Female Teachers Are Sexist

One of the more interesting facets of political correctness is the number of contortions the politically correct must go through to avoid stating the obvious. The latest example involves a study which dances around the question of why girls do better than boys in school, but then do worse than boys on standardized (objective) tests and once they leave the school environment. The obvious answer from their study is that female teachers are sexist, but saying so is taboo.

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?