Learning to Be “Smart” in Kindergarten

From the Marshall Memo #439

“All those involved in the institution of schooling help to shape who we think we are, who others think we are, and who we think we can become,” says Illinois State University professor Beth Hatt in this troubling American Educational Research Journal article. Hatt describes what she learned in a one-year ethnographic study of a kindergarten classroom in a semi-rural school district in the southeastern U.S. with a mix of 25 middle- and working-class white, African-American, and Latino children. She spent a total of 865 hours observing the classroom, interviewing teachers, children, and parents, following the students to lunch, recess, and specials, and examining classroom artifacts such as school assessments and report cards. 

Right away, Hatt noticed that the teacher, Mrs. Rayburn (all names are pseudonyms), a white middle-class woman, had her own sense of which children were “smart.” For example, the child with the highest entering pre-K assessment score was a white boy from a very poor family who had a mild speech impediment. Rayburn openly expressed her low opinion of this boy’s intelligence, and by winter break referred him for tutoring. “Here the teacher’s implicit theory of smartness trumped her explicit knowledge of intelligence evidenced by pre-K assessment scores,” says Hatt. By Christmas in his kindergarten year, the boy had begun to actively dislike school.

Hatt describes two classroom artifacts that were central to student and teacher interpretations of smartness: the Stoplight and the Shoe Tyer’s and Phone Number Club:

• The Stoplight – On a large poster of a traffic light, each child had a car with his or name on it. At the beginning of the day, all cars were on green, and children’s cars stayed there if they behaved well. If children disobeyed a rule, Rayburn or her assistant, Mrs. Daniels, told them to move their car to yellow, which meant You better slow down, or red, which meant Stop what you’re doing and think about what you’re doing. “The student then typically walked to the stoplight with his or her head down, moved the car either to yellow or red (depending on where the car was originally), and most often began to cry,” says Hatt. “When I interviewed students, I discovered every child defined being smart as ‘not having to move your car.’ For the children, being smart had come to be closely connected to the stoplight.” 

Rayburn and Daniels reinforced this by telling misbehaving children that if they made “good choices” and started being smart, they could move their cars back to green. They also chose students for special jobs based on whose cars were on green. Children were keenly aware of everyone’s status on the stoplight. Parents reported that the first thing children talked about when they got home was who moved his or her car that day. When Hatt asked, every student was able to immediately identify Natalie, a middle-class white girl, as the child who never had to move her car, and Jackson, an African-American boy, as the one who had to move his car almost every day. On the very first day of the school year, Jackson moved his car to yellow for making “mouth noises.” When he cried loudly, he was told to “shut it off” and “cry quietly.” “You’re in big school now and in big school we cry quietly,” said Daniels. 

Natalie, says Hatt, “was a ‘fish in water’; she stood out as smart by not standing out behaviorally, functioning effortlessly within the rules of the classroom.” Her parents had taught her about being conservative in speech (speak when called on), in movement (hands to yourself, legs crossed when sitting), and in communication (“Yes, ma’am”). It was easy for her to earn the label as the smartest child in the classroom. Jackson, on the other hand, was spontaneous, “on the move”, and had a hard time adjusting to classroom rules, even though he tried hard. “In essence the stoplight served as a giant, constant visual symbol and reminder of who was good and, consequently, smart,” says Hatt, “there for all to see.”

It’s not surprising that Natalie was constantly negotiating demands from children to sit with her at lunch, play with her at recess, or hold hands. Jackson, by contrast, was not included in games, not sought after at lunch, had no special friends in the class, and often played by himself at recess. Rayburn told Hatt on the first day of school that she knew Natalie would be her favorite student. During the year, she frequently complained that Jackson “gets on my nerves.” 

The stoplight was supposed to be an impartial arbiter of student behavior, but Hatt noticed consequences were not doled out in a completely objective manner. “For instance,” she says, “white males from middle-class families repeatedly avoided Mrs. Rayburn’s surveillance. African-American students, especially black males, who refused a submissive position in the classroom were repeatedly the first to get in trouble and received the harshest reprimands. Hence, being good became about one’s relationship with authority and teacher attitude rather than whether one broke rules more than others.”

• The Shoe Tyer’s and Phone Number Club – The second artifact that caught Hatt’s attention was a poster with a picture of a shoe and a telephone and a list of the students who could tie their shoes and recite their telephone numbers. “Students did not learn home phone numbers or how to tie their shoes at school,” she says. “Mrs. Rayburn and Mrs. Daniels gave parents responsibility for these tasks, refusing to tie students’ shoes. If a student could not tie his or her shoes, he or she either had to find someone in the Shoe Tyer’s Club to do it or walk around with shoes untied. Children able to tie their shoes were framed as intelligent. On the first day of school, Daniels noticed a girl tying her own shoes and said, “You’re so smart! Did you tie your shoe by yourself? We have a Shoe Tyer’s Club. You’re gonna be part of it. Two thumbs up!” Jackson, on the other hand, never joined the Shoe Tyer’s Club; his mother, a single parent, worked full time while raising him and two siblings. “Membership in the Shoe Tyer’s Club was construed as a ‘big deal’”, says Hatt, “yet differences in students’ home situations and the unfairness of teachers’ expectations were left unrealized, unchallenged, and unapologized for. The concept of ‘smartness’ makes one’s ability to tie shoes seem based on one’s innate smartness rather than familial circumstances and teacher implementation.” 

“Smartness related to a student’s prior knowledge of taught material,” continues Hatt. “For example, students already able to count to high numbers or who knew the seasons were often called ‘geniuses’ or were told they were ‘so smart.’ In addition, when students demonstrated they knew material before it was taught, they were typically given privileges such as getting nap towels first or being first in line. Through the discourse of smartness students were taught being referred to as ‘smart’ was a form of praise.” They made “good choices”, were “responsible”, and knew how to “do school”, which meant they were smart. Privileges like leading the calendar activity every morning and taking part in show and tell didn’t go to students whose cars weren’t on green or students who weren’t in the Shoe Tyer’s or Phone Number Club. 

One day a student brought in a toy snow leopard for show and tell. A boy correctly named the animal and another boy said, “Aren’t you smart! You’re a genius!” “His words and intonation directly mimicked Mrs. Daniels’s when she would tell students they were smart,” says Hatt. “Encouraging students to appropriate authoritative discourse in the classroom overshadowed students’ own voices, and students thereby became ventriloquists of teachers’ voices of authority. Because students adopted teacher discourse, student agency became limited; Mrs. Rayburn in effect became the author of their words, interpretations, and meanings, and students became stratified along the lines of who could best approximate the teacher’s authority.” 

Hatt is most troubled by the fact that students were labeled “smart” and lavishly rewarded in the classroom if they knew curriculum content and behavioral expectations before they were taught. “Hence, smartness becomes largely about possessing the cultural capital most valued by the teacher,” she says. “… Defining smartness is a tool for maintaining power and limiting who has access to power… [Smartness] teaches us about our academic identities by answering the question, ‘Do I have something worth saying?’ ‘Do I have authority in this context?’ and ‘How should I behave?’” Children arrive in school and use feedback – grades, teachers’ comments, classroom status – to decide if they are smart and if school is a place where they belong and a place worth investing in. Students like Jackson may not see themselves as “dumb” but they see that they will never be identified as smart in school. It’s not surprising that Jackson said he hated school before the end of his kindergarten year. 

“What is taught in schools includes who ‘is’ and ‘is not’ smart and what smartness means,” Hatt concludes. “Determinations are based on teachers’ expectations mediated by knowledge of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and racial identities… If we fail to pay attention to how smartness operates in schools and within larger society, we miss a critical opportunity to reimagine and reinterpret smartness, particularly for low-income students and students of color. We also miss the opportunity to explore how we perpetuate it ourselves. We must see smartness as a tool of control and social positioning. Only then can we begin to disrupt smartness in everyday schooling practices, empowering students to frame and author their lives.” 

“Smartness As a Cultural Practice in Schools” by Beth Hatt in American Educational Research Journal, June 2012 (Vol. 49, #3, p. 438-460); Hatt can be reached at hatt.beth@gmail.com; 

http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/08/06/0002831211415661.fu...