Mars and Venus in the Classroom--WaPo

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/17/AR2006051701778.html?referrer=email

Mars and Venus in the Classroom

By Richard Morin
Thursday, May 18, 2006; Page A02

First the good news: One year with a male English teacher would eliminate nearly a third of the gender gap in reading performance among 13-year-olds.

Now the bad: Having a male teacher improves the performance of boys while harming girls' reading skills. On the other hand, a year with a female teacher would close the gender gap in science achievement among 13-year-old girls by half and eliminate the smaller achievement gap in mathematics, says economist Thomas S. Dee of Swarthmore College, who examined data collected from more than 20,000 eighth-graders beginning in 1988.

In kindergarten, boys and girls do equally as well on tests of reading readiness, general knowledge and math. By third grade, boys have slightly higher math scores and slightly lower reading scores -- gaps that widen as the children grow older.

The gender gaps for children age 9 to 13 approximately double in science and reading. And by the time they're 17, "the underperformance of . . . boys in reading is equivalent to 1.5 years of schooling, and though men continue to be over-represented in college level science and engineering, girls are now more likely to go to college and persist in earning a degree," Dee said in a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dee found that assigning boys to male teachers and girls to female instructors "significantly improves the achievement of both girls and boys as well as teacher perceptions of student performance and student engagement with the teacher's subject." That's particularly bad news for boys, because more than eight in 10 sixth- and eighth-grade reading and English teachers are women, he reported.

"The fact that most middle school teachers of math, science, and history are also female may raise girls' achievement. In short, the current gender imbalance in middle school staffing may be reducing the gender gap in science by helping girls but exacerbating the gender gap in reading by handicapping boys," according to a summary of his study in the latest NBER Digest

[Kailassa]

1. Whether or not I did well in a subject at school

depended on whow much the teacher loved their subject and how much they repected their students.
Whether they were male or female never seemed relevant.

So these statistics leave me puzzled. I think we should just ignore them and work on training, support and environment to enable all teachers to teach better.

[kennetha]

2. Don't ignore the stats.

You are suggesting precisely the wrong thing and are demonstrating confirmation bias. Since you already are inclined to believe that the gender of the teacher doesn't make a difference, you look for evidence to confirm what you already believe and ignore or dismiss evidence that contradicts what you believe.

But on what basis really do you believe what you believe? One case! Your own! From that one case you generalize and dismiss as "puzzling" this research.

The gender gap between boys and girls is real and widespread -- you find it all over the industrialized world, in fact. I think the thing that gets in the way of people acknowleding that boys have a problem, that's it's an urgent problem, and that we need to take special steps to address it, is the rise of a kind of feminism that refuses to believe that boys and men could possibly be getting the short end of the gender stick.

[AngryAmish]

3. Lots of folks around here say it is not a problem

There is always saying "boo-hoo for the overpriviledged boys". Just wait.

[Kailassa]

4. I'm not disputing the gender gap.

However I believe there are many advantages in coeducational education. And co-ed classes mean about half the kids being taught by teachers of the opposite sex unless you have 2 teachers per class.

As things are at the moment, most teachers feel quite unprepared to teach when they begin teaching, and have to do most of their learning by experience. Then there is a problem that few teachers feel they have the support they need from the school and "the system."

My contention is that there is so much room for improvement in teaching that addressing the issues involved in education would benefit both boys and girls more than single sex classes with a same sex teacher would.

[lumberjack_jeff]

5. All we can do is recognize problems and try to fix them.

I have three sons, 16, 13 and 7.

In second grade both of the older boys read at or above their grade level and were placed in high-cap programs. The eldest had a male teacher in 6th grade, the middle had a male teacher in 5th grade, the rest were female. Since reaching middle-school, both boys have had exclusively female english and history teachers. I think that they've had two or three male teachers in academic subjects - total.

The oldest entered HS in honors english. In his 3rd quarter sophomore report card, he's now failing half of his academic classes including core english. The 13 year old is doing about as poorly. Very little has changed in their lives since the second grade - same parents, same town.

They are smart kids - at least as smart as their parents (mom was 4th in her graduating class, and I was at least able to maintain a b+ average) so I don't know why they're doing so poorly, but it's reasonable to observe that almost all of their academic teachers have been women, and their female peers do much better.

Comparing my own school experience to theirs, the OP rings true. Whatever the problem is, it's robbed them of their opportunity to go to college.

[Kailassa]

7. I'm speaking from an Australian perspective,

and things could be different here to in America.

Here we have enormous variation in the quality of teachers in the one school, so much so that getting my kids into a class with a teacher who has really been prepared to "go the extra mile" and shown a real caring for the kids has been the most important issue. My son did best with female teachers because, frankly, the male teachers he had were not good. I won't go into what they did, but I promise you that you'd have not wanted then to teach your sons either.

I'm not knocking male teachers, the teachers who inspired me and taught me well were all male, it's just that you get different people in different schools.

What I'm really wondering, and wondering how to ask without getting flamed, is, are there bigger gender differences between the sexes in American society than they are in Australia? I get the impression that there is a lot of pressure on girls in republican circles to be sweet and childish, appealing, smiley and utterly clueless. If a teacher like that is in a class and the girls have been brought up that way too, then they will be able to relate to her and the boys will not. Don't forget that statistics are just an average, and a bunch of cases like this could be skewing the averages.

I'm sorry to hear about your sons' problems with school. It sounds as though they have been badly let down by their schools. Perhaps you could get a male English tutor for them privately.

Do they read much? If not, persuading them to read more could help too. One advantage of a male English teacher is that he is more likely to know what sort of novels will appeal to teenage boys. I'm a fan of kids being free to read whatever crap appeals to them; too many are put off reading altogether by being forced to study "good" novels that they don't find interesting. Quantity over quality any day. ;-)

And one thing I'll mention just on the very faint off-chance it could be relevant. My daughter read heaps and did well in English until she reached her teens. Then her English results just went down the toilet and, however hard she tried, they got worse and worse until she gave up trying. She went back to college in her mid twenties, and this time saw a counselor, who referred her for testing. The results showed she was dyslexic. I'd assumed I'd be able to pick the symptoms of something like that, but I'm ashamed to admit I hadn't. I'd put it down to her taking up drinking and wagging school, and was only trying to change the behavioural issues.

Anyway, once she realized there was a reason for her difficulties, she determined to beat them. I can't see English ever being easy for her, but she writes heaps now, wants to be an author. So I give her some guidance, teach her grammar, and edit her atrocious spelling.

So don't go thinking that even 16 is too late to change things. You might still find a way to really help even your oldest. I hope so.

[Igel]

6. Cutting to the actual papers.

Plus a few.

Apparently the one that Morin is referring to.
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tdee1/Research/w11660revised.pdf
One thing not made explicit by Morin is that the difference isn't symmetrical in many subjects. A female teacher in science will pull up the girls' achievement level much less than it depresses the boys' achievement if the class is balanced for gender, which results in an overall depression of achievement; but for things like history, the girls' do much better than the boys do worse, resulting in a net gain in (apparently) learning; while for English, the increase/decrease are about the same, so the amount of learning's the same, but the distribution is different.

A Teacher like me: Does Race, Ethnicity, or Gender Matter?
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tdee1/Research/aeap&p05.pdf
Conclusion: yeah, it does more so in terms of teacher expectations of students, and but also a race/ethnicity mismatch hurts lower SES students (and those in the south). But somebody's always going to be hurt: so increase overall training and effectiveness.

Teachers, Race, and Student Achievement in a Randomized Experiment
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tdee1/Research/restat04.pdf
Pretty much same conclusion: in early grades, same-race teachers promote educational achievement. But since classes are mixed race, flipping the race of the teacher would just negatively/positively affect different groups of students.

I must say, I don't think I understand what's going on at all. But I'm not going to say it's not happening. There's enough work driving minority-teacher recruitment and training based precisely on this sort of effect that to deny the probability that it works for sex as well as for race/ethnicity seems self-defeating.

[depakid]

8. Richard Morin- LOL. Think I'd trust that guy's analysis?

He's not all that far from John Stossel.

Par the Post's course. If I brought this article in to a grad school class- everyone would laugh.