Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Rteacher]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14546994/?GT1=8404

Basically, a peer-reviewed study (by Thomas Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College and visiting scholar at Stanford University ...) indicates that boys learn more from men teachers, and girls learn more from women teachers. Unfortunately for boys, 80% of teachers in U.S. schools are women - and it would seem that many (feminist types?) favor girls...

Not surprisingly, women/feminist leaders challenge the findings, questioning the validity of the study...

[Rteacher]

For those too lazy to click on the link and actually read the whole article, I'll briefly excerpt some of the findings:

Dee�s study is based on a nationally representative survey of nearly 25,000 eighth-graders that was conducted by the Education Department in 1988. Though dated, the survey is the most comprehensive look at students in middle school, when gender gaps emerge, Dee said.

He examined test scores as well as self-reported perceptions by teachers and students.

Dee found that having a female teacher instead of a male teacher raised the achievement of girls and lowered that of boys in science, social studies and English.

Looked at the other way, when a man led the class, boys did better and girls did worse.

The study found switching up teachers actually could narrow achievement gaps between boys and girls, but one gender would gain at the expense of the other.

Dee also contends that gender influences attitudes.

For example, with a female teacher, boys were more likely to be seen as disruptive. Girls were less likely to be considered inattentive or disorderly.

In a class taught by a man, girls were more likely to say the subject was not useful for their future. They were less likely to look forward to the class or to ask questions.

Dee said he isolated a teacher�s gender as an influence by accounting for several other factors that could affect student performance. But his study is sure to be scrutinized.

�The data, as he presents them, are far from convincing,� said Marcia Greenberger, co-president of the National Women�s Law Center, which works to advance the progress of women...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14546994/?GT1=8404

[Yu_Bum_suk]

This article presenst no data whatsoever, so there's no way for the reader to analyse them. It focuses only on 13-14-year-olds and only at science, social studies and English (presumably not ESL). This is an age when girls are generally a little more developed mentally than boys. It's also worth noting that this study was probably done at mixed, not segregated, schools.

Some of the best teachers I ever had were women and some of the most useless men, and I don't see why competency, not sex, should be the concern. At any rate, I'm sure that if 80% of American school teachers were men this study would help lead to millions of dollars in grants to get more women teachers.

[Woland]

I'm not surprised to read this, but YBS is right that there's got to be more to it.

I have read in the past the argument with young children that boys have a narrower hearing rainge than girls and that often their female teachers' voices can go outside their range at times. The result is that boys don't hear instruction and tend to act up to boot. In a sense, it's not gender itself that makes the difference, but other associated factors. So, this is the no surprise part. Gender probably has some effect.

The bad news is that many people may read that article and think it has a large effect or is a sole cause. Statistics and scientific data get reported so badly to a largely innumerate public. YBS has correctly pointed to a number of other factors that we should also expect to have an effect. The real questions are, what are the effects (and it would be easy to calculate and report effect sizes) of each and what are the interactions among influences. But that would be too complicated for most people. *Sigh*

My bet is gender effects get moderated and/or mediated when other factors are considered.

[Ya-ta Boy]

I'm dubious, too.

[Rteacher]

I've heard several disturbing accounts of how radical feminist "women" blatently discriminate and propagandize against boys in the classroom. (Unfortunately, I'm too tired to try to find them right now...) But, I can cut and paste this review of a book on the same general topic that made some ripples a few years back:

And now, from dissident feminist gadfly Christina Hoff Sommers, comes the provocatively titled new book "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men" (Simon & Schuster), both an addition and a challenge to the onslaught of boys-are-in-trouble literature.

The mother of two sons, Sommers makes a powerful case for treating boys with more concern and compassion, while calling for a moratorium on the depiction of girls (and boys) as psychologically crippled victims of an oppressive society. Regrettably, she doesn't base her plea for boys on the principle of individuality but often advances an overly simplistic view of sexual difference.

As expected, Sommers ably and convincingly rebuts the claims of a "girl crisis," following up on her debunking of feminist "Ms.-information" in the 1994 book "Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women." She cites a host of data -- academic sources, as well as the U.S. Department of Education -- that supports her claim that "far from being shy and demoralized, today's girls outshine boys."

Girls not only get better grades but have higher aspirations, says Sommers. She points out that in recent years, girls have outnumbered boys in advanced-placement programs, in all extracurricular activities except sports, and even in most high-level math and science courses.

More male students are "disengaged" from school, says the author, and they are pessimistic about their prospects. While boys, on average, maintain an edge on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), this is largely due to the fact that more girls from disadvantaged backgrounds take the SATs, because more of them go to college. (Overall, 55 percent of bachelor's degrees awarded in 1996 -- and 64 percent for African-Americans -- went to women.) On standardized tests taken by all schoolchildren, girls are narrowing the gender gap in math and science while boys continue to lag behind, by a much wider margin, in reading and writing.

Have girls simply benefited from actions taken to remedy the disadvantages decried by feminists in the last decade? Sommers argues that at the time the save-the-girls crusade began, girls weren't really in need of saving. By 1990, women were already earning 53 percent of college degrees, and the gender gap favoring girls on reading and writing tests was larger than the one favoring boys on math and science tests. Nor was there any real evidence that girls' self-confidence or psychological health were uniquely at risk.

And even as efforts to empower girls have undoubtedly helped them get closer to parity in some areas -- math, science, computers and athletics -- and get further ahead in others, boys' problems, says Sommers, remain virtually "invisible" to educators who remain wedded to the notion that young males are a privileged group. She describes a 1997 education conference that featured reports on several surveys showing girls to be doing better on most measures of academic and social success. These revelations, presented "somewhat apologetically," says Sommers, had zero effect on the tenor of the conference: "The allegedly tragic fate of girls in 'our sexist society' remained the dominant motif."

But in depicting boys as a "gender at risk," Sommers tends to gloss over crucial socioeconomic differences. Middle-class boys are generally doing as well as their sisters; it is among working-class and poor children that boys today are more likely to founder and girls to pursue more ambitious goals. And all too many children of both sexes are robbed of a quality education: Girls may be ahead in language skills, but their average reading and writing scores in 11th grade still fall short of real proficiency.

Nonetheless, it would be hard to dispute that Sommers is on to a serious problem. A mostly male underclass left in the dust by more upwardly mobile women is hardly something to celebrate. And the evidence of boys' underperformance in some key areas is strong enough to warrant targeted intervention (which, according to Sommers, has worked well in England). It's hard to see how any fair-minded person could disagree.

It is not difficult, however, to find controversy in the second part of Sommers' indictment, in which she claims that boys are being singled out for inappropriate special education in accordance with a radical feminist agenda. "The War Against Boys" describes a reign of terror created by "girl partisans" who see boys as actual or potential sexist evildoers, a climate in which "boys live under a cloud of censure, in a permanent state of culpability." Mildly ribald jokes or innocuous horseplay can lead to charges of harassment and harsh penalties; schoolchildren are herded into consciousness-raising sessions heavy on exaggerated tales of the horrors males inflict on females.

Sommers maintains that sexual misconduct should be treated no differently from the larger problems of bullying and violence in which both boys and girls can be victims and perpetrators, and that bad behavior should be seen as a matter of discipline and ethics, not gender politics...


Sommers is especially alarmed by "increasingly aggressive efforts to feminize boys" under the guise of helping them -- led by feminists like Carol Gilligan, who earlier spearheaded the crusade on behalf of oppressed and silenced girls, and by their male supporters such as "Real Boys" author Pollack. In her view, these would-be saviors are just as bad as the outright boy-bashers: They want to "rescue" boys from conventional masculinity and make them "less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more nurturing -- more, in short, like girls." And to achieve their utopia of androgyny, they are willing to pathologize normal boyhood and warp the true nature of boys.

As it happens, I heartily agree with Sommers that emotional expressiveness is not always a good thing and that "stoicism and reserve may well be traits to be encouraged, not vices or psychological weaknesses to be overcome." (Having been accused on occasion of being emotionally repressed, I was especially cheered by her account of research indicating that repression may be healthier than wallowing in emotion.)

And I certainly agree that schools should not be in the business of getting students, male or female, "in touch with their feelings," especially through intrusive and psychologically manipulative methods requiring children to describe why they feel bad about themselves or why they fight with their parents. Whether this is a gender issue is a different matter; Sommers produces no real evidence that such assignments are more injurious or alienating to boys than to girls.

Gender reformers like Gilligan and Pollack are wrong, of course, to depict the American "boy next door" as a near basket case, tragically disconnected from his feelings, emotionally isolated, enslaved by the rigid codes of manhood and only a few degrees removed from the Columbine killers. Yet, while Sommers criticizes this reductive view, she also seems to be agree that "emotional disengagement" and "reluctance to engage in social interactions" are indeed typical of boys. However, she regards these traits as biologically "hard-wired" and therefore in no need of fixing.

In fact, I suspect that just as Gilligan and Pollack overestimate the rigidity of cultural stereotypes of masculinity, at least in middle-class families, Sommers overestimates the rigidity of biological distinctions. Both sides underestimate the social and emotional skills of boys, even if these skills tend to manifest themselves somewhat differently than those of girls.

Sommers also ignores the fact that in some segments of American society, boys still do get a lot of grief if they stray from conventional masculinity. I suspect that the tyranny of the jock culture is still far more prevalent in our schools, and more damaging to boys' learning, than the tyranny of teacher-enforced androgyny. I really don't see why Pollack should be ridiculed for hoping to see a time when boys can "safely stay in the 'doll corner' as long as they wish, without being taunted" -- even if far more girls than boys will choose to drift into that corner.

To be fair, Sommers is hardly a champion of unbridled machismo. She believes that a proper education should temper masculine aggressiveness with gentleness and civility; she even offers some tantalizing evidence that in a single-sex school with male teachers, many boys feel liberated to pursue interests in non-stereotypic activities such as art...

Should a proper education be tailored to the supposedly distinct qualities of boys and girls? There is no doubt that many single-sex schools and classes, some of which are described in "The War Against Boys," serve children very well. But these are carefully designed educational programs in which students get a great deal of focused attention. They would probably work even if they were coed -- though, undoubtedly, there are some children who learn better without being distracted by the opposite sex.

In the end, Sommers herself seems to conclude that boys and girls really need the same things out of their schooling: firm moral rules, structured and guided learning, healthy competition combined with teamwork. Maybe, as she suggests, boys need these things more. Is that really a point worth arguing?

Sommers is right about many things -- above all, the fact that boys need attention and encouragement at least as much as girls do. It will be too bad if her tendency toward retro-sounding rhetoric about the perils of "feminizing" boys alienates many educators who need to hear her arguments the most.
http://archive.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/06/21/sommers/print.html

[happeningthang]

Could be interesting, I hope this guys got something more than controversy and publicity. Here's a link to the journal, http://www.educationnext.org/ , they haven't got the study up yet.

Just on a personal anecdotal sense, I was a boy terror for both female and male teachers in primary school. One male maths teacher was such a *beep*, I would just leave his class.

In high school I did better with male teachers than female. No evident reasons that I can see, their classes conincided with things I was interested in.

[EFLtrainer]

This is another "Doh!" research project. This has been known for freaking ever. I mean DECADES.

[tomato]

In Germany, where the majority of elementary teachers are men, boys outperform girls in reading achievement.

Preston, R. C. 1962. Reading achievement of German and American children. School and Society 90: 350-354.

In the United States, boys' reading achievement was poorer than that of girls under female teachers, but boys equaled girls' achievement with auto-instructional methods.

McNeil, J. D. 1964. Programmed instruction versus usual classroom procedures--teaching boys to read. American Educational Research Journal 1: 113-119.