Presume Competence: A Teacher’s Power Move

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

By Judy Chinitz and Alex Gorman

Artwork by Justin Negard

Founders’ note: In our September/October 2023 education issue, we told the remarkable story of Judy Chinitz and Alex Gorman. The article, titled F-O-R-C-E O-F N-A-T-U-R-E, which can be found on our website, inspired readers to connect with Judy’s Mouth to Hand Learning Center in Mount Kisco. Some reached out hoping to meet her students—nonspeaking members of our community who have learned to communicate by typing—while others wanted to donate to her nonprofit, Mouth to Hand Parent Association. While working on the article, we were inspired to give Judy’s students a voice in every issue. The result: a page we ironically titled Out Loud (see page 90). Judy’s students remain some of the smartest and funniest people we know, and we’re continually inspired by them.

For our second education issue, we challenged Judy and Alex to write a think piece exploring what education could be. They excitedly accepted and chose a topic we believe will resonate with all our readers, whether they have children or not, and regardless of their children’s age or ability. This fundamental shift in educational philosophy, grounded in research, has the potential to transform our society. 

In 1968, researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson gave a set of elementary school children an IQ test at the beginning of the school year. Then, the researchers randomly selected 20 percent of those students and told their teachers those students were expected to experience significant intellectual growth that year. The reality was that these students, called “intellectual bloomers,” were no different than any others in the school; however, they made the greatest academic gains that year by far. Why? Because the teachers’ beliefs and expectations changed how they interacted with those students. Teachers unwittingly gave the “bloomers” more attention, encouragement and helpful feedback, resulting in greater academic performance and intellectual growth. The students themselves weren’t any different—they were selected at random—but the teachers believed they were.

This is a scenario we, the authors of this piece, have often considered. What if teachers, and the educational system in general, presumed competence in all their students? As an “insider,” one of us has personally experienced how teachers are trained to evaluate and determine students’ capabilities.

Judy is a New York State licensed special education teacher who originally taught students who were blind or visually impaired. But several years after her own son, Alex, was diagnosed with autism (just after his second birthday), she retrained and became certified to teach students with autism. Judy often remembers what the professionals told her about Alex: He will need to be taught everything, even emotions. If he’s not talking by five years old, he’ll never have language. Have you considered a residential placement for him? “The fascinating thing about the way teachers are taught to teach nonspeaking students with autism is that it doesn’t work,” Judy says. “But we do it anyway, because it’s considered ‘best practice.’ No one questions that the methods almost always fail with this population. And you know what Einstein supposedly said about doing the same thing over and over again, even when it fails? It’s the height of insanity!”

Alex, now 31, spent his entire school career in programs for the profoundly cognitively impaired. His IQ, Judy was told, was 40, adding “profound cognitive impairment” to his diagnosis. Or, what the education system labels “low-functioning autism.” Yet, when Alex was in his mid-20s, Judy learned his IQ is actually in the range of “genius.”

Several years ago, after learning how to communicate by typing, Alex earned his high school equivalency diploma and is now completing his freshman year of college; he’s contemplating a double major in math and English literature. Judy—like many other parents whose children were similarly diagnosed and can now communicate by typing—often wonders: How could such a disparity occur?

The Pygmalion in the classroom

In the Greek myth “Pygmalion and Galatea,” Pygmalion, a sculptor, creates a statue of the perfect woman, Galatea, and falls madly in love with her. The goddess of love, Aphrodite, hears Pygmalion’s prayer that Galatea, his beautiful ivory statue, come to life, and Aphrodite grants Pygmalion his wish. In other words, one human, through belief and passion, can create another.

When Rosenthal and Jacobson wrote a book about their findings, they titled it “Pygmalion in the Classroom,” as an homage to the Greek myth. That same year (1968), they summarized their findings in an article published in Scientific American, explaining, “The child does poorly in school because that is what is expected of him. In other words, his shortcomings may originate not in his different…background but in his teacher’s response to that background.”

But their concept wasn’t entirely new. Rosenthal’s and Jacobson’s research was fundamentally based on the work of Robert Merton, a Harvard-educated sociologist who spent his career at illustrious academic institutions such as Harvard University, Tulane University and Columbia University. In 1948, Merton published an incredibly important paper titled “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” which outlined his theory on the subject. Merton’s paper was based on even earlier research by renowned sociologist W.I. Thomas, whose 1928 theorem (called Thomas Theorem) concluded, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

In other words, if we perceive something as real, we will act in accordance. And by acting as if a false premise is real, we make it real. “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true,” wrote Merton. “The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.”

The rat race

Rosenthal even tested this phenomenon on rats. In one experiment, for example, he told some of his graduate students their rats were genetically engineered to be exceptionally intelligent, while he told other students their rats were genetically engineered to be unintelligent and would perform poorly when running through a maze. However, as you’ve probably guessed by now, all the animals were exactly the same kind of ordinary lab rat.

The results shocked the world; the students’ expectations made a dramatic difference in how the rats performed. “From the outset the rats believed to have the higher potential proved to be the better performers,” the research concluded. “The rats thought to be dull made poor progress and sometimes would not even budge from the starting position in the maze.”

But rats don’t understand the human language, so why did the theory hold up here? Because the students treated their rats differently based upon the false information they’d received. The students with “intelligent rats” treated them more gently; they were more caring and friendly with their rats. So, even when it comes to rats, a person’s expectations drive the subject’s performance.

As Rosenthal and Jacobson stated almost 60 years ago, “The central concept behind our investigation was that of the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy.’ The essence of this concept is that one person’s prediction of another person’s behavior somehow comes to be realized… Perhaps then, more attention in educational research should be focused on the teacher.”

Teachers hold all the power

Time and again, studies have proven that a teacher’s behavior drives a student’s success; if they believe their students can learn, their students will succeed in learning, and if they believe their students will fail, the self-fulfilling prophecy leads to student failure.

Just last year, two important studies were released proving this point. In March, researcher Francesca Siems-Muntoni and her team found that a teacher’s expectations can affect a student’s motivation. The study, published in the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology, showed that students’ math scores dramatically improved when the teacher had positive versus negative expectations. Then, in November, researcher Christine M. Rubie-Davies and her team reviewed the literature on this topic, concluding that “highly biased teachers had large negative self-fulfilling prophecy effects on student outcomes.” But “when teachers have high expectations for all students, achievement will likely increase substantially.”

Notably, back in 1984, educational researcher Anne Donnellan published what is arguably the single most critically important paper in educational literature. Donnellan’s paper, titled “The Criterion of the Least Dangerous Assumption,” presents a theory that should be the guiding principle behind ALL education. “In the absence of conclusive data,” she writes, “educational decisions should be based on assumptions which, if incorrect, will have the least dangerous effect on the student.” What does this mean? Without irrefutable proof that a student cannot learn, all students should be taught in such a way that, if wrong, the teaching does the least amount of damage to the student.

To sum it up—presume competence.​ ​Ask yourself, is it more or less dangerous for the student if you assume they cannot learn meaningful academic material, no matter what they appear to be on the outside? Is it harmful to teach a student age-appropriate material even if you believe they cannot understand it? Or will teaching a student juvenile material over and over again, no matter what you believe they are capable of, do more harm?

Faulty testing leads to negative outcomes

Far too often, both traditional and special education rely on faulty testing, which results in teachers basing their expectations on false information.

For example, while it is acknowledged that over 88 percent of students diagnosed with autism have severe motor impairment, when they take an intelligence test, the tasks they’re given are all based on their motor skills: answering questions with their mouths (motor task); pointing to things (motor task); stacking blocks or making patterns with beads (motor task); writing (motor task); etc.

As you’d expect, because the student cannot physically answer any of the questions, the test falsely concludes they are profoundly cognitively impaired. When a teacher believes this potentially false information about a student, it leads to the self-fulfilling-prophecy paradigm; the teacher will presume incompetence, and that presumption will change how the student is treated and taught throughout his school career.

Alex’s educational experience illustrates this point. “I cannot write, sign or talk with my mouth,” he says. “I cannot even nod yes or no. I had no way to communicate until six years ago, when my mother learned how to teach me to type with one finger. No matter what I did at school, it was interpreted as a sign of my obvious cognitive impairment. The tasks I was ‘taught’ were agonizingly ridiculous and boring. For example, one of the ‘leisure time activities’ was to drop pennies into a coffee can. When I refused to do it anymore, the response was not, ‘God Almighty! That is the most boring thing on the planet. No wonder he’s refusing to do it!’  Instead, the response was, ‘Ah…you see! He has behaviors! That proves he is low functioning.’ Or, I was repeatedly asked to touch my nose to learn my body parts. I know where my %#@#! nose is! Why did I have to touch it two hundred billion times? So, I’d get up and walk away, which resulted in a written report about my lack of comprehension of body parts, cementing the educational system’s insistence upon my profound cognitive impairment.

No one ever considered the possibility that perhaps, just perhaps, I could not demonstrate my knowledge in the way they demanded. Instead, my lack of ability to perform tasks I was physically incapable of doing was considered proof that I needed to be taught the same way over and over again.

The solution

At-risk students, whether due to cultural differences, minority status, economic disadvantage, disabilities or other factors affecting performance, are, more often than not, caught in the nefarious web of the self-fulfilling prophecy. How can we rectify this?

Teachers must flip the narrative and take responsibility for figuring out how to educate their students. As Donnellan writes, “Generally, the criterion of the LDA [least dangerous assumption] holds that there is less danger to students if teachers assume instructional failure is due to instructional inadequacy rather than to student deficits.”

Simply put, if students are failing to learn, perhaps they are not being taught in a way that allows them to succeed.

This article was published in the September/October 2025 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.