324 THE PROB LEMS OF EDUCATION ARE NOT GE NE TIC
aptitude is required. Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study
in the United States has suggested that underrating girls’ mathe matics
potential accounted for a substantial portion of the development of the
mathe matics achievement gap between boys and girls who had performed
equally in the early grades.^8 Such gender prejudice may have been chang-
ing in recent years, but the point is the potency of the attribution
pro cesses.
In contrast, banishing “ge ne tic” prejudices has been highly eff ective. As
Boaler also says in his review, when schools abandon grouping by assumed
ability and move to mixed or heterogeneous grouping, achievement and
participation improves signifi cantly. Likewise, in her book Mindset (t hat
quickly became a New York Times bestseller), Carol Dweck summarizes
her research showing that changing teachers’ and children’s “mindsets”
about ability can dramatically improve motivation and achievement.
In seeming agreement with this view, the U.S. Department of Health
and Human Ser vices made changes to the Head Start programs (June 19,
2015). Th ese are designed, they say, “to better support the ability of pro-
grams to serve children from diverse economic backgrounds, given
research that suggests children’s early learning is positively infl uenced by
interactions with diverse peers.”
Th ere seems little doubt that these expectancy eff ects will be due, at
least in part, to the culture of fatalism and pessimism created by psychol-
ogists of cognitive ability through the instrumentation of IQ. And they
will contribute markedly to individual diff erences in test per for mances
and school attainments. But now let us look at eff ects of the curriculum;
what is being taught, and how; and how it refl ects increasing anxiety, not
about genuine learning but about maintaining an ideology of children’s
potential and a bogus equality of opportunity.
AN ALIENATING CURRICULUMCovert se lection in schools also takes place through a special brand of
learning in the form of a set curriculum. Th at basic model of the school
curriculum has permeated the developed world. But it is as ill designed
for real education as taking fi sh out of water to teach them to swim, or
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