The world over, we receive two conflicting messages about schools: they reproduce inequality and they can be the ‘great equalizer’ when effective. Recent policies have introduced national or state performance testing along with targets tied to incentives, often with the explicit intent to strengthen the equalizing function of schooling (OECD, 2003). The idea is that performance targets create clearly defined goals that can shape educators’ will and preferences, and compel schools to overcome the soft cultural power of low expectations that often form of students with low status (Weinstein, 2002). Schools equalize, according to established research on effective schools, when educators are determined to lessen structural disadvantage with expectations that all students can succeed. When not innate, this determination, it is claimed, can be manufactured via the strong motivational power of incentives tied to performance goals.  In other words, goal setting, it is assumed, has the power to reform teachers’ low expectations into high expectations. The proposed paper constructs a theoretical argument to examine this assumption in light of social psychological influences on expectation formation.

The literature on effective schools (Hallinger & Heck, 2010; Leithwood & Louis, 2012; Robinson, Lloyd, & Rowe, 2008) tells us that a culture of high expectations is characterized by ambitious goal-setting and commitments to goal performance (Elmore, 2004; Knapp & Feldman, 2012), while recognizing the particular need of high expectations in schools serving students from disadvantaged backgrounds where expectancy effects can create a self-fulfilling prophecy of low performance (Weinstein, 2002).  However, this literature tells us less about the symbolic or material resources that bring about high expectations for disadvantaged students, or those that prevent low expectations from developing. Goal-setting may not be enough to reform teacher expectations if “expectancy processes do not solely reside ‘in the minds of the teachers,’ but instead are built into the very fabric of our institutions and our society” (Weinstein, 2002, p. 290).

The literature on status group dynamics provides insight into some of the institutional forces on educators’ expectations (Feather, 2002; Lamont & Fournier, 1992).  Research on status group dynamics points to the tendency of individuals and groups to make symbolic distinctions between themselves and others that result in a moral order of differential deservingness and associated practices (Anagnostopoulos, 2006). Given the ‘economy’ of attention and energy in schools, judgments of deservingness by educators can be understood similarly to the concept of deservingness in scholarship about redistributive welfare policies (van Oorschot, 2006) – as distinctions between those who are perceived as in-group or out-group and those who are assessed as victims of circumstance or culprits in their own predicament (Feather, 2002). Ordinarily in-group victims are seen as the most deserving, while out-group culprits are seen as the least deserving. For educators, whose resources of time and effort are necessarily limited, judgments of deservingness may underlie the formation of expectations about student achievement potential.  Perceptions of students’ status and deservingness may delimit the degree to which performance goals can define educators’ expectations for students.

While extensive research on goal setting in the work place has ascertained that goals are a primary force in motivating workers to expend effort (Locke & Latham, 2002), pushing expectations higher, in schools the potential of goals to shape expectations is likely conditioned by the simultaneous pull of institutionalized assumptions of deservingness.

The striving for schools that nurture a culture of high expectations for all students necessitates a clearer understanding of how expectations form in teachers.  The objective of this paper is to present a theoretical argument of expectation formation that balances the tension between the power of goal-setting and judgments of deservingness.

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