Eagles to work together by telling them that vandals from outside had meddled with the camp’s water system. 

Leaders can bring people together or divide them up. Some of the things that teachers do nowadays, with the best of intentions, have the unintended result of making children more aware of the ways they can be sorted into social categories. I believe that a teacher’s job is not to emphasize the cultural differences among the students (that can be done at home by the parents) but to downplay them. A teacher’s job is to unite students by giving them a common goal. (pp. 246-247)