Beverly Cantello didn’t appreciate being misled — at least, not at first.
It was 1964. Cantello was 23 years old and just starting out in her teaching career when a Harvard psychologist named Robert Rosenthal came to her elementary school. The principal announced that she’d given Rosenthal permission to administer a fancy-sounding new IQ test to the school’s students that spring.
Shortly thereafter, Cantello was told that Rosenthal’s Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition revealed something remarkable: Small groups of children in each classroom were poised to “bloom” academically.
And indeed, over the next school year, the designated students at Spruce Elementary School in South San Francisco excelled, just as predicted. The youngest of them made the most dramatic gains: On average, these first-graders increased their IQ scores by more than 27 points.
Only then were Cantello and her colleagues informed that Rosenthal had not told the truth. The Test of Inflected Acquisition was just a standard IQ test. The “bloomers” had been chosen at random. It was the teachers’ belief in their pupils’ potential, not any innate advantage, that spurred the students to achieve.
