Our discussion on power law and scale free graphs was very intriguing in the number of settings it could be applied to. Google links, popular companies, a country’s trade in a particular industry. What I began to wonder was whether a student’s success in the public education (or other education) systems could be modeled in a similar style.
In the fall I attended a panel on the education gap in America. The panel was hosted by Teach for America, a nonprofit that places teachers in needy school systems for two years. One of the panelists shared a story of students he had who had repeatedly been labeled as the “bad” kid, the disruptive class clown. As the title stuck, the student embraced his role. More importantly however, other teachers believed the title as well. A student could have been a distracted kindergartener and when his kindergarten teacher told the other teachers that he was a “naughty”/”bad” student, the other teachers became even less willing to spend the time and effort in teaching this student. As the panelist put it, “this kid could have sneezed on the first day and his teachers would have sent him to the principal’s office.” He didn’t get the same level of education because as he progressed through school, his reputation as unteachable grew exponentially and the teachers didn’t want to put in the effort to teach him or didn’t believe that the effort would make a difference.
Perhaps if teachers were made aware of the phenomenon of the power law in education and shown background and a graph demonstrating how the situation can occur, they would be more willing to put in the time and effort that child needs to succeed and to break out of the label assigned to him/her.
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