Before we delve into this, here’s a quick reminder of how political correctness works. The politically correct separate people by race and gender and then assign goodness/badness based on those groups or genders. If you happen to be in a “good group,” then nothing bad may be said about you. In fact, to say bad things about you would be labeled racist or sexist. And if you happen to be in a bad group, then nothing good can be said about you or that would be labeled racist or sexist as well. Girls are in the good group. Boys are in the bad. Hence, thou shalt not criticize girls or praise boys. If there is a gap where girls do worse than boys, that is the result of bias. But if there is a gap where boys do worse than girls, that's because boys are bad students.
So what am I talking about?
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development just completed a study of 17 countries and they discovered something interesting. For quite some time now, it’s been true in most countries that girls get better grades in school. They graduate in higher numbers, get more degrees, and generally have better grades. Hence, girls appear to be better students. BUT there is this pesky problem that boys routinely beat girls on standardized tests and in the real world of employment. In fact, this study found that if you compare standardize tests to grades, the boys grades are way below what the standardized testing would predict. Up to now, the explanations offered by feminists have been to assume that the grades must be right because girls are good and thus a result which shows girls being better must be right, and they've explained away the standardized test problem as the testing being biased in favor of boys. They also claim that income disparity is the result of sexism.
Well, this study has uncovered a wee bit of a problem with this. According to the study, the gender divide in grades is the result of the teachers judging the girls to be better behaved... not better students. This is purely a subjective measure and the study actually termed this "bias." That's a huge step toward truth. Of course, they did their best not to call this gender bias/sexism, but that's what it is. Instead, they said it was bias toward the well-behaved and against the not well-behaved, but that's nonsense. For one thing, the label of which was well-behaved and which wasn't was subjective and is a tautology, i.e. circular reasoning: teachers favor the well-behaved, who are girls, because we have defined girls as well-behaved. Break that down logically and you will see that "well-behaved" is just another word for "girl" and you get "teachers favor girls."
And this is borne out by the standardized testing because it shows that boys do better than the girls in terms of what they really learn. That means that when the students are tested objectively, i.e. in an arena where the teachers cannot warp the grades, the girls do much more poorly than they do when the teachers are able to warp the grades. Logic tells us this means the teachers are favoring girls unfairly. Basically, women teachers favor female students because they like girls better even though the girls are not better students.
Moreover, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The study found that because of this bias, the girls benefited from better grades which meant better opportunities and the boys were harmed because they were denied the opportunities and they were told to lower their expectations. Thus, the teachers set the boys up by giving them worse opportunities and then held that against them when they graded the boys. This, frankly, calls into question the validity of the entire system.
Think about this in terms of race because that will clarify this. Imagine if black students sat through classes taught by white teachers and they were marked down repeatedly, consistently and across-the-board by those white teachers on the subjective scoring system used by the teachers. But once those black students were allowed to take standardize tests, i.e. tests that do not know if a student is black or white or male or female and which the white teachers cannot grade in a way to favor the white students, the blacks suddenly did much better than the grades they were given and in fact outperformed the higher-graded white kids. How fast do you think everyone would start yelling racism? And don't you think they would be right?
Yet, because of political correctness, women are per se considered incapable of being sexist. Thus, even though the obvious answer to the facts presented above is that female teachers (who make up 84% of teachers) are systematically lowering male grades because they don't like the males as much as the females, no one is talking about that because they don't want to raise the issue of gender discrimination by female teachers. But that is exactly what is going on.
And to be clear, sexism doesn't even need to be intentional to make this happen. As has been shown in any number of contexts, bias can take many forms, including a simple lack of empathy or devaluing of traits that are more common with the other gender/race and overvaluing traits that are more common with your own race. Thus, for example, a creative writing teacher might grade a lousy essay on a subject they sympathize with higher than a brilliant essay on a subject they care little for. That's human nature, and study after study has shown that people do behave this way, even if they don’t think they do. So why do we ignore the obvious effects of bias when a system where 84% of teachers are females uses subjective criteria (like classroom participation) to determine that girls are better than boys even as objective criteria expose those subjective criteria to be wrongly applied?
If you want to improve the education system, the first thing to do, honestly, is to stop avoiding the obvious problems just because it's politically correct to do so. The problem isn’t that boys are somehow incapable of learning as well, it’s that female teachers favor girls. And the way to fix that is either to hire more male teachers and to make sure kids get both, or to separate kids by sex... or start using standardize tests to set grades (hint, hint).
Thoughts?
27 comments:
well it's very late. Historically, I cannot deny that women were assigned the role of home maker, and culturally were not a factor in the workforce. The women's liberation movement was bent on changing this. Rather than get into a historical discussion of the pill and abortion, and how it opened up things for women who wanted to change the "traditional" role of the family, I will say that starting with my generation, there was a real desire on the part of women to have opportunities to have professional careers. So far, that has not resulted in an equal number of women who have broken the so called glass ceiling. So, we have had a cultural push on the part of groups like NOW to prove women can do anything men can do, and, perhaps, set up a kind of unofficial "affirmative action" environment for women. It was ripe for the excesses of the P.C. method. That is, anybody who argued with the push and methodology of the P.C. groups could get booed down and sent to "sensitivity classes." I imagine that teaching is dominated by female teachers since that was long considered a suitable occupation. But I do think that coupled with the P.C. "push" it has resulted in a kind of reverse discrimination against boys who are portrayed as idiots in most t.v. shows.
Personally, I don't are whether a teacher is female or male, as long as they don't inject their built in agenda and bias into their teaching. Fat chance of that happening anytime soon
Jed, I certainly think there is some of that. Education schools in colleges tend to be dominated by trendy leftist thinking, which includes things like "gender" education, which is pretty much anti-male-ism.
But bias doesn't even need to be intentional to be real. Think about it this way. As a male, you would likely be more inclined to view a paper on the merits of football favorably than a female teacher would be. And on the other side of the coin, you would be less inclined to view an article on the pros/cons of various makeup products favorably than might a woman because one interests you and one doesn't. Neither of you is being intentionally biased, but your personality choices (which are tied to gender) lead you to see things differently, which results in different grades. Thus, without meaning too, you are more likely to give the NFL paper a higher grade and a female teacher is more likely to give the makeup article a higher grade.
Now expand this to other ideas like, "gee, he/she acts like I did as a child and she/he does not." And suddenly it becomes very easy to see how even inadvertently, a million tiny decisions can end up creating a wave of bias, which then feeds on itself as reputations form... "oh, he did poorly because he must be a bad student, ergo I will treat him accordingly and assume he is a bad student."
Once that happens, it becomes self-perpetuating.
Logic tells us that teacher bias is the cause when subjective scores don't match objective scores. But no one is willing to consider this because they don't like the answer. This study is the first I've seen which almost breaks that taboo.
Another problem, when a man tries to teach kids below the age of 14 he is often going to have problems being hired because when a man teaches kids below the age of 14 people assume he might be a pedophile.
Because women never have sex with students.
Kit, I think that in the modern world, the smart thing is always to take precautions when being with other people's children by making sure you are never alone with them.
That said, however, I think the number of claims made in that regard is not very high, it's just sensationalized in the media. In other words, that's a tiny risk and it's an easy risk to avoid with open classrooms, by using your judgment in maintaining a professional distance, and by not being alone with them, etc.
To address your second point (your sarcastic point), you are correct that the MSM simply assumes that female teachers don't have sex with kids despite the constant stream of examples to the contrary. This again strikes me as political correctness at play with the MSM once again hiding a problem which doesn't fit the worldview they want to promote -- Catholic priests = bad, Boy Scouts Master = bad (no mention of them being gay allowed), female teachers = good. But again, we're talking about a tiny percentage.
My first impression: Oh, you guys are just jealous...now I will finish reading...
For the curious, the link below contains a link to the PDF of the study.
http://oecdeducationtoday.blogspot.fr/2013/03/grade-expectations.html
Looking at the study, I think the problem is what the authors claim it is, that schools grade students based not only on what they know, but the work they turn in (100+100+0 works out to a D even if the knowledge of the student isn't in doubt) and their behavior.
Even if the teacher is being perfectly fair to everyone, the case could be made that dropping someone a letter grade in a subject not because they haven't mastered the subject, but because they talked too much during lectures isn't a good thing.
I don't have any boys myself, but conventional wisdom is that when they are younger, boys are more rambunctious than girls and that was certainly my experience during the two years I mentored/tutored troubled elementary school kids.
Anthony, I'm not sure about your link. I can't find anything referring to "bias" either on the page or in the PDF. Nor can I find anything apparently related to your comment. Perhaps you posted the wrong URL?
Bev, spoken like a true female chauvinist pig. :-)
On this particular point, personal experience with the school system doesn't help me a lot. I was the smartest kid in my class (and not particularly rambunctious), a fact acknowledged by everyone; most of the others who got grades at or near my level were girls, and the majority of boys were in the average to below-average range. Whether that indicates bias, I can't say. Being a rural district, most males had a greater interest in industrial or agricultural work, which is why so many of them went to vo-tech.
Also, while I think having an overwhelmingly single-sex teaching staff can lead to bias, this can go in both directions. There were one or two women, for example, who all the students "knew" gave better grades to male pupils, because they were young and lonely. These things can be very unpredictable.
Piggybacking T-Rav's comment, grading must've been more objective when I was in grade school, b/c I always got good grades despite always being in detention. I was the most out-of-place kid you ever saw. While the other detention kids were obvious "toughs"--in trouble for fighting and acting out--I was the one in for failing to raise his hand.
If anything, I was an over-eager student. The same traits that kept me in from recess during my elementary days, by the time I was in the upper grades, gained me lots of favor with my teachers.
What is interesting is only a few years ago, experts were opining that girls were being discriminated against in the classroom because teachers would not call on them when they raised their hands to answer questions.
And still our children cannot read, write or do simple math. Maybe the experts should stop trying to find bias at every turn and try and find out WHY our children aren't learning basic skills.
When my brother was in Kindergarten (admittedly a few years ago), my mother was told by his teacher that he was obviously retarded and would never learn anything. It turned out she required 5 year olds to sit still AND listen - and since some of the boys tended to be able to do one OR the other, she had given several boys' parents similar pronouncements of doom. Eventually the principal (male) stopped by the classroom and got these boys together at the back of the room and let them move around AND listen. All of them could then answer the questions she asked after storytime. She retired at the end of the year.
Point is, these expectations aren't necessarily new, but they have, over the last generation of educating educators, become entrenched. "Appropriate behavior" mirrors what girls are generally more capable of. Now, there are plenty of girls who can't sit still or be quiet either, but then you add in the unintended bias, and you get teachers who don't notice the girls' behavior as often or don't consider it as negatively as the boys' sitting next to them... I had a high school classmate who became a teacher and began in 3rd grade. After several years she declared that the entire contingent of boys should be required to be on Ritalin because it was too much trouble to teach them. She admitted that they were "normal", but normal was annoying. (She now teaches older kids and seems to be much better at it.)
(While I think that AD/HD can be over-diagnosed in younger boys because of these same natural differences, I am discovering that it can also be totally ignored as well - I am doing a lot of testing in my practicum and I get told, 'yeah, I couldn't ever concentrate and I got frustrated and couldn't sit still, but they all just told me I was lazy and not trying hard enough'. Somehow teachers seem to miss the non-behavioral signs.)
PS Andrew, can you link to the study? thanks!
Bev, LOL! Yep. That's the problem. :)
Here is the study itself: LINK
And here is the report that lead me to it:
LINK
I should clarify that the study doesn't use the word "bias," the reporter did, but that is the meaning of what the study talks around.
Anthony, I agree completely that it is wrong to knock someone down who has mastered the goals of the class on the basis of some other subject measure of basically how much you liked having them in your class. Unfortunately, what this study has revealed is exactly that -- that students are being graded to a statistically significant degree on factors unrelated to the purpose of education and that it's hurting those students in the process.
The study noted that boys are being knocked down as are kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds. This then snowballs into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And I don't think it requires intentional bias to make this happen. It just requires a lot of little moments where the teacher downgrades/upgrades for subject behavior.
I've personally seen this a lot where teachers favor people whose skills do not merit their grades and they give those people a boost and take down others. And I've seen those same people struggle once they hit college and came upon anonymous grading.
And if this study is correct, and I think it is, then what you have here is a systematic problem based on gender. Since the boys are proving in the anonymous testing that they have the skills, logic tells us that the reason for their poor grades is bias on the part of teachers. That is something that should be addresses -- which is certainly would be if the genders were reversed or they were races instead.
T-Rav, One of the points they are making in the study is that this disparity in grading begins right away and it changes the course of students. Thus, once you are marked as trouble, you will always be marked as trouble and treated accordingly. In return, these students respond by lowering their expectations, which creates a downward cycle.
From my own experience, I've seen both. I've seen teachers who favored boys and I've seen teachers who favored girls -- all the way up through law school. I've also seen teachers who abuse "classroom participation" as a tool to manipulate grades throughout. Moreover, having done some teaching at the law school level (legal writing course), I can tell you that there many opportunities to pick one student over another even without stretching. And that can make a huge difference in their career course because where they rank in law school matters for what kinds of interviews they will even get.
In any event, the evidence here is of bias. If the boys were doing poorly on the tests and failing in the job market, that would show that the teachers are right, but they aren't. They are showing the opposite, which means that the subjective grades are wrong. And since the subjective grades are marked on things unrelated to the goals of education (according to the study), that is a problem.
tryanmax, I don't think the issue is as blatant as that. This issue is more subtle. In other words, this isn't about teachers yanking boys out of class and sending them to detention. This is about systematic bias. In systems of millions of children across countries, that's the only way you're going to get a truly significant result.
And in this case, the kind of bias that can make this change can be subtle. If you get 6 grades a semester (12 a year) for 12 years, that's 144 grades. If each of those is brought down a little, the cumulative effect can be huge.
Think of it this way. Say you are a near perfect student who get 95% on every substantive test. You should be a straight A student at or near the top of your class. But just over half your teachers don't like you because they are biases (knowingly or not). Those teachers take 10% off your score for classroom participation. Suddenly, your overall average is 89% and you're a B student. Suddenly, you are denied access to the college prep course and the A-track courses. Instead of going to Harvard, you can now only get in to the state college. And so on. The course of your life has changed not because you failed, but because a chunk of your teachers were biased.
Further, I would suspect this is actually a bigger deal in the middle than at the top, because someone who aces the tests will be harder to grade down than someone in the middle of the pack. Thus, a B- student who gets a lot of Cs won't notice what is happening to them.
Bev, Everything I've seen says that the schools are actually doing a lot better than people realize when it comes to education. The problems of illiterate kids tend to be isolated.
In terms of what you are talking about with the experts, that is them trying to explain why the boys do better on tests. This has been the question for them for some time:
1. Boys do better on tests.
2. Boys do better in life.
So why don't the grades the girls get match the two outcomes above? This is what the experts have been trying to solve and they've been going at it from the perspective of "how do we make things more fair for the girls." But what this study exposes is that the assumption that the grades are right and the tests/life are wrong is false.
That's why I wrote this article, because this study is the first I've found which has discovered that all this effort spent to figure out why the girls are being cheated is premised on a bad information -- the idea that the grades given to the girls is the accurate measure and everything else is wrong. That's politically correct thinking.
rlaWTX, I think that's exactly right and the two examples you've given are actually things you hear all the time. Schools label boys as retarded or ADHD very early on and this sets them down a course that will affect them the rest of their lives. I've actually known kids who were quite bright but were put into the slow track because they misbehaved at some point early on and they never escaped that track again.
And the reason for this is exactly what you say -- the unintentional bias of a teacher who expects boys to behave the same way girls do because girls have been defined as "good." Thus, when the boys don't act the same way, they get downgraded and pushed aside by the teachers even though they are quite capable (as the anonymous testing proves).
I really do think this is a problem as I've seen it myself throughout my time in school and because, as this study notes, it is causing a statistically significant difference in how boys and girls are being graded. That snowballs into denied opportunities throughout life.
And I think the solutions are to get a lot more male teachers or to separate the students by gender early on and to introduce as much anonymous/objective grading as possible.
Andrew - Here is one possible answer - anecdotal of course, but from what I have observed. Women leave the workforce sometime in their early careers to have children. Many go right back in after "materinity leave", but many do not. They leave permanently or for a number years. Men do not. Companies in response, are more hesitent to spend as much time/money grooming women who may or may not leave the workforce. Men do not.
No one wants to examine the reality of biology...
Bev, I think that's true and that explains the long term difference in incomes. But that doesn't explain the test results -- which is what this study focused on.
This study says:
1. According to the standardized tests, boys do much better than the grades they get in school.
2. Examining schools, we found that the teachers are grading on things unrelated to education, specifically the teacher's assessment of how well the student is "behaved." (i.e. how much they like the student).
3. This is not related to the purpose of education and should not be considered in the grading.
4. But it is considered and the result is that boys are systematically downgraded by teachers as are kids from lower socio-economic groups, while girls and kids from higher socio-economic groups are getting higher scores than they deserve.
5. This happens consistently throughout education.
6. This causes the affected students to change their goals and thereby lower their expectations, which causes the snowball effect.
I've added the point that men do better in the real world as well (excluding black males) just to point out that there is more evidence than just test scores. Also, I'm the one concluding that the likely cause is gender bias as "behavior" in this case is just another way of saying "girl-like" and because we have tendency to favor those most like us and with 84% of teachers being middle to upper-middle class females, it is likely they will prefer middle to upper-class females... which is what the study has found.
P.S. You are right that no one wants to examine biology because that would require admitting that men and women are different and the liberal feminist credo is that all differences are the result of patriarchal oppression.
But all differences ARE the result of patriarchal oppression...right? RIGHT????? {{{uses Mom death-stare}}}
Seriously, there has to be something biological or evolutionary about girls being able to sit still longer and concentrate at an earlier age than boys. It has always been a commonly held "belief" that girls "mature faster" than boys. But that is not really what your article is about. It is about why boys are penalized for "being boys", yet do better on standardized testing.
I don't really remember this kind of problem before "mainstreaming", btw. When I was in school even the boys were expected to sit still and almost always did. Again, beside the point.
Anyway, boys are icky...
Bev, Nice use of the mom death-stare! :)
Girls are supposed to mature faster than boys, at least, that's what I've heard and I have no reason to doubt it. I think the problem is, however, that rather than compensating for this or being more stick about requiring conforming behavior, teachers instead are apparently downgrading for this behavior. That creates the problem.
And frankly, if you have a boy in the system, you might want to consider this if their grades aren't great.
As for mainstreaming, I don't remember this problem either when I was young, nor do I see it at private schools. I think again, this is one of those moments where whoever designed the system (liberal feminists) got it wrong and rather than fix the system they are trying to find other things to blame.
As for being icky, that may be true, but girls have cooties. ;)
Sort of on topic.
While boys are substantially lagging behind girls in college, girls are still under represented in the hard sciences and engineering. This has been presented as a national priority "must change" condition. Even when the Republicans had control of the house prior to the Nasty Pelosi era, they rolled over for the feminists, literally asking them what they wanted and granting it to them. Colleges have been put on notice from their government funding masters, that there WILL be more women graduating in the sciences and fast.
There have been numerous special programs of outside of school science programs open only to girls. There's a program on PBS now called "Sci-girls". After the congressional hearings, the Intel Science Talent Search, which used to be the Westinghouse prize was suddenly dominated by girl entrants.
I know of one woman grad student who told me that she didn't have the qualifications to get into a particular university's graduation engineering program, but was told by the department secretary that if she applied she would be taken, and added that if she had a sister or if her mother wanted to apply, they'd be taken as well.
What I fail to understand is, why aren't men hell of a lot more pissed off about what amounts to baldfaced discrimination? I'm beginning to believe all those conspiracy theories about female hormones in the water supply from the birth control pills.
i am a student and i completely agree girls are also treated better not always openly though
It is rampant in my sons middle school classes. Girls are allowed to talk to each other, but boys are considered disruptive if they do it. Girls get special time with teachers where they have cupcakes and watch TV, but boys don't get the same treatment. Boys are slowly discouraged from school while girls are encouraged. Recently saw a top 10% of the high school picture and it was 12 girls. Small school I know but this is only going to get worse. Thank god my son tests highly and colleges care mostly about SAT scores, but certainly frustrating for him being judged harsher than the girls. This is far different than when I was a kid. I felt girls and boys were treated fairly.
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