Angry in the Great White North

From the Globe and Mail:

For all the differences between the sexes, here's one that might stir up debate in the teacher's lounge: Boys learn more from men and girls learn more from women.

That's the upshot of a provocative study by Thomas Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College and visiting scholar at Stanford University. His study was to appear Monday in Education Next, a quarterly journal published by the Hoover Institution.

Vetted and approved by peer reviewers, Dr. Dee's research faces a fight for acceptance. Some leading education advocates dispute his conclusions and the way in which he reached them.

Dispute the conclusions? I bet.

Dr. 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, Dr. Dee said.

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

Dr. 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.

That last point is the most interesting. It says that we need both men and women teachers.

That's a good thing, right?

Wrong.

Right now 80% of teachers in American public schools are women. I wouldn't be surprised if the same holds true in Canada. That means to reach parity in gender, we would have to implement an affirmative action plan...in favour of male teachers.

Affirmative action for men? What next? Eliminating the Status of Women Canada? Unthinkable!

In any case, we can ignore the study. The statistical evaluation of 25,000 students will fall as a house of cards in the face of anecdotes:

“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.

Ms. Greenberger said she found Dr. Dee's conclusions to be questionable and inconsistent. More broadly, she said, boys and girls benefit by having male and female teachers as role models.

“I don't think there are many parents or students, looking back over their educational careers, who haven't been inspired by a teacher of the opposite sex,” she said.

Well, if she thinks that most students will be able to remembers a teacher of the opposite sex that they found effective, then that's all we need to leave well enough alone.

Seriously, though, you know what they'll say. The problem is not that there aren't enough male teachers. The problem is with male students. They should be able to learn just fine from female teachers. If they can't, then we need to re-wire them. Obviously we need to start eliminating gender differences earlier. Gloria Steinem said, "We need to raise boys like we raise girls", and that attitude has shaped public education for nearly twenty years:

The girl-crisis came first and a single professor at Harvard University is the person most responsible for promulgating it. In 1989, Carol Gilligan, a professor at the Harvard School of Education and a pioneer in the field of women’s psychology, announced her finding that the nation’s adolescent girls were in crisis. In her words, "As the river of a girl’s life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing." Gilligan believes girls are silenced –"they lose their voice" as they enter adolescence in our male-centered society. Her distressing portrait of endangered girls had no basis in reality—as I shall show. But it fascinated an uncritical media who helped gain for it a widespread acceptance.

Maybe we can start with the truth for a change. It would be refreshing. And appropriate too, since truth has to be at the core of education anyway.