By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 9, 1998; Page B4

The Montgomery County school administration said yesterday that it believes differing teacher expectations are a "driving factor" in the math achievement gap between the county's white and Asian students, on one hand, and Hispanic and black students on the other.

The assertion is based on the county's first analysis of the relationship between eighth-grade math test scores and the likelihood of success in ninth-grade algebra.

School officials acknowledged that achievement is affected by other factors, including student attitudes and family environment and income. But they said teacher attitudes are key to closing the disparity.

"Expectations are a driving factor," Associate School Superintendent Steven G. Seleznow said after he presented the county's annual report on student achievement at a school board meeting. "I think it plays a significant role [in creating the gap]. And we think high expectations are a fundamental condition for success for every student."

The school system has begun to tackle biased attitudes through new teacher training and evaluations and a planned computerized tracking system that will give teachers more information about individual students, officials said.

The report contained some good news: Achievement rose among all racial and ethnic groups. In absolute numbers, however, participation in advanced courses by African Americans and Hispanics remains low. And a substantial test score gap persists between non-Asian minorities and whites.

The school system based its conclusions about teacher attitudes on a study of 3,500 students showing that white and Asian eighth-graders who scored 650 – or proficient – on the county's math test had an 85 percent likelihood of passing ninth-grade algebra, one of the county's key measures of student achievement. But for black and Hispanic students, that likelihood fell to 82 percent – a difference officials called unacceptable.

"Students will perform to the level that we expect them to," said board member Beatrice B. Gordon (At Large). "If we expect little of them, we will get little of them."

Some school board members, however, cautioned that to really address the achievement gap, an analysis considering factors such as poverty and the racial breakdown of faculty members would be helpful.

The need to change teacher expectations in Montgomery was flagged in 1990 by Yale University psychologist Edmund W. Gordon, who noted that "so ubiquitous is the perception that the attitudes and behaviors of some teachers are influenced by bias . . . that it seems essential to attack this perception aggressively."

Spokesman Brian Porter said school officials want to focus on changing what is in their control: classroom behavior and performance. For example, a new teacher evaluation system is being developed that may require teachers to show how they've adapted classroom instruction to the students in their classes.

And once a new computerized student data system is up and working, teachers will have at their desks access to a full academic profile of each student. That way, officials said, teachers who may be predisposed to thinking minority students are less likely to be high achievers can see scores that prove otherwise.

"There will be no opportunity for a teacher to say, 'You know, I didn't know that kid could score that well,'‚" Porter said. "If an individual does not change their attitude, they can certainly change their behavior in the classroom and that's what we really want so that students get a fair shot no matter who they are," he said.

Teachers union President Mark Simon said the county's 8,500 teachers "take very seriously" the link between expectations and performance. "Teachers are very aware of the power of their expectations," he said. "It's something that teachers are working on all the time."

John Kaluta, a technology education teacher at Montgomery Blair High School, acknowledged that some teachers have lower expectations of some students, but he said sometimes it's the students whose expectations of themselves are low. "For instance, there are students who know perfectly well how to speak proper English," he said. "They know how to do it, they just choose not to do it. And the teacher is reacting, not to a student's race or ethnicity, but to the way they carry themselves."

Other data released yesterday showed that the number of black students taking at least one high school honors or advanced placement test rose from 25 percent in 1990-91 to 30 percent in 1997-98. Hispanic participation similarly went from 24 percent to 32 percent. White and Asian student participation rose from the 50-60 percent range to the mid-to-high 60s.