El 30% de los alumnos españoles no finaliza la Secundaria Obligatoria
Comunidad Escolar, Año XXIV, número 794, 27 de septiembre de 2006
Mientras el 30% de los alumnos españoles no obtiene la titulación en Secundaria Obligatoria, las mujeres logran el doble de titulaciones que los hombres en Bachillerato y FP de grado medio. Según el último informe de la OCDE, las ratios de los centros españoles se sitúan por debajo de la media, mientras que el número de horas de clases en Primaria y Secundaria es mayor en España.
Madrid. R.C.
A pesar de reconocer que el índice de fracaso escolar en nuestro país se sitúa muy por encima de la media europea, la ministra de Educación y Ciencia, Mercedes Cabrera, se ha mostrado convencida de que con la implantación de la Ley Orgánica de Educación (LOE) se reducirán estas elevadas tasas. Según refleja el último informe de la OCDE, el 30% de los alumnos españoles no finaliza la Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO), mientras que la media en los países de la OCDE es del 12%. No obstante, la titular de Educación advirtió que estos datos corresponden al año 2003, cuando gobernaba el Partido Popular. En su intervención en el Congreso de los Diputados, subrayó que la memoria económica que acompaña a la LOE prevé una inversión que asciende a 7.000 millones de euros, con lo que se demuestra que el Gobierno otorga prioridad a la reforma educativa. Asimismo, recordó que la LOE da especial relevancia a la detección de dificultades de aprendizaje desde la Educación Infantil y Primaria, además de la atención a la diversidad en Secundaria y el desarrollo de programas de cualificación profesional.
Logros educativos
Este informe de la OCDE se ha estructurado en torno a cuatro capítulos. Del primero de ellos, dedicado a los logros educativos de la población adulta, se desprende que el porcentaje de españoles que ha alcanzado una titulación de educación secundaria superior, correspondiente a Bachillerato, FP de grado medio y otros estudios secundarios ha mejorado con respecto al año anterior, pero sigue siendo inferior al de la OCDE. Del segmento de población entre 25 y 64 años, la tasa de los que lograron una titulación de educación secundaria superior es de 45%, frente al 67% de la OCDE o de la UE. Aunque se ha mejorado en dos puntos con respecto al año anterior, la distancia con respecto a la OCDE es todavía elevada.
Según precisó Alejandro Tiana en la presentación del documento, la tasa de la generación española de 55 a 64 años estaba a 32 puntos de la de la OCDE (21% frente a 53%) y la distancia de la población de 25 a 34 años desciende a 16 puntos. En los treinta años que hay de diferencia entre ambas poblaciones nuestro sistema educativo ha reducido la distancia con la OCDE a la mitad y ha multiplicado por tres el porcentaje de españoles que ha alcanzado una titulación en educación secundaria superior. La proporción de estudiantes que actualmente completan las enseñanzas de Bachillerato o ciclos formativos de grado medio en relación con su grupo de edad se sitúa en España en el 66% frente al 81% de media de la OCDE.
Titulaciones
Este documento constata que las jóvenes españolas de 25 a 35 años han permanecido un promedio de 12,5 años en el sistema educativo frente a 11,9 años los varones. Además, la proporción de mujeres entre 25 y 34 años con titulación de Bachillerato o FP de grado medio supera en 17 puntos a la de los varones, mientras que en la OCDE dicha diferencia es de sólo 9 puntos.
Por otra parte, los resultados españoles en educación superior se sitúan en posición destacada entre los países de la OCDE, del 38 frente al 31% respectivamente. Mientras que en educación superior España ha alcanzado porcentajes similares a la media de la OCDE, en secundaria superior Bachillerato y FP de grado medio estamos todavía lejos de esa media.
El secretario general de Educación declaró que la “universidad no es una fábrica de parados”, ya que este informe verifica que el paro entre los varones españoles que sólo tienen estudios primarios (8,7%) es casi el doble que el de los que tienen estudios medios o superiores (4,9% y 5,3% respectivamente). En cuanto a las mujeres, la proporción es similar 17,2% frente a 8,8%, no obstante las cifras de paro son casi el doble que las de ellos.
Sobre un índice 100 equivalente a los ingresos alcanzados por los titulados en educación secundaria superior, los varones licenciados españoles alcanzan un nivel de ingresos de 144, mientras que las personas que no terminaron esta etapa se queda en 84. Por su parte, las mujeres licenciadas logran un nivel de salarios de 156, cifra que duplica el de aquellas que no finalizaron la secundaria superior.
Gasto
Aunque el gasto educativo ha aumentado de manera continuada en la última década, su crecimiento ha sido durante años inferior al del Producto Interior Bruto (PIB), con el resultado de que el porcentaje de gasto público en educación con respecto al PIB que en 1995 era del 4,6%, en 2003 era sólo del 4,3%, cifras significativamente menores que las correspondientes de la OCDE, 5,3% en 1995 y 5,5% en 2003.
Mientras que la proporción del gasto corriente en educación destinado al profesorado de Primaria y Secundaria, en relación con el gasto total en educación, es del 74,6%, frente al 63,6% de la OCDE. En educación terciaria, estas proporciones son respectivamente del 58,5% y 43%.
Los españoles han permanecido menos tiempo en la enseñanza formal que la media de la OCDE, pero las distancias se acortan si se considera la población más joven y desaparecen si se atiende a la esperanza de escolarización de los menores de 5 años. En los últimos veinte años, la permanencia en el sistema educativo ha mejorado en dos años en los hombres y en más de tres en las mujeres. En 2004, la esperanza de escolarización para los menores de 5 años era de 17,2 años y en la OCDE de 17,4.
Organización de centros
En casi todas las edades, el número total de horas de clase obligatorias en Primaria y Secundaria es mayor en España, que en la OCDE. Así como, el número medio de alumnos por clase en centros públicos de Primaria es de 19,3, situándose por debajo de la media de la OCDE que es de 21,5. En Secundaria es de 24 alumnos en España y de 23,8 la media de la OCDE. Por lo que se refiere a los centros privados, la media de alumnos por clase en Primaria es de 24,3, frente a 20,3 en la OCDE, mientras que en Secundaria es de 26,9 frente a 22,8 respectivamente.En Educación Infantil ha pasado de 14,8 en 2003 a 13,9 en 2004, pero en el OCDE ha aumentado de 14,4 al 14,8. La cifra española en Primaria es de 14,3 alumnos por profesor, frente a 16,9% de la OCDE y en Secundaria de 10,8 y de 13,3, respectivamente.
Por su parte, los profesores españoles de Primaria imparten 880 horas de clase al año, mientras que en la OCDE es de 805 de media. Así como, en Secundaria obligatoria las horas lectivas anuales son 581 y en la OCDE es de 704 y en la Secundaria postobligatoria, 564 y 663 respectivamente. No obstante, las horas totales de trabajo y el número de días trabajados al año es similar en España y en los países de la OCDE.
Si bien los salarios iniciales de los profesores españoles son en general un 25% superior a los de sus compañeros de la OCDE, en los primeros años de docencia, la proporción entre el salario máximo que se alcanza en Educación Secundaria y el inicial es de 1,43 en España frente al 1,7 de la OCDE. En nuestro país, un profesor necesita 39 años para alcanzar el salario máximo, mientras que la media de años de la OCDE es de 24. Por último, el poder adquisitivo del salario de los profesores españoles, medido en euros constantes, ha descendido entre 1996 y 2004.
Mientras el 30% de los alumnos españoles no obtiene la titulación en Secundaria Obligatoria, las mujeres logran el doble de titulaciones que los hombres en Bachillerato y FP de grado medio. Según el último informe de la OCDE, las ratios de los centros españoles se sitúan por debajo de la media, mientras que el número de horas de clases en Primaria y Secundaria es mayor en España.
Madrid. R.C.
A pesar de reconocer que el índice de fracaso escolar en nuestro país se sitúa muy por encima de la media europea, la ministra de Educación y Ciencia, Mercedes Cabrera, se ha mostrado convencida de que con la implantación de la Ley Orgánica de Educación (LOE) se reducirán estas elevadas tasas. Según refleja el último informe de la OCDE, el 30% de los alumnos españoles no finaliza la Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO), mientras que la media en los países de la OCDE es del 12%. No obstante, la titular de Educación advirtió que estos datos corresponden al año 2003, cuando gobernaba el Partido Popular. En su intervención en el Congreso de los Diputados, subrayó que la memoria económica que acompaña a la LOE prevé una inversión que asciende a 7.000 millones de euros, con lo que se demuestra que el Gobierno otorga prioridad a la reforma educativa. Asimismo, recordó que la LOE da especial relevancia a la detección de dificultades de aprendizaje desde la Educación Infantil y Primaria, además de la atención a la diversidad en Secundaria y el desarrollo de programas de cualificación profesional.
Logros educativos
Este informe de la OCDE se ha estructurado en torno a cuatro capítulos. Del primero de ellos, dedicado a los logros educativos de la población adulta, se desprende que el porcentaje de españoles que ha alcanzado una titulación de educación secundaria superior, correspondiente a Bachillerato, FP de grado medio y otros estudios secundarios ha mejorado con respecto al año anterior, pero sigue siendo inferior al de la OCDE. Del segmento de población entre 25 y 64 años, la tasa de los que lograron una titulación de educación secundaria superior es de 45%, frente al 67% de la OCDE o de la UE. Aunque se ha mejorado en dos puntos con respecto al año anterior, la distancia con respecto a la OCDE es todavía elevada.
Según precisó Alejandro Tiana en la presentación del documento, la tasa de la generación española de 55 a 64 años estaba a 32 puntos de la de la OCDE (21% frente a 53%) y la distancia de la población de 25 a 34 años desciende a 16 puntos. En los treinta años que hay de diferencia entre ambas poblaciones nuestro sistema educativo ha reducido la distancia con la OCDE a la mitad y ha multiplicado por tres el porcentaje de españoles que ha alcanzado una titulación en educación secundaria superior. La proporción de estudiantes que actualmente completan las enseñanzas de Bachillerato o ciclos formativos de grado medio en relación con su grupo de edad se sitúa en España en el 66% frente al 81% de media de la OCDE.
Titulaciones
Este documento constata que las jóvenes españolas de 25 a 35 años han permanecido un promedio de 12,5 años en el sistema educativo frente a 11,9 años los varones. Además, la proporción de mujeres entre 25 y 34 años con titulación de Bachillerato o FP de grado medio supera en 17 puntos a la de los varones, mientras que en la OCDE dicha diferencia es de sólo 9 puntos.
Por otra parte, los resultados españoles en educación superior se sitúan en posición destacada entre los países de la OCDE, del 38 frente al 31% respectivamente. Mientras que en educación superior España ha alcanzado porcentajes similares a la media de la OCDE, en secundaria superior Bachillerato y FP de grado medio estamos todavía lejos de esa media.
El secretario general de Educación declaró que la “universidad no es una fábrica de parados”, ya que este informe verifica que el paro entre los varones españoles que sólo tienen estudios primarios (8,7%) es casi el doble que el de los que tienen estudios medios o superiores (4,9% y 5,3% respectivamente). En cuanto a las mujeres, la proporción es similar 17,2% frente a 8,8%, no obstante las cifras de paro son casi el doble que las de ellos.
Sobre un índice 100 equivalente a los ingresos alcanzados por los titulados en educación secundaria superior, los varones licenciados españoles alcanzan un nivel de ingresos de 144, mientras que las personas que no terminaron esta etapa se queda en 84. Por su parte, las mujeres licenciadas logran un nivel de salarios de 156, cifra que duplica el de aquellas que no finalizaron la secundaria superior.
Gasto
Aunque el gasto educativo ha aumentado de manera continuada en la última década, su crecimiento ha sido durante años inferior al del Producto Interior Bruto (PIB), con el resultado de que el porcentaje de gasto público en educación con respecto al PIB que en 1995 era del 4,6%, en 2003 era sólo del 4,3%, cifras significativamente menores que las correspondientes de la OCDE, 5,3% en 1995 y 5,5% en 2003.
Mientras que la proporción del gasto corriente en educación destinado al profesorado de Primaria y Secundaria, en relación con el gasto total en educación, es del 74,6%, frente al 63,6% de la OCDE. En educación terciaria, estas proporciones son respectivamente del 58,5% y 43%.
Los españoles han permanecido menos tiempo en la enseñanza formal que la media de la OCDE, pero las distancias se acortan si se considera la población más joven y desaparecen si se atiende a la esperanza de escolarización de los menores de 5 años. En los últimos veinte años, la permanencia en el sistema educativo ha mejorado en dos años en los hombres y en más de tres en las mujeres. En 2004, la esperanza de escolarización para los menores de 5 años era de 17,2 años y en la OCDE de 17,4.
Organización de centros
En casi todas las edades, el número total de horas de clase obligatorias en Primaria y Secundaria es mayor en España, que en la OCDE. Así como, el número medio de alumnos por clase en centros públicos de Primaria es de 19,3, situándose por debajo de la media de la OCDE que es de 21,5. En Secundaria es de 24 alumnos en España y de 23,8 la media de la OCDE. Por lo que se refiere a los centros privados, la media de alumnos por clase en Primaria es de 24,3, frente a 20,3 en la OCDE, mientras que en Secundaria es de 26,9 frente a 22,8 respectivamente.En Educación Infantil ha pasado de 14,8 en 2003 a 13,9 en 2004, pero en el OCDE ha aumentado de 14,4 al 14,8. La cifra española en Primaria es de 14,3 alumnos por profesor, frente a 16,9% de la OCDE y en Secundaria de 10,8 y de 13,3, respectivamente.
Por su parte, los profesores españoles de Primaria imparten 880 horas de clase al año, mientras que en la OCDE es de 805 de media. Así como, en Secundaria obligatoria las horas lectivas anuales son 581 y en la OCDE es de 704 y en la Secundaria postobligatoria, 564 y 663 respectivamente. No obstante, las horas totales de trabajo y el número de días trabajados al año es similar en España y en los países de la OCDE.
Si bien los salarios iniciales de los profesores españoles son en general un 25% superior a los de sus compañeros de la OCDE, en los primeros años de docencia, la proporción entre el salario máximo que se alcanza en Educación Secundaria y el inicial es de 1,43 en España frente al 1,7 de la OCDE. En nuestro país, un profesor necesita 39 años para alcanzar el salario máximo, mientras que la media de años de la OCDE es de 24. Por último, el poder adquisitivo del salario de los profesores españoles, medido en euros constantes, ha descendido entre 1996 y 2004.
Concern Over Gender Gaps Shifting to Boys
Edweek, March 15, 2006
By Debra Viadero
Kenneth E. Wallace, a suburban Chicago educator, first noticed that boys were lagging behind girls academically when he coached high school wrestling in Indiana in the 1980s.
His district put a “no pass, no play” rule in place. Girls’ participation in sports was barely affected, but Mr. Wallace found himself working in overdrive to tutor the boys on his team so they could still compete.
Years later, when Mr. Wallace became an assistant principal, the contrasts were even more vivid. Who accounted for most of the disciplinary referrals on his desk? The boys. Suspensions? Boys again. Mr. Wallace also saw that boys predominated in special education and among the ranks of dropouts.
“We have this misguided emphasis on trying to remake boys,” said Mr. Wallace, who is doing a doctoral dissertation on the topic. “Rather than change boys, we need to learn to respect and understand who they are.”
Mr. Wallace, now an assistant superintendent in Illinois’ Maine Township High School District 207, is not alone in his concern. After years of efforts aimed at boosting girls’ achievement in science and mathematics, researchers, writers, and educators are now expressing alarm about the plight of boys.
Even boys themselves have jumped into the debate. In December, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old senior at Milton High School in Milton, Mass., filed a federal civil rights complaint contending that his school discriminates against boys by making it easier for girls to succeed.
In some ways, the gender patterns now generating worries are not new. On National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in reading, for instance, boys at every age tested—9, 13, and 17—have trailed behind girls since at least 1971. The congressionally mandated NAEP also tests nationally representative samples of students in mathematics. On those tests, boys have had a razor-thin lead over girls at all three age levels since 1992.
What’s more, the patterns appear to be universal. On a 2003 reading test given to 15-year-olds around the world, female students outscored males in all but one of the 41 countries tested.
What is newer, though, are trends at the college level in the United States. According to a report published this month by the National Center for Education Statistics, men went from being the majority to the minority of the nation’s undergraduate population between 1970 and 2001.
Over that time, men’s share of undergraduate enrollment shrank from 58 percent to 44 percent. By 2001, the report adds, women earned 60 percent of all associate’s degrees and 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees.
Experts say the trend is troubling because high-level skills are more important than ever. “There was a time when there were all kinds of end runs you could do around the educational system, like join the military or join a union and get a manufacturing job,” said Thomas Newkirk, the author of the 2002 book Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture. “Now, if boys fail at school, they’re not going to be competitive.”
Brain Variations Eyed
Judith S. Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska psychology professor who studies academic gender differences, says that advocates for boys have bandied about some misleading statistics lately. Nonetheless, she says, boys’ schooling problems are real.
“Something has changed, and I’m not quite clear what it is,” she said in an interview last week. “But this is an issue that has gone on since Tom Sawyer.”
Long-Term Trends
Average scale scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that girls have long scored higher than boys in reading at ages 9 and 17, although the gap has narrowed at age 9. While boys have consistently outscored girls in mathematics at age 17, girls have narrowed the gap. At age 9, the gender gap in math has been slim in recent decades, although boys now edge out girls.
Boys do seem to have a hard time in school—and their problems worsen as they move from elementary to middle to high school. At age 9, the NAEP data show, boys score an average of 5 points lower than girls in reading. The gap widens to 14 points at age 17.
Experts agree that boys get poorer grades than girls and number disproportionately among special education students, those diagnosed with attention deficit disorders, and disciplinary cases.
Theorists advance a range of possible causes for the statistical imbalances. Their suggestions include: differences between boys and girls in the hard-wiring of the brain; schooling practices that are not “boy friendly”; after-effects of the women’s movement; and the recent emphasis on testing. None of those explanations, though, is definitive.
The biological theory has gained currency because of technology developed in recent decades that allows scientists to peek into live human brains for the first time. With techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, researchers have learned that male and female brains look different, exhibit different patterns of operation, and develop at different rates.
A Scientific American article published last year, for instance, noted that women possess a greater density of neurons in parts of the temporal-lobe cortex associated with language processing and comprehension. Studies have also shown that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs complex thoughts and impulse control, reaches its maximum thickness in girls at age 11—18 months earlier than it does in boys.
Many researchers say neurological differences explain why girls are more verbal than boys, and why boys squirm and fidget in class, or fail to turn their homework in on time.
But Mr. Newkirk cautions against reading too much into the brain studies. “You have studies that show there’s more blood flow or electrical activity in this or that part of the brain,” he said. “To go from that to saying, ‘Therefore, we need to teach this way,’ is too big of a leap.”
A study soon to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence also highlights developmental differences in processing speed on certain moderately difficult types of tasks on intelligence tests. Processing speed is key to reading and writing fluency and computational math.
Looking at test data on more than 8,000 students at all levels of schooling, Stephen M. Camarata and Richard Woodcock of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., discovered that boys have lower processing speeds than girls beginning in elementary school. The gap widens in middle and high school. In adulthood, male and female scores converge.
“It may be important that teachers know there are these differences in cognitive efficiency in males and females in terms of homework or timed tests,” said Mr. Camarata.
Another new report, released just last week, fingers classroom grading practices for boys’ poor academic performance. William A. Draves and Julie Coates, both of whom are researchers for Learning Resources Network, or LERN, a national nonprofit education group based in River Falls, Wis., surveyed 200 K-12 teachers last year. Eighty-four percent of the teachers said boys were more likely than girls to turn in homework late, or not at all.
Homework Pass?
The authors propose a provocative solution: Eliminate grading penalties for homework.
“Males, more than females, are oriented to new challenges,” Mr. Draves said. Boys will do 10 of the same kinds of math problems to their satisfaction and leave the remaining 10 problems undone. “By continuing to penalize boys, we decrease their educational expectations,” he added.
Other experts are skeptical of that view. “There’s no point in requiring something if there are no consequences,” said Kathy Stevens, who wrote, with Michael Gurian, the 2005 book The Minds of Boys.
Ms. Stevens is also the director of training at the Gurian Institute, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based organization that promotes “boy friendly” teaching techniques. She said those strategies include frequent “brain breaks” for students, making sure homework is meaningful, and sprinkling stress balls around the class that boys can squeeze to stay focused.
Ms. Stevens says the growing emphasis in schools on preparing students for high-stakes standardized tests has made it tougher for boys to succeed. “The worst thing you can do for little boys is make them sit down and be quiet,” she said. “We did that before, too, but we had more recess and physical education. Now, schools are cutting that out in the drive to boost test scores.”
Other educators are taking bolder steps to improve boys’ achievement. The staff at Woodlawn Avenue Elementary School, an 850-student school in DeLand, Fla., just north of Daytona Beach, began putting boys and girls in separate classrooms at the start of the 2004-05 school year.
“Boys are generally positive about the program,” said JoAnne Rodkey, the school’s longtime principal. “Before, they thought the classroom teachers favored girls.” The school also reports that students of both sexes in the single-gender classes are now outscoring their same-age counterparts in mixed classes on state tests.
Ms. Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska and other prominent experts have launched a national network, called the Boys’ Project, to try to figure out why so many boys disengage from school. Her own research, conducted through interviews with high school seniors, is leading her to conclude that teenage boys’ sliding educational aspirations may be an indirect result of the advances young women have made through the women’s movement.
“They [young men] no longer see themselves as the provider of the family, so who and what are they supposed to be?” Ms. Kleinfeld wrote in an e-mail. “Why not enjoy yourself and slide, earning a little money now and then when you need it?”
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/03/15/27boys.h25.html?qs=gender
By Debra Viadero
Kenneth E. Wallace, a suburban Chicago educator, first noticed that boys were lagging behind girls academically when he coached high school wrestling in Indiana in the 1980s.
His district put a “no pass, no play” rule in place. Girls’ participation in sports was barely affected, but Mr. Wallace found himself working in overdrive to tutor the boys on his team so they could still compete.
Years later, when Mr. Wallace became an assistant principal, the contrasts were even more vivid. Who accounted for most of the disciplinary referrals on his desk? The boys. Suspensions? Boys again. Mr. Wallace also saw that boys predominated in special education and among the ranks of dropouts.
“We have this misguided emphasis on trying to remake boys,” said Mr. Wallace, who is doing a doctoral dissertation on the topic. “Rather than change boys, we need to learn to respect and understand who they are.”
Mr. Wallace, now an assistant superintendent in Illinois’ Maine Township High School District 207, is not alone in his concern. After years of efforts aimed at boosting girls’ achievement in science and mathematics, researchers, writers, and educators are now expressing alarm about the plight of boys.
Even boys themselves have jumped into the debate. In December, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old senior at Milton High School in Milton, Mass., filed a federal civil rights complaint contending that his school discriminates against boys by making it easier for girls to succeed.
In some ways, the gender patterns now generating worries are not new. On National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in reading, for instance, boys at every age tested—9, 13, and 17—have trailed behind girls since at least 1971. The congressionally mandated NAEP also tests nationally representative samples of students in mathematics. On those tests, boys have had a razor-thin lead over girls at all three age levels since 1992.
What’s more, the patterns appear to be universal. On a 2003 reading test given to 15-year-olds around the world, female students outscored males in all but one of the 41 countries tested.
What is newer, though, are trends at the college level in the United States. According to a report published this month by the National Center for Education Statistics, men went from being the majority to the minority of the nation’s undergraduate population between 1970 and 2001.
Over that time, men’s share of undergraduate enrollment shrank from 58 percent to 44 percent. By 2001, the report adds, women earned 60 percent of all associate’s degrees and 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees.
Experts say the trend is troubling because high-level skills are more important than ever. “There was a time when there were all kinds of end runs you could do around the educational system, like join the military or join a union and get a manufacturing job,” said Thomas Newkirk, the author of the 2002 book Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Popular Culture. “Now, if boys fail at school, they’re not going to be competitive.”
Brain Variations Eyed
Judith S. Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska psychology professor who studies academic gender differences, says that advocates for boys have bandied about some misleading statistics lately. Nonetheless, she says, boys’ schooling problems are real.
“Something has changed, and I’m not quite clear what it is,” she said in an interview last week. “But this is an issue that has gone on since Tom Sawyer.”
Long-Term Trends
Average scale scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that girls have long scored higher than boys in reading at ages 9 and 17, although the gap has narrowed at age 9. While boys have consistently outscored girls in mathematics at age 17, girls have narrowed the gap. At age 9, the gender gap in math has been slim in recent decades, although boys now edge out girls.
Boys do seem to have a hard time in school—and their problems worsen as they move from elementary to middle to high school. At age 9, the NAEP data show, boys score an average of 5 points lower than girls in reading. The gap widens to 14 points at age 17.
Experts agree that boys get poorer grades than girls and number disproportionately among special education students, those diagnosed with attention deficit disorders, and disciplinary cases.
Theorists advance a range of possible causes for the statistical imbalances. Their suggestions include: differences between boys and girls in the hard-wiring of the brain; schooling practices that are not “boy friendly”; after-effects of the women’s movement; and the recent emphasis on testing. None of those explanations, though, is definitive.
The biological theory has gained currency because of technology developed in recent decades that allows scientists to peek into live human brains for the first time. With techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, researchers have learned that male and female brains look different, exhibit different patterns of operation, and develop at different rates.
A Scientific American article published last year, for instance, noted that women possess a greater density of neurons in parts of the temporal-lobe cortex associated with language processing and comprehension. Studies have also shown that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that governs complex thoughts and impulse control, reaches its maximum thickness in girls at age 11—18 months earlier than it does in boys.
Many researchers say neurological differences explain why girls are more verbal than boys, and why boys squirm and fidget in class, or fail to turn their homework in on time.
But Mr. Newkirk cautions against reading too much into the brain studies. “You have studies that show there’s more blood flow or electrical activity in this or that part of the brain,” he said. “To go from that to saying, ‘Therefore, we need to teach this way,’ is too big of a leap.”
A study soon to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence also highlights developmental differences in processing speed on certain moderately difficult types of tasks on intelligence tests. Processing speed is key to reading and writing fluency and computational math.
Looking at test data on more than 8,000 students at all levels of schooling, Stephen M. Camarata and Richard Woodcock of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., discovered that boys have lower processing speeds than girls beginning in elementary school. The gap widens in middle and high school. In adulthood, male and female scores converge.
“It may be important that teachers know there are these differences in cognitive efficiency in males and females in terms of homework or timed tests,” said Mr. Camarata.
Another new report, released just last week, fingers classroom grading practices for boys’ poor academic performance. William A. Draves and Julie Coates, both of whom are researchers for Learning Resources Network, or LERN, a national nonprofit education group based in River Falls, Wis., surveyed 200 K-12 teachers last year. Eighty-four percent of the teachers said boys were more likely than girls to turn in homework late, or not at all.
Homework Pass?
The authors propose a provocative solution: Eliminate grading penalties for homework.
“Males, more than females, are oriented to new challenges,” Mr. Draves said. Boys will do 10 of the same kinds of math problems to their satisfaction and leave the remaining 10 problems undone. “By continuing to penalize boys, we decrease their educational expectations,” he added.
Other experts are skeptical of that view. “There’s no point in requiring something if there are no consequences,” said Kathy Stevens, who wrote, with Michael Gurian, the 2005 book The Minds of Boys.
Ms. Stevens is also the director of training at the Gurian Institute, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based organization that promotes “boy friendly” teaching techniques. She said those strategies include frequent “brain breaks” for students, making sure homework is meaningful, and sprinkling stress balls around the class that boys can squeeze to stay focused.
Ms. Stevens says the growing emphasis in schools on preparing students for high-stakes standardized tests has made it tougher for boys to succeed. “The worst thing you can do for little boys is make them sit down and be quiet,” she said. “We did that before, too, but we had more recess and physical education. Now, schools are cutting that out in the drive to boost test scores.”
Other educators are taking bolder steps to improve boys’ achievement. The staff at Woodlawn Avenue Elementary School, an 850-student school in DeLand, Fla., just north of Daytona Beach, began putting boys and girls in separate classrooms at the start of the 2004-05 school year.
“Boys are generally positive about the program,” said JoAnne Rodkey, the school’s longtime principal. “Before, they thought the classroom teachers favored girls.” The school also reports that students of both sexes in the single-gender classes are now outscoring their same-age counterparts in mixed classes on state tests.
Ms. Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska and other prominent experts have launched a national network, called the Boys’ Project, to try to figure out why so many boys disengage from school. Her own research, conducted through interviews with high school seniors, is leading her to conclude that teenage boys’ sliding educational aspirations may be an indirect result of the advances young women have made through the women’s movement.
“They [young men] no longer see themselves as the provider of the family, so who and what are they supposed to be?” Ms. Kleinfeld wrote in an e-mail. “Why not enjoy yourself and slide, earning a little money now and then when you need it?”
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2006/03/15/27boys.h25.html?qs=gender
Meanwhile: The wonders of a single-sex education
International Herald Tribune, November 3, 2006
CONCORD, Massachusetts: Sitting by the open kitchen doors of my house on the Fenn School campus in Concord, I can see and hear the exertions of our football team at practice. It is the expression of the engaged, community- building life of boys at play in the presence of trusted mentors.
Here the curriculum and schedule fit the natural rhythms of boys at work and play. Too few boys get the same chance to spend so much time playing freely or competitively while also enjoying opportunities to act, sing, paint or play a musical instrument.
Too few boys can easily and unselfconsciously discuss the significance of a novel or poem openly in class, emboldened to be personally engaged because it's the normal thing to do.
Right now I need to be separated from these boys whom I love to teach. On leave as an English teacher at Fenn, I have embarked on a rigorous, six- month chemotherapy program for advanced inflammatory breast cancer.
Today in Opinion Life holds a new, acute meaning for me. I have lots of time to reflect on my life as a wife, mother, first-time grandmother and longtime teacher. Not a day passes that I do not think about the joys of teaching these boys. Given the kind of place that cares for boys in their "boyness," they have a great capacity for goodness and camaraderie, artistry and athletic prowess, competition and cooperation, and empathy and emotional expressiveness.
Recently, a spate of horrifying school shootings has given rise to a discussion about the pathologies and failures of males in our society. My fear is that we might easily slip into hand-wringing despair over our apparent inability to reach them. If boys are falling behind girls in school, as some argue, we should not ask whether, in our admirable quest to level the playing field for girls, we have shortchanged boys.
The right question to ask is, what must we do to ensure that both boys and girls grow to their full moral and intellectual potential? We can start by taking them away from each other at crucial junctures in their schooling. Before coming to teach here, I spent 20 years at Wellesley College as a class dean and writing teacher. I worked to help young women claim an identity of competence and independence in class, on the playing fields, in theater and studio, social service and college government.
In my experience, good single-sex schools and classes for males and females allow young people to release themselves temporarily from the developmental and learning differences between the sexes, from the undue burden of the hyper-sexualized society in which they live, giving them the opportunity to explore freely what it means to be human.
By focusing on them alone as a gender in class or in school, the paradox is that their sex no longer matters in the most essential educational processes. Take an example from school life at Fenn. Without a girl to play the part of a young Jewish woman in the Warsaw ghetto in a fifth-grade drama production, a boy takes on the role, as my then-shy son did years ago.
Today in Opinion
Life holds a new, acute meaning for me. I have lots of time to reflect on my life as a wife, mother, first-time grandmother and longtime teacher. Not a day passes that I do not think about the joys of teaching these boys.
Given the kind of place that cares for boys in their "boyness," they have a great capacity for goodness and camaraderie, artistry and athletic prowess, competition and cooperation, and empathy and emotional expressiveness.
Recently, a spate of horrifying school shootings has given rise to a discussion about the pathologies and failures of males in our society.
My fear is that we might easily slip into hand-wringing despair over our apparent inability to reach them. If boys are falling behind girls in school, as some argue, we should not ask whether, in our admirable quest to level the playing field for girls, we have shortchanged boys.
The right question to ask is, what must we do to ensure that both boys and girls grow to their full moral and intellectual potential?
We can start by taking them away from each other at crucial junctures in their schooling.
Before coming to teach here, I spent 20 years at Wellesley College as a class dean and writing teacher. I worked to help young women claim an identity of competence and independence in class, on the playing fields, in theater and studio, social service and college government.
In my experience, good single-sex schools and classes for males and females allow young people to release themselves temporarily from the developmental and learning differences between the sexes, from the undue burden of the hyper-sexualized society in which they live, giving them the opportunity to explore freely what it means to be human.
By focusing on them alone as a gender in class or in school, the paradox is that their sex no longer matters in the most essential educational processes.
Take an example from school life at Fenn. Without a girl to play the part of a young Jewish woman in the Warsaw ghetto in a fifth-grade drama production, a boy takes on the role, as my then-shy son did years ago.
At this all-boys school, it happens all the time and without stigma. Such an experience can lead boys to uncover the deep emotional and spiritual currents that underlie our common humanity, male and female alike. It may also lead them, as it did my son, to recognize that theater can be a way out of shyness by taking another identity onstage. The same thing happened when he put on football gear and learned how to play the game from a coach who was also his Latin teacher - an experience that led this sensitive, artistic boy to an unexpected development as a strong high school and college athlete.
In my view, these happy outcomes are directly related to a single-sex educational environment. Schools that use gender as a lens to understand boys and girls on their own terms create opportunities that open them up, not close them down, and that make them feel good about being boys and girls learning new things.
These schools foster a sense of being in control responsibly. Some exist now. Many more could become those places if they would consider giving boys and girls a chance to take time out from each other - to learn to be who they are and achieve their potential in all of their gendered and human glory.
At this all-boys school, it happens all the time and without stigma. Such an experience can lead boys to uncover the deep emotional and spiritual currents that underlie our common humanity, male and female alike.
It may also lead them, as it did my son, to recognize that theater can be a way out of shyness by taking another identity onstage.
The same thing happened when he put on football gear and learned how to play the game from a coach who was also his Latin teacher - an experience that led this sensitive, artistic boy to an unexpected development as a strong high school and college athlete.
In my view, these happy outcomes are directly related to a single-sex educational environment.
Schools that use gender as a lens to understand boys and girls on their own terms create opportunities that open them up, not close them down, and that make them feel good about being boys and girls learning new things.
These schools foster a sense of being in control responsibly. Some exist now. Many more could become those places if they would consider giving boys and girls a chance to take time out from each other - to learn to be who they are and achieve their potential in all of their gendered and human glory.
Lorraine Garnett
Lorraine Garnett Ward chairs the English Department at the Fenn School.
CONCORD, Massachusetts: Sitting by the open kitchen doors of my house on the Fenn School campus in Concord, I can see and hear the exertions of our football team at practice. It is the expression of the engaged, community- building life of boys at play in the presence of trusted mentors.
Here the curriculum and schedule fit the natural rhythms of boys at work and play. Too few boys get the same chance to spend so much time playing freely or competitively while also enjoying opportunities to act, sing, paint or play a musical instrument.
Too few boys can easily and unselfconsciously discuss the significance of a novel or poem openly in class, emboldened to be personally engaged because it's the normal thing to do.
Right now I need to be separated from these boys whom I love to teach. On leave as an English teacher at Fenn, I have embarked on a rigorous, six- month chemotherapy program for advanced inflammatory breast cancer.
Today in Opinion Life holds a new, acute meaning for me. I have lots of time to reflect on my life as a wife, mother, first-time grandmother and longtime teacher. Not a day passes that I do not think about the joys of teaching these boys. Given the kind of place that cares for boys in their "boyness," they have a great capacity for goodness and camaraderie, artistry and athletic prowess, competition and cooperation, and empathy and emotional expressiveness.
Recently, a spate of horrifying school shootings has given rise to a discussion about the pathologies and failures of males in our society. My fear is that we might easily slip into hand-wringing despair over our apparent inability to reach them. If boys are falling behind girls in school, as some argue, we should not ask whether, in our admirable quest to level the playing field for girls, we have shortchanged boys.
The right question to ask is, what must we do to ensure that both boys and girls grow to their full moral and intellectual potential? We can start by taking them away from each other at crucial junctures in their schooling. Before coming to teach here, I spent 20 years at Wellesley College as a class dean and writing teacher. I worked to help young women claim an identity of competence and independence in class, on the playing fields, in theater and studio, social service and college government.
In my experience, good single-sex schools and classes for males and females allow young people to release themselves temporarily from the developmental and learning differences between the sexes, from the undue burden of the hyper-sexualized society in which they live, giving them the opportunity to explore freely what it means to be human.
By focusing on them alone as a gender in class or in school, the paradox is that their sex no longer matters in the most essential educational processes. Take an example from school life at Fenn. Without a girl to play the part of a young Jewish woman in the Warsaw ghetto in a fifth-grade drama production, a boy takes on the role, as my then-shy son did years ago.
Today in Opinion
Life holds a new, acute meaning for me. I have lots of time to reflect on my life as a wife, mother, first-time grandmother and longtime teacher. Not a day passes that I do not think about the joys of teaching these boys.
Given the kind of place that cares for boys in their "boyness," they have a great capacity for goodness and camaraderie, artistry and athletic prowess, competition and cooperation, and empathy and emotional expressiveness.
Recently, a spate of horrifying school shootings has given rise to a discussion about the pathologies and failures of males in our society.
My fear is that we might easily slip into hand-wringing despair over our apparent inability to reach them. If boys are falling behind girls in school, as some argue, we should not ask whether, in our admirable quest to level the playing field for girls, we have shortchanged boys.
The right question to ask is, what must we do to ensure that both boys and girls grow to their full moral and intellectual potential?
We can start by taking them away from each other at crucial junctures in their schooling.
Before coming to teach here, I spent 20 years at Wellesley College as a class dean and writing teacher. I worked to help young women claim an identity of competence and independence in class, on the playing fields, in theater and studio, social service and college government.
In my experience, good single-sex schools and classes for males and females allow young people to release themselves temporarily from the developmental and learning differences between the sexes, from the undue burden of the hyper-sexualized society in which they live, giving them the opportunity to explore freely what it means to be human.
By focusing on them alone as a gender in class or in school, the paradox is that their sex no longer matters in the most essential educational processes.
Take an example from school life at Fenn. Without a girl to play the part of a young Jewish woman in the Warsaw ghetto in a fifth-grade drama production, a boy takes on the role, as my then-shy son did years ago.
At this all-boys school, it happens all the time and without stigma. Such an experience can lead boys to uncover the deep emotional and spiritual currents that underlie our common humanity, male and female alike. It may also lead them, as it did my son, to recognize that theater can be a way out of shyness by taking another identity onstage. The same thing happened when he put on football gear and learned how to play the game from a coach who was also his Latin teacher - an experience that led this sensitive, artistic boy to an unexpected development as a strong high school and college athlete.
In my view, these happy outcomes are directly related to a single-sex educational environment. Schools that use gender as a lens to understand boys and girls on their own terms create opportunities that open them up, not close them down, and that make them feel good about being boys and girls learning new things.
These schools foster a sense of being in control responsibly. Some exist now. Many more could become those places if they would consider giving boys and girls a chance to take time out from each other - to learn to be who they are and achieve their potential in all of their gendered and human glory.
At this all-boys school, it happens all the time and without stigma. Such an experience can lead boys to uncover the deep emotional and spiritual currents that underlie our common humanity, male and female alike.
It may also lead them, as it did my son, to recognize that theater can be a way out of shyness by taking another identity onstage.
The same thing happened when he put on football gear and learned how to play the game from a coach who was also his Latin teacher - an experience that led this sensitive, artistic boy to an unexpected development as a strong high school and college athlete.
In my view, these happy outcomes are directly related to a single-sex educational environment.
Schools that use gender as a lens to understand boys and girls on their own terms create opportunities that open them up, not close them down, and that make them feel good about being boys and girls learning new things.
These schools foster a sense of being in control responsibly. Some exist now. Many more could become those places if they would consider giving boys and girls a chance to take time out from each other - to learn to be who they are and achieve their potential in all of their gendered and human glory.
Lorraine Garnett
Lorraine Garnett Ward chairs the English Department at the Fenn School.
The Why Chromosome. How a teacher’s gender affects boys and girls.
By Thomas S. Dee
Gender gaps in educational outcomes are a matter of real and growing concern. We’ve known for a long time, since the 1970s, that girls outscore boys in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading tests, while boys tend to outperform girls in math and science.
Boys are increasingly less likely than girls to attend college and to receive a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, female college students continue to be underrepresented in such technical fields as engineering and computer science.
One popular, if controversial, response to these patterns has been a renewed push for single-sex education—an effort that has drawn support from across political divides. An amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act authorizing the creation of single-sex public schools was sponsored by Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, but the measure passed in large part due to the support of Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, a Wellesley College graduate grateful for her opportunity to attend one of the country’s premier women’s colleges. (“Wellesley nurtured, challenged, and guided me,” she declared in her 1992 Commencement Day speech.) The National Association for Single-Sex Public Education reports that, as of April 2006, at least 223 public schools in the United States were offering gender-separate educational opportunities, up from just 4 in 1998. Although most were coeducational schools with single-sex classrooms, 44 were wholly single-sex.
The majority of arguments for single-sex schools and classrooms focus on the effects on interactions among students, but they also present the possibility of greatly increasing the number of students with teachers of the same gender. Is there any convincing evidence that doing so could make a difference in education—for boys and girls alike? So far the jury has been out, but my analysis of national survey and test-score data collected by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) allows me to offer new and convincing evidence of the differential impact of a teacher’s gender on student learning.
The Gender Gap
The evolution of the gender gaps in achievement as children mature suggests that what occurs in schools and classrooms may play an important role. According to the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, when children enter kindergarten, the two genders perform similarly on tests of both reading and mathematics. But a few years later, by the spring of the 3rd grade, boys, on average, outperform girls in math and science, while the girls outperform the boys in reading. Disconcertingly, NAEP results show that for children between the ages of 9 and 13, the gender gaps in science and reading roughly double and the math gap increases by two-thirds. For children between the ages of 13 and 17, there is modest growth in the math and reading gender gaps but a substantial expansion of the gap in science.
The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white test-score gap in reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a difference worthy of concern.
Drowned out by the din of public argument over the role of nature vs. nurture is a debate, far from settled, over exactly how the experience of going to school shapes learning among boys and girls. One school of thought contends that teachers, both men and women, treat boys and girls differently in the classroom. For example, some controversial evidence, based on classroom observations, suggests that both are likely to offer praise and remediation in response to comments by boys but mere acknowledgment to comments by girls. Some cognitive scientists suggest that teachers may subtly communicate different academic expectations of boys and girls and these biased expectations may become self-fulfilling.
Teacher Gender Matters
Other theories, of special interest here, suggest that much depends on the gender of the teacher. One theory asserts that the teacher’s gender shapes communications between teacher and pupil, while another says the teacher acts as a gender-specific role model, regardless of what he or she says or does. According to this second theory, students are more engaged, behave more appropriately, and perform at a higher level when taught by one who shares their gender.
Tests of these theories have relied primarily on information about teachers and students in college and graduate school. Findings have been mixed, so the issue remains unresolved. Studies have not focused on young adolescents, the time when students are particularly sensitive to gender differences and when gender gaps in achievement are pronounced.
I investigated the effect of a teacher’s gender using the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS), which contains data on a nationally representative sample of nearly 25,000 8th graders from 1988. In addition to examining the effect of teacher gender on students’ test-score performance, I examined teacher perceptions of a student’s performance and student perceptions of the subject taught by a particular teacher. I was especially interested in the influence of a teacher’s gender on students’ perceptions, because engagement with an academic subject may be an important precursor to subsequent achievement levels, course selection in high school and college, and also occupational choice. For example, the underrepresentation of women in fields like engineering and computer science may be due to levels of confidence and interest in related subjects in high school.
Indeed, my results confirm that a teacher’s gender does have large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material. Simply put, girls have better educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men. These findings persist, even after I account for a variety of other characteristics of students, teachers, and classrooms that may influence student learning. They are especially important for young men when one considers that the percentage of 6th-grade teachers who were female ranged from 58 to 91 percent across four core subjects (math, science, reading, and history). Although these percentages decline in later grades, 83 percent of the English teachers in 8th grade are female, as are more than half of 8th-grade math and science teachers.
A Mother Lode of Gender Data
Key to my findings is the National Education Longitudinal Survey, initiated in 1988 as a survey of a nationally representative sample of 8th-grade students from 1,052 public and private schools. The DOE resurveyed a sample of these students during four follow-up reviews, in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 2000. For my study I rely only on the NELS data from 1988, which is based on surveys of 24,599 students and two of each student’s teachers.
In particular, I exploit a unique feature of the teacher surveys. For each sampled student, NELS administered questionnaires to teachers from two academic subjects: mathematics and English; mathematics and history; science and English; and science and history. Two completed teacher surveys are available for 21,324 of the 8th-grade students—a bit smaller than the full sample of NELS students because some teachers did not complete their questionnaires and some students did not have a class in one or both of the academic subjects randomly assigned to their school for which teacher surveys were administered.
The teacher survey solicited a variety of information about the teacher’s background, including gender. It also included several questions about how the teacher viewed the behavior and performance of the specific students in the study. I was most interested in the effect of gender on three assessments that appear to be particularly good indicators of academic development. Teachers were asked to simply respond yes or no as to whether the student was frequently disruptive, consistently inattentive, or rarely completed homework.
The student component of NELS includes additional outcome data for the subjects taught by each sampled teacher, including the results from multiple-choice achievement tests. The survey also asked students questions about their engagement with the subject. In particular, students indicated whether they were afraid to ask questions in that subject, looked forward to their class, and saw the subject as useful for their future. NELS also solicited information about each student’s gender as well as a variety of other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
NELS is a goldmine of information for those interested in gender dynamics within the classroom. Especially noteworthy is the fact that data are available from the same student in two different subjects taken from two different teachers, which enables us to account for educationally relevant characteristics of students that cannot be ascertained by conventional background characteristics. In other words, these “matched-pairs” data allow us to see how the outcomes of the same student vary with two different teachers.
When estimating the effect of a teacher’s gender, I use standard statistical techniques to adjust for the effect of several other teacher and classroom characteristics that may affect student outcomes. For example, I take into account whether the student shares the teacher’s race and ethnicity, because some of my own prior research suggests that the race of a teacher may influence student outcomes (see “The Race Connection,” Education Next, Spring 2004). I also consider the size of the class, the percentage of students in the classroom with limited English proficiency, the number of years a teacher has been working in the profession, and whether the teacher is state-certified in the subject he or she is teaching. What does this valuable set of data reveal about the connections between gender and learning?
The Most Important Findings
For three subject areas—science, social studies, and English—the overall effect of having a woman teacher instead of a man raises the achievement of girls by 4 percent of a standard deviation and lowers the achievement of boys by roughly the same amount, producing an overall gender gap of 8 percent of a standard deviation, no small matter if it can be assumed that this happened over the course of a single year. In fact, these estimates suggest that the effects of a year with a teacher of a particular gender are quite large relative to the gender gaps in achievement in the national datasets mentioned above. But I am hesitant to draw that conclusion in the absence of information about the gender of the teacher the student had in preceding years. Some of what I attribute to the 8th grade might have occurred in previous years, if the student had had multiple years of schooling from a teacher of the same gender.
While these results summarize the overall impact of teacher’s gender on test scores, the effects vary somewhat from one subject to the next. Test-score benefits for girls of having a female teacher are concentrated in social studies. I estimate that a female social-studies teacher increases a girl’s performance by 9 percent of a standard deviation. In contrast, the impact in English is not statistically significant. For boys, the largest effect appears in science. Their scores drop by 5 percent of a standard deviation if they have a female teacher. In English and social studies, the drops appear to be almost as large but are not statistically significant.
It does not seem likely that one can explain these results by the quality of the student’s teacher, because almost all teachers, whether men or women, are teaching boys and girls together. Yet the effect differs, depending on whether the genders of teacher and student match.
Still, to double-check this possibility, I isolate those situations where students of different genders had the same teacher. For the typical teacher who was surveyed by the NELS, there were three to four students included in the study. Given this information, I was able to re-estimate the effect of a teacher on students of the opposite gender, while adjusting for the overall effect of any individual teacher on student learning. In other words, because the same teacher is sometimes observed with sampled boys and girls, we can assess whether gender interactions matter after adjusting for the teacher’s unobserved traits. The overall results—the average for the three subject areas—indicate an average positive impact on student achievement of 4 percent of a standard deviation whenever the teacher-student gender was the same.
Classroom Dynamics
Exactly why gender makes so much of a difference in student learning is difficult to ascertain. But the NELS data offer some suggestive evidence that the opinions of teachers about their students—and of students about their teachers—is shaped in part by gender characteristics.
Regardless of the academic subject, boys are two to three times more likely than girls to be seen as disruptive, inattentive, and unlikely to complete their homework. However, how boys and girls view academic subjects varies across subjects in ways that parallel the gender gaps in subject test scores. For example, girls are more likely than boys to report that they are afraid to ask questions in math, science, and social studies. They are also less likely to look forward to these classes or to see them as useful for their future. Meanwhile, boys, as compared to girls, register more negative perceptions of English classes.
But while boys and girls may exhibit different behaviors and prefer different subjects, that is not quite the same thing as having a different experience because of the gender of the teacher. So is there any evidence that teachers relate better to students whose gender they share—or vice versa? Significant patterns can be detected within the NELS data. When a class is headed by a woman, boys are more likely to be seen as disruptive, while girls are less likely to be seen as either disruptive or inattentive.
Furthermore, when taught by a man, girls were more likely to report that they did not look forward to a subject, that it was not useful for their future, or that they were afraid to ask questions. This dynamic is strongest in science, where student reports indicate that female science teachers are far more effective in promoting girls’ engagement with this field of study. The estimated effects in the other two subjects pointed in the same direction but were statistically insignificant when examined separately.
Boys also had fewer positive reactions to their academic subject when taught by an opposite-gender teacher. In particular, when taught by a female teacher, boys were significantly more likely to report that they did not look forward to the subject. This effect appears to have been particularly pronounced when the female teacher was in history. The patterns for boys in other subjects are quite consistent with those observed in history, though I should again be cautious in drawing strong conclusions because many of the results fall short of conventional levels of statistical significance.
Math Results Unclear
Results in math differ strikingly from those in the other subject areas, but I place little weight on the findings in this area for reasons that require explanation. My initial analysis showed that both boys and girls suffered if they had a woman teacher. Both girls and boys scored 7 percent and 8 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, than if they had a man. But before rushing to the conclusion that math is a subject uniquely suited for male instruction, one needs to take into account other possible explanations.
I can rule out some obvious candidates. There is no evidence, for example, that female math teachers were given larger classes or were less likely to hold the proper subject-specific qualifications, such as proper state certification or a subject-specific degree at either the undergraduate or graduate level.
But I was concerned about the likelihood that women teachers are assigned the less-promising math students. Administrators may think that women are better equipped to handle more difficult students or that men are better able to challenge the bright ones. If so, then it could appear that students benefit less from women teachers simply because they are given the lower-achieving ones in the first place.
To check this out, I estimated the effect of having a female math teacher on students’ science scores. This can be ascertained because students were tested in all four subjects, although only two of their teachers were surveyed. The reasoning behind this admittedly indirect test is that the gender of a student’s math teacher should have relatively small effects on performance in science class taught by another teacher, especially in 8th grade, when science instruction usually does not have a significant mathematical component. If a student with a female math teacher also scores poorly in science, that would be a sign of a lower-performing student overall, not evidence that the gender of the teacher in the math class is having a negative impact.
And that is precisely what I found. The apparent impact of having a female math teacher on a girl’s performance in science was a negative 4 percent of a standard deviation, a fairly large effect (though one that was only weakly significant from a statistical point of view). In fact, the apparent impact on science performance was two-thirds the size of the effect on math performance. That suggests that any estimates of the effect of teacher gender on girls’ math achievement may well be biased by the fact that women are more likely to be assigned to lower-performing math students.
For that reason, and because I found no similar connections in other subject areas when I did the same kind of analysis, I excluded the math results from the main analysis reported above. Nor should it be particularly surprising that women are assigned lower-performing students in math, though that was not the case in other subjects.
In most middle schools, for most subjects, separating students by ability levels is the exception rather than the rule. But the one subject where it is most likely to happen is in fact math, where administrators may think that a certain level of accomplishment is necessary before algebra or some other advanced math material can be introduced. And when math classes are tracked, one can easily imagine that male teachers are more likely to be assigned to the advanced class. Thus, I place little weight on the math results that were observed.
If Not Single-Sex Schooling, Then What?
My results indicate that learning from a teacher of the opposite gender has a detrimental effect on students’ academic progress and their engagement in school. My best estimate is that it lowers test scores for both boys and girls by approximately 4 percent of a standard deviation and has even larger effects on various measures of student engagement.
Adverse gender effects have an impact on both boys and girls, but that effect falls more heavily on the male half of the population in middle school, simply because most middle-school teachers are female. My estimates suggest that, if half of the English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades were male and their effects on learning were additive, the achievement gap in reading would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school. Similarly, these results suggest that part of boys’ relative propensity to be seen as disruptive in these grades is due to the gender interactions resulting from the preponderance of female teachers.
Unfortunately, in a coeducational setting, some of this gap closing would take place at the expense of the opposite gender, an outcome few would embrace. No one wants to see girls do worse in reading, or boys fare worse in science.
Some may therefore find in these results a strong case for a particular form of single-sex education, where teachers and students share the same gender. However, one should hesitate before drawing such policy conclusions from these findings. They may not be perfectly transferable to single-sex classrooms, where gender dynamics may differ from coeducational learning environments. Moreover, single-sex education may have other drawbacks, regardless of its potential impact on the outcomes examined in this study.
Would more limited interventions prove effective? Much depends on whether the gender impacts are due primarily to interactions within the classroom or more subtle “role-model” effects. If teachers had gender-specific training based on evidence about the different learning styles of boys and girls, could gender effects be limited? What if this training were aimed at combating gender biases in teacher behavior and expectations? My study suggests that gender interactions in the classroom matter, but it is still far from clear exactly why this is so. Perhaps the best policy solution is to keep an open mind about a variety of strategies that neither unequivocally endorse single-sex education nor rule it out of order altogether.
Thomas S. Dee is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Swarthmore College and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
The Why Chromosome
Gender gaps in educational outcomes are a matter of real and growing concern. We’ve known for a long time, since the 1970s, that girls outscore boys in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading tests, while boys tend to outperform girls in math and science.
Boys are increasingly less likely than girls to attend college and to receive a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, female college students continue to be underrepresented in such technical fields as engineering and computer science.
One popular, if controversial, response to these patterns has been a renewed push for single-sex education—an effort that has drawn support from across political divides. An amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act authorizing the creation of single-sex public schools was sponsored by Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, but the measure passed in large part due to the support of Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, a Wellesley College graduate grateful for her opportunity to attend one of the country’s premier women’s colleges. (“Wellesley nurtured, challenged, and guided me,” she declared in her 1992 Commencement Day speech.) The National Association for Single-Sex Public Education reports that, as of April 2006, at least 223 public schools in the United States were offering gender-separate educational opportunities, up from just 4 in 1998. Although most were coeducational schools with single-sex classrooms, 44 were wholly single-sex.
The majority of arguments for single-sex schools and classrooms focus on the effects on interactions among students, but they also present the possibility of greatly increasing the number of students with teachers of the same gender. Is there any convincing evidence that doing so could make a difference in education—for boys and girls alike? So far the jury has been out, but my analysis of national survey and test-score data collected by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) allows me to offer new and convincing evidence of the differential impact of a teacher’s gender on student learning.
The Gender Gap
The evolution of the gender gaps in achievement as children mature suggests that what occurs in schools and classrooms may play an important role. According to the Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, when children enter kindergarten, the two genders perform similarly on tests of both reading and mathematics. But a few years later, by the spring of the 3rd grade, boys, on average, outperform girls in math and science, while the girls outperform the boys in reading. Disconcertingly, NAEP results show that for children between the ages of 9 and 13, the gender gaps in science and reading roughly double and the math gap increases by two-thirds. For children between the ages of 13 and 17, there is modest growth in the math and reading gender gaps but a substantial expansion of the gap in science.
The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white test-score gap in reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a difference worthy of concern.
Drowned out by the din of public argument over the role of nature vs. nurture is a debate, far from settled, over exactly how the experience of going to school shapes learning among boys and girls. One school of thought contends that teachers, both men and women, treat boys and girls differently in the classroom. For example, some controversial evidence, based on classroom observations, suggests that both are likely to offer praise and remediation in response to comments by boys but mere acknowledgment to comments by girls. Some cognitive scientists suggest that teachers may subtly communicate different academic expectations of boys and girls and these biased expectations may become self-fulfilling.
Teacher Gender Matters
Other theories, of special interest here, suggest that much depends on the gender of the teacher. One theory asserts that the teacher’s gender shapes communications between teacher and pupil, while another says the teacher acts as a gender-specific role model, regardless of what he or she says or does. According to this second theory, students are more engaged, behave more appropriately, and perform at a higher level when taught by one who shares their gender.
Tests of these theories have relied primarily on information about teachers and students in college and graduate school. Findings have been mixed, so the issue remains unresolved. Studies have not focused on young adolescents, the time when students are particularly sensitive to gender differences and when gender gaps in achievement are pronounced.
I investigated the effect of a teacher’s gender using the National Education Longitudinal Survey (NELS), which contains data on a nationally representative sample of nearly 25,000 8th graders from 1988. In addition to examining the effect of teacher gender on students’ test-score performance, I examined teacher perceptions of a student’s performance and student perceptions of the subject taught by a particular teacher. I was especially interested in the influence of a teacher’s gender on students’ perceptions, because engagement with an academic subject may be an important precursor to subsequent achievement levels, course selection in high school and college, and also occupational choice. For example, the underrepresentation of women in fields like engineering and computer science may be due to levels of confidence and interest in related subjects in high school.
Indeed, my results confirm that a teacher’s gender does have large effects on student test performance, teacher perceptions of students, and students’ engagement with academic material. Simply put, girls have better educational outcomes when taught by women and boys are better off when taught by men. These findings persist, even after I account for a variety of other characteristics of students, teachers, and classrooms that may influence student learning. They are especially important for young men when one considers that the percentage of 6th-grade teachers who were female ranged from 58 to 91 percent across four core subjects (math, science, reading, and history). Although these percentages decline in later grades, 83 percent of the English teachers in 8th grade are female, as are more than half of 8th-grade math and science teachers.
A Mother Lode of Gender Data
Key to my findings is the National Education Longitudinal Survey, initiated in 1988 as a survey of a nationally representative sample of 8th-grade students from 1,052 public and private schools. The DOE resurveyed a sample of these students during four follow-up reviews, in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 2000. For my study I rely only on the NELS data from 1988, which is based on surveys of 24,599 students and two of each student’s teachers.
In particular, I exploit a unique feature of the teacher surveys. For each sampled student, NELS administered questionnaires to teachers from two academic subjects: mathematics and English; mathematics and history; science and English; and science and history. Two completed teacher surveys are available for 21,324 of the 8th-grade students—a bit smaller than the full sample of NELS students because some teachers did not complete their questionnaires and some students did not have a class in one or both of the academic subjects randomly assigned to their school for which teacher surveys were administered.
The teacher survey solicited a variety of information about the teacher’s background, including gender. It also included several questions about how the teacher viewed the behavior and performance of the specific students in the study. I was most interested in the effect of gender on three assessments that appear to be particularly good indicators of academic development. Teachers were asked to simply respond yes or no as to whether the student was frequently disruptive, consistently inattentive, or rarely completed homework.
The student component of NELS includes additional outcome data for the subjects taught by each sampled teacher, including the results from multiple-choice achievement tests. The survey also asked students questions about their engagement with the subject. In particular, students indicated whether they were afraid to ask questions in that subject, looked forward to their class, and saw the subject as useful for their future. NELS also solicited information about each student’s gender as well as a variety of other demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.
NELS is a goldmine of information for those interested in gender dynamics within the classroom. Especially noteworthy is the fact that data are available from the same student in two different subjects taken from two different teachers, which enables us to account for educationally relevant characteristics of students that cannot be ascertained by conventional background characteristics. In other words, these “matched-pairs” data allow us to see how the outcomes of the same student vary with two different teachers.
When estimating the effect of a teacher’s gender, I use standard statistical techniques to adjust for the effect of several other teacher and classroom characteristics that may affect student outcomes. For example, I take into account whether the student shares the teacher’s race and ethnicity, because some of my own prior research suggests that the race of a teacher may influence student outcomes (see “The Race Connection,” Education Next, Spring 2004). I also consider the size of the class, the percentage of students in the classroom with limited English proficiency, the number of years a teacher has been working in the profession, and whether the teacher is state-certified in the subject he or she is teaching. What does this valuable set of data reveal about the connections between gender and learning?
The Most Important Findings
For three subject areas—science, social studies, and English—the overall effect of having a woman teacher instead of a man raises the achievement of girls by 4 percent of a standard deviation and lowers the achievement of boys by roughly the same amount, producing an overall gender gap of 8 percent of a standard deviation, no small matter if it can be assumed that this happened over the course of a single year. In fact, these estimates suggest that the effects of a year with a teacher of a particular gender are quite large relative to the gender gaps in achievement in the national datasets mentioned above. But I am hesitant to draw that conclusion in the absence of information about the gender of the teacher the student had in preceding years. Some of what I attribute to the 8th grade might have occurred in previous years, if the student had had multiple years of schooling from a teacher of the same gender.
While these results summarize the overall impact of teacher’s gender on test scores, the effects vary somewhat from one subject to the next. Test-score benefits for girls of having a female teacher are concentrated in social studies. I estimate that a female social-studies teacher increases a girl’s performance by 9 percent of a standard deviation. In contrast, the impact in English is not statistically significant. For boys, the largest effect appears in science. Their scores drop by 5 percent of a standard deviation if they have a female teacher. In English and social studies, the drops appear to be almost as large but are not statistically significant.
It does not seem likely that one can explain these results by the quality of the student’s teacher, because almost all teachers, whether men or women, are teaching boys and girls together. Yet the effect differs, depending on whether the genders of teacher and student match.
Still, to double-check this possibility, I isolate those situations where students of different genders had the same teacher. For the typical teacher who was surveyed by the NELS, there were three to four students included in the study. Given this information, I was able to re-estimate the effect of a teacher on students of the opposite gender, while adjusting for the overall effect of any individual teacher on student learning. In other words, because the same teacher is sometimes observed with sampled boys and girls, we can assess whether gender interactions matter after adjusting for the teacher’s unobserved traits. The overall results—the average for the three subject areas—indicate an average positive impact on student achievement of 4 percent of a standard deviation whenever the teacher-student gender was the same.
Classroom Dynamics
Exactly why gender makes so much of a difference in student learning is difficult to ascertain. But the NELS data offer some suggestive evidence that the opinions of teachers about their students—and of students about their teachers—is shaped in part by gender characteristics.
Regardless of the academic subject, boys are two to three times more likely than girls to be seen as disruptive, inattentive, and unlikely to complete their homework. However, how boys and girls view academic subjects varies across subjects in ways that parallel the gender gaps in subject test scores. For example, girls are more likely than boys to report that they are afraid to ask questions in math, science, and social studies. They are also less likely to look forward to these classes or to see them as useful for their future. Meanwhile, boys, as compared to girls, register more negative perceptions of English classes.
But while boys and girls may exhibit different behaviors and prefer different subjects, that is not quite the same thing as having a different experience because of the gender of the teacher. So is there any evidence that teachers relate better to students whose gender they share—or vice versa? Significant patterns can be detected within the NELS data. When a class is headed by a woman, boys are more likely to be seen as disruptive, while girls are less likely to be seen as either disruptive or inattentive.
Furthermore, when taught by a man, girls were more likely to report that they did not look forward to a subject, that it was not useful for their future, or that they were afraid to ask questions. This dynamic is strongest in science, where student reports indicate that female science teachers are far more effective in promoting girls’ engagement with this field of study. The estimated effects in the other two subjects pointed in the same direction but were statistically insignificant when examined separately.
Boys also had fewer positive reactions to their academic subject when taught by an opposite-gender teacher. In particular, when taught by a female teacher, boys were significantly more likely to report that they did not look forward to the subject. This effect appears to have been particularly pronounced when the female teacher was in history. The patterns for boys in other subjects are quite consistent with those observed in history, though I should again be cautious in drawing strong conclusions because many of the results fall short of conventional levels of statistical significance.
Math Results Unclear
Results in math differ strikingly from those in the other subject areas, but I place little weight on the findings in this area for reasons that require explanation. My initial analysis showed that both boys and girls suffered if they had a woman teacher. Both girls and boys scored 7 percent and 8 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, than if they had a man. But before rushing to the conclusion that math is a subject uniquely suited for male instruction, one needs to take into account other possible explanations.
I can rule out some obvious candidates. There is no evidence, for example, that female math teachers were given larger classes or were less likely to hold the proper subject-specific qualifications, such as proper state certification or a subject-specific degree at either the undergraduate or graduate level.
But I was concerned about the likelihood that women teachers are assigned the less-promising math students. Administrators may think that women are better equipped to handle more difficult students or that men are better able to challenge the bright ones. If so, then it could appear that students benefit less from women teachers simply because they are given the lower-achieving ones in the first place.
To check this out, I estimated the effect of having a female math teacher on students’ science scores. This can be ascertained because students were tested in all four subjects, although only two of their teachers were surveyed. The reasoning behind this admittedly indirect test is that the gender of a student’s math teacher should have relatively small effects on performance in science class taught by another teacher, especially in 8th grade, when science instruction usually does not have a significant mathematical component. If a student with a female math teacher also scores poorly in science, that would be a sign of a lower-performing student overall, not evidence that the gender of the teacher in the math class is having a negative impact.
And that is precisely what I found. The apparent impact of having a female math teacher on a girl’s performance in science was a negative 4 percent of a standard deviation, a fairly large effect (though one that was only weakly significant from a statistical point of view). In fact, the apparent impact on science performance was two-thirds the size of the effect on math performance. That suggests that any estimates of the effect of teacher gender on girls’ math achievement may well be biased by the fact that women are more likely to be assigned to lower-performing math students.
For that reason, and because I found no similar connections in other subject areas when I did the same kind of analysis, I excluded the math results from the main analysis reported above. Nor should it be particularly surprising that women are assigned lower-performing students in math, though that was not the case in other subjects.
In most middle schools, for most subjects, separating students by ability levels is the exception rather than the rule. But the one subject where it is most likely to happen is in fact math, where administrators may think that a certain level of accomplishment is necessary before algebra or some other advanced math material can be introduced. And when math classes are tracked, one can easily imagine that male teachers are more likely to be assigned to the advanced class. Thus, I place little weight on the math results that were observed.
If Not Single-Sex Schooling, Then What?
My results indicate that learning from a teacher of the opposite gender has a detrimental effect on students’ academic progress and their engagement in school. My best estimate is that it lowers test scores for both boys and girls by approximately 4 percent of a standard deviation and has even larger effects on various measures of student engagement.
Adverse gender effects have an impact on both boys and girls, but that effect falls more heavily on the male half of the population in middle school, simply because most middle-school teachers are female. My estimates suggest that, if half of the English teachers in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades were male and their effects on learning were additive, the achievement gap in reading would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school. Similarly, these results suggest that part of boys’ relative propensity to be seen as disruptive in these grades is due to the gender interactions resulting from the preponderance of female teachers.
Unfortunately, in a coeducational setting, some of this gap closing would take place at the expense of the opposite gender, an outcome few would embrace. No one wants to see girls do worse in reading, or boys fare worse in science.
Some may therefore find in these results a strong case for a particular form of single-sex education, where teachers and students share the same gender. However, one should hesitate before drawing such policy conclusions from these findings. They may not be perfectly transferable to single-sex classrooms, where gender dynamics may differ from coeducational learning environments. Moreover, single-sex education may have other drawbacks, regardless of its potential impact on the outcomes examined in this study.
Would more limited interventions prove effective? Much depends on whether the gender impacts are due primarily to interactions within the classroom or more subtle “role-model” effects. If teachers had gender-specific training based on evidence about the different learning styles of boys and girls, could gender effects be limited? What if this training were aimed at combating gender biases in teacher behavior and expectations? My study suggests that gender interactions in the classroom matter, but it is still far from clear exactly why this is so. Perhaps the best policy solution is to keep an open mind about a variety of strategies that neither unequivocally endorse single-sex education nor rule it out of order altogether.
Thomas S. Dee is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Swarthmore College and a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
The Why Chromosome
Childhood versus the Pussycat Dolls
Mercatornet, 29 March 2007
Written by Theron Bowers
A widely publicised report on the sexualisation of girls belabours the obvious and fails to make effective recommendations. Why?
First, Madonna, then Britney, today's queens of pop eroticism are the Pussycat Dolls. The former burlesque dance troupe turned singers are everywhere posing in lingerie and chirping, "Doncha". Last spring the toy company Hasbro even announced a plan for a Pussycat fashion doll. According to the New York Times, the toy line was "intended for children age 6-9" and aimed "to mimic the act’s playfully risqué style". Other sexy dolls have been hits -- the Spice Girls dolls generated 150 million. The Bratz dolls, mini-skirted valley girls, are popular and have a Saturday morning cartoon show. So the Hasbro deal didn’t raise any eyebrows. The business section of the Times reported on the story no differently than any other commercial deal. Readers were probably left wondering, what’s next, pole-dancing Barbie?
Fortunately, parents responded quickly to the prospect of their 6-year-old daughters mimicking the Pussycat Dolls. Less than a month later, Hasbro dropped its plans. Unfortunately, moms and dads had slowed the march against childhood for only a moment.
The American Psychological Association (APA) has also noticed these assaults on girlhood. Last month, it released a report from its Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Like many professional organisations, the APA is a subsidiary of the progressive movement. A few years ago the organisation published a study which suggested that child sexual abuse wasn’t very harmful. Lately, the APA has taken up the battle against American Indian mascots, abstinence education and teaching intelligent design.
The APA claims that the task force was begun in response to "public concern". The concern is hardly new. More than 25 years ago, the starlet Brooke Shields became a 15-year-old teenage sex kitten in provocative Calvin Klein ads for jeans. In 1999, after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, we were introduced to the Felini-esque world of child beauty pageants with six-year-old girls coquettishly batting their eyelashes and prancing around in swim suits.
The APA's report spins a tale of a monistical cultural web involving the media, families and peers which harass and sexualise young female victims. In a Stockholm Syndrome twist, the girls adopt the men’s sexual image of women. The story ends with women suffering from impaired cognitive functioning, body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, physical health problems and exploitation.
The Task Force has an easy time proving the obvious. The media frequently presents women as sexual objects. Unfortunately, the title of the report states, "Girls." Most of the sexualised images are of women. The authors of the report state that girls model themselves after women, hence the images are relevant.
Their justification is acceptable. Girls grow up with bed-hopping shows like Friends and Sex and the City. Former Disney Wonderkid, now trampy boozer, Linsay Lohan has praised Sex and the City stating that the show ''changed everything for me, because those girls would just sleep with so many people!''
However, the Task Force has a tougher problem demonstrating harm. Most researchers work at universities where there is a shortage of 12-year-old girls. The majority of the studies involve college women. While the old lemons and lemonade approach may work for some problems, good research isn’t so flexible. The Task Force tries to finesse the lack of relevant subjects by reasoning that "what young women believe about themselves and how they feel at the present moment were shaped by how they were treated and what they were exposed to when they were girls." Excuse changing the metaphor, but this lemon is hard swallow. People’s beliefs and feelings are also changed by what they experienced one hour ago. Anyone who has been to college knows how easily some young people can change after a few weeks.
None the less, the Task Force arrives at some interesting conclusions about the consequences of sexualisation. The attention grabber in several stories has been the swim suit versus the sweater experiment. The authors described an experiment with college students. Students were asked to try on and evaluate either a sweater or a swim suit. While waiting in a dressing room, they were asked to complete a math test. The women who wore the sweater did significantly better on the math test than women in the swim suites. The report notes similar results among minority women.
The writer concludes that thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualised ideas disrupted "mental capacity" (although it appears that performance was disrupted rather than capacity). The Task Force gushes over this series of studies: "The implications are stunning and suggest that sexualisation may contribute to girls dropping out of higher level mathematics in high school."
As for mental illness, the Task Force argues that cultural beauty ideas lead to eating disorders. However, the studies cited noted that only when the beauty idea emphasises thinness is there an association with anorexia.
Looking at the culture through the microscopic lens of science, the Task Force distorts the evidence throughout the report. The microscope shows decreased cognitive performance. Yet, the big picture reveals that college attendance is higher than ever and women outnumber men. The microscope focuses on the influence of beauty on thinness but ignores the influence of class values and health on thinness. Remember Gloria "You can never be too rich or too thin" Vanderbilt?
The Task Force places most of the responsibility for solving the problem with the government, through schools, legislation and research money. When mentioned, parents are portrayed as either ignorant dupes or as promoters of a sexualised message. Mothers are criticised for "fat talk" and fathers appear lecherous. Despite the emphasis on modesty and virtues other than attractiveness in traditional Western faiths, religion is only briefly mentioned and more attention is paid to eastern meditative practices than traditional Christianity.
Some headlines have proclaimed that the report calls for a removal of sexualised images of girls. In fact, the Task Force's recommendations are quite tepid. Although a minuscule proportion of advertisements involve sexualised image of children, the Task Force only suggests that the government "reduce" the use of sexualised images of girls. The Task Force recommendations are silent about limiting the use of eroticised adult female images or pornography. The Task Force fails to heed their previous evidence that girls are sexualised by modelling themselves after the images of adult women. The Pussycat fashion dolls may have a new life after this report.
The APA Task Force calls for a safe surrender and no meaningful changes in our current climate of sexualisation, illustrated by their emphasis on comprehensive sex education. Sex education is a harm-reduction strategy which is not intended to combat or support resistance to sexualisation any more than needle exchange programs fosters overcoming addiction. Meanwhile, the APA has declared a jihad against abstinence-only programs. Unlike cucumber and condom programs, the abstinence-only approach may actually encourage girls and boys to respect themselves, their sexuality, marriage and children.
The APA Task Force knows the problem but not the solution. For the Task Force, strengthening families and returning to traditional values is not a consideration. The Pussycat Dolls can curl up by their milk and sleep well tonight. The APA is no threat to Doll Power.
Theron Bowers MD is a psychiatrist Deep in the Heart of Texas and may be contacted at tcbowers@sbcglobal.net.
Written by Theron Bowers
A widely publicised report on the sexualisation of girls belabours the obvious and fails to make effective recommendations. Why?
First, Madonna, then Britney, today's queens of pop eroticism are the Pussycat Dolls. The former burlesque dance troupe turned singers are everywhere posing in lingerie and chirping, "Doncha". Last spring the toy company Hasbro even announced a plan for a Pussycat fashion doll. According to the New York Times, the toy line was "intended for children age 6-9" and aimed "to mimic the act’s playfully risqué style". Other sexy dolls have been hits -- the Spice Girls dolls generated 150 million. The Bratz dolls, mini-skirted valley girls, are popular and have a Saturday morning cartoon show. So the Hasbro deal didn’t raise any eyebrows. The business section of the Times reported on the story no differently than any other commercial deal. Readers were probably left wondering, what’s next, pole-dancing Barbie?
Fortunately, parents responded quickly to the prospect of their 6-year-old daughters mimicking the Pussycat Dolls. Less than a month later, Hasbro dropped its plans. Unfortunately, moms and dads had slowed the march against childhood for only a moment.
The American Psychological Association (APA) has also noticed these assaults on girlhood. Last month, it released a report from its Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Like many professional organisations, the APA is a subsidiary of the progressive movement. A few years ago the organisation published a study which suggested that child sexual abuse wasn’t very harmful. Lately, the APA has taken up the battle against American Indian mascots, abstinence education and teaching intelligent design.
The APA claims that the task force was begun in response to "public concern". The concern is hardly new. More than 25 years ago, the starlet Brooke Shields became a 15-year-old teenage sex kitten in provocative Calvin Klein ads for jeans. In 1999, after the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, we were introduced to the Felini-esque world of child beauty pageants with six-year-old girls coquettishly batting their eyelashes and prancing around in swim suits.
The APA's report spins a tale of a monistical cultural web involving the media, families and peers which harass and sexualise young female victims. In a Stockholm Syndrome twist, the girls adopt the men’s sexual image of women. The story ends with women suffering from impaired cognitive functioning, body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, physical health problems and exploitation.
The Task Force has an easy time proving the obvious. The media frequently presents women as sexual objects. Unfortunately, the title of the report states, "Girls." Most of the sexualised images are of women. The authors of the report state that girls model themselves after women, hence the images are relevant.
Their justification is acceptable. Girls grow up with bed-hopping shows like Friends and Sex and the City. Former Disney Wonderkid, now trampy boozer, Linsay Lohan has praised Sex and the City stating that the show ''changed everything for me, because those girls would just sleep with so many people!''
However, the Task Force has a tougher problem demonstrating harm. Most researchers work at universities where there is a shortage of 12-year-old girls. The majority of the studies involve college women. While the old lemons and lemonade approach may work for some problems, good research isn’t so flexible. The Task Force tries to finesse the lack of relevant subjects by reasoning that "what young women believe about themselves and how they feel at the present moment were shaped by how they were treated and what they were exposed to when they were girls." Excuse changing the metaphor, but this lemon is hard swallow. People’s beliefs and feelings are also changed by what they experienced one hour ago. Anyone who has been to college knows how easily some young people can change after a few weeks.
None the less, the Task Force arrives at some interesting conclusions about the consequences of sexualisation. The attention grabber in several stories has been the swim suit versus the sweater experiment. The authors described an experiment with college students. Students were asked to try on and evaluate either a sweater or a swim suit. While waiting in a dressing room, they were asked to complete a math test. The women who wore the sweater did significantly better on the math test than women in the swim suites. The report notes similar results among minority women.
The writer concludes that thinking about the body and comparing it to sexualised ideas disrupted "mental capacity" (although it appears that performance was disrupted rather than capacity). The Task Force gushes over this series of studies: "The implications are stunning and suggest that sexualisation may contribute to girls dropping out of higher level mathematics in high school."
As for mental illness, the Task Force argues that cultural beauty ideas lead to eating disorders. However, the studies cited noted that only when the beauty idea emphasises thinness is there an association with anorexia.
Looking at the culture through the microscopic lens of science, the Task Force distorts the evidence throughout the report. The microscope shows decreased cognitive performance. Yet, the big picture reveals that college attendance is higher than ever and women outnumber men. The microscope focuses on the influence of beauty on thinness but ignores the influence of class values and health on thinness. Remember Gloria "You can never be too rich or too thin" Vanderbilt?
The Task Force places most of the responsibility for solving the problem with the government, through schools, legislation and research money. When mentioned, parents are portrayed as either ignorant dupes or as promoters of a sexualised message. Mothers are criticised for "fat talk" and fathers appear lecherous. Despite the emphasis on modesty and virtues other than attractiveness in traditional Western faiths, religion is only briefly mentioned and more attention is paid to eastern meditative practices than traditional Christianity.
Some headlines have proclaimed that the report calls for a removal of sexualised images of girls. In fact, the Task Force's recommendations are quite tepid. Although a minuscule proportion of advertisements involve sexualised image of children, the Task Force only suggests that the government "reduce" the use of sexualised images of girls. The Task Force recommendations are silent about limiting the use of eroticised adult female images or pornography. The Task Force fails to heed their previous evidence that girls are sexualised by modelling themselves after the images of adult women. The Pussycat fashion dolls may have a new life after this report.
The APA Task Force calls for a safe surrender and no meaningful changes in our current climate of sexualisation, illustrated by their emphasis on comprehensive sex education. Sex education is a harm-reduction strategy which is not intended to combat or support resistance to sexualisation any more than needle exchange programs fosters overcoming addiction. Meanwhile, the APA has declared a jihad against abstinence-only programs. Unlike cucumber and condom programs, the abstinence-only approach may actually encourage girls and boys to respect themselves, their sexuality, marriage and children.
The APA Task Force knows the problem but not the solution. For the Task Force, strengthening families and returning to traditional values is not a consideration. The Pussycat Dolls can curl up by their milk and sleep well tonight. The APA is no threat to Doll Power.
Theron Bowers MD is a psychiatrist Deep in the Heart of Texas and may be contacted at tcbowers@sbcglobal.net.
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