Bumper sticker for a new century: “Well-behaved girls please their teachers”

This study has been getting a lot of attention this week. Here’s Christina Hoff Sommers in the Times:

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.

The commentary that I’ve read has focused entirely on how this means that boys are now academically disadvantaged compared to girls. I don’t doubt that the phenomenon the study describes is bad for boys, but I think it’s every bit as bad for girls, and maybe worse. The “classroom behavior” “skills” that the study identifies—“attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization,” all based on teacher reports—sound a lot like how a school would describe kids who do as they’re told, always pay attention, are never difficult, comply with all “expectations,” and don’t draw attention to themselves in way that makes trouble. (Call me a cynic, but I can’t help but think that “learning independence” means something closer to “don’t bother the teacher” than to “think independently.”)

If school rewards girls because they are more docile and compliant with the expectations of authority figures, that’s hardly good news for girls. For one thing, those are exactly the traits we shouldn’t want to develop in the people who will one day be deciding our elections. And even if we just look narrowly at the kids’ future employment: are those really the traits that will enable those girls to someday succeed on an equal basis with those “poorly behaved” boys? Or would being assertive and strong-willed potentially come in handy? (What happened to that old bumper sticker, “Well-behaved women never make history”?)

That this study is somehow good news for girls is a conclusion you could reach only if you think of education entirely in terms of maximizing grades, or entirely in terms of producing the ideal Walmart cashier.

Sommers concludes that “fairness today requires us to address the serious educational deficits of boys and young men.” Ugh, I can’t help but fear where that’s going: the solution is to make sure that schools train boys to be much more docile and compliant. Instead, how about we re-examine our “expectations” and our educational goals, and start encouraging traits that will enable all kids to become assertive and independent-minded members of a democratic society?

Related post here.
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Teachers and gender in the popular imagination

In her post yesterday about teachers and sexiness, NorthTOmom suggests that readers “Google ‘sexy teacher’ and see what comes up.” This got me thinking about my post about the “cool teacher.” So I did an experiment: first I did a Google image search for “sexy teacher.” (Suggestion: Do not do this at work.) The results were overwhelmingly female. Here was the top result:

Then I did a search for “cool teacher.” The results were much more male, and here was the top result:

Maybe that’s nothing more than a reflection of the gendered connotations our society gives to the words “cool” and “sexy.” But I also stumbled across this video of the “Top Ten Movie Teachers.” In reality, about three-quarters of public school teachers are female. Quite the opposite for teachers in popular movies, apparently:





What is going on in that warped collective mind of ours? And how does it affect the school experience?
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O Captain, My Captain

Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society

Everyone has a story about the cool teacher: the refreshingly unconventional one, the memorably irreverent one, the one who broke the rules, the iconoclast.

It recently occurred to me that, way more often than not, the teacher in those stories is male. I don’t think I’m imagining that, though you might convince me otherwise. Two counterexamples that come to mind are both from literature: Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Charles Baxter’s short story “Gryphon.” But the portrayal of the female teachers in those works is considerably darker than that of the typical “cool teacher”; in the former she’s revealed to be a fascist, and in the latter she’s insane.

Hypothesis: women do not have the same societal permission to be unconventional and irreverent in the workplace, and have to worry much more about being called unprofessional. I’ve heard women in academia, for example, say that they have to worry more about projecting an air of authority in the classroom, or about being “tough” enough that they don’t lose the students’ respect. I think it is much easier, for example, for a male professor to allow students to call him by his first name than it is for a female professor.

Is there truth to that hypothesis? If so, what effect does it have on K-12 schools, which are staffed predominantly by women?
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If only these boys could be more like girls

A friend recently told me about her son, who graduated from our local high school a year or two ago. He had struggled throughout his school experience. He didn’t apply to college, but his mother hopes that he might eventually enroll in a vocational or technical program and learn a trade that he might enjoy. His school experience was so negative, though, that he’s reluctant to sign up for any more of it.

A few days later, another friend told me how concerned she was about her grandson, a high schooler here. He, too, had always struggled with school, even though he was a smart kid. He had had enough behavioral problems that he had been medicated for a large part of his childhood. His family finally decided that the medication was making him miserable – it was “killing him,” his grandmother said – and insisted that he be taken off it. Now he was trying to adjust to high school. He had found a subject that he liked – Chemistry – and she hoped that he might finally get some enjoyment from school. When she talked about the behavior problems he had experienced, we joked that there was a scientific name for it: it’s called “being a boy.”

I think of what it must be like to be a boy at my kids’ school. Of the sixteen classroom teachers at the school, one is male. The remaining fifteen are women, as are the principal, the office staff, the guidance counselor, the nurse, the gym teacher, the music teacher, the art teachers, the lunchroom staff, and the recess attendants. One of the special ed classrooms has a male teacher, and there is a male custodian that the kids seem to like.

I’m certainly not suggesting that you need to be male to teach boys, or that men are better teachers than women. Many of the school’s teachers are great at what they do, and the kids – both boys and girls – respond well to them. But kids are very aware of gender, and the virtual absence of men at the school must have an effect on them. It doesn’t help that the school’s administration has decided to ratchet up its emphasis on behavior and discipline. To any boy who has trouble meeting “expectations,” school must seem like the place where you go to have women lecture and scold you about your behavior and tell you to sit still and be quiet. What does that do to a kid’s self-concept? What does it do to his attitude toward women?

(And what does this atmosphere do to the girls’ conceptions of gender? The qualities most rewarded by the school – docility, obedience, quietness – are the very qualities that have served girls in particular so poorly. The “problem kids” are punished for not learning those qualities, and the “well-behaved” kids are punished by learning them.)

Shouldn’t the school at least reflect on this gender disparity, even if it can’t change it? If the school’s “expectations” are hurting, rather than helping, a significant number of kids, shouldn’t they be reexamined? Is it possible that the absence of male staff has an effect on how the school conceives of what is age-appropriate behavior? Does a group of women reach the same conclusions about what’s “appropriate” behavior as a group of men would?

Boys need role models – not just to show them what good behavior is, but to show them how good behavior can be consistent with masculinity. Who wouldn’t trade a thousand lectures on bullying for one instance of a respected male teacher treating a socially marginal kid as one of the guys, or de-escalating a conflict without losing face, or challenging a racial or homophobic slur? Not every male teacher could do that effectively; but even the best female teacher cannot model compassionate, kind, intelligent masculinity.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy for a boy to be kind, or book-smart, or respectful of women, or tolerant toward people who are different, and still be accepted by his male peers. Boys need some examples to see how it can be done. Instead, at our school, they get lectures and behavior prizes and law-enforcement-style disciplinary practices. None of it addresses their need. If they have to choose between being good and being boys, I know what they’ll choose – even if it means deciding that they’re not cut out for school.
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