FEMALE TEACHERS MARKING DOWN BOYS
by Hilary White
For decades we’ve listened to teachers and ‘academics’ shedding crocodile tears as they bemoan the terrible ‘failure’ of the boys in their classes falling behind girls.
Now a five year University study has shown why.
Those same teachers are just deliberately marking boys down – even when they do better in tests and exams than their female counterparts.
A five-year research project, funded by the Departments of Education and Justice in Northern Ireland, found “systemic flaws” in teaching techniques led to teachers discriminating overtly against male students.
The shocking survey blows the lid on how since the 1970s, when feminist critics complained that the school system favored “male thinking,” grades have been decided not by performance and knowledge, but on a teachers whim.
Feminists condemned intelligence and knowledge as ‘too masculine’. And they argued successfully that pupils should be marked on ‘emotional intelligence’ (a phrase which means nothing, and so is entirely subjective), and social skills (which means being nice).
Facts, dates, rote learning, and maths skills went out of the window and “fair” teaching styles were introduced in which no matter what a pupils test results, what the teacher thought of them held sway.
As a result mainly female teachers have been expressing low views of their boys students and favouring girls.
They discriminate against blacks and hispanics in the US, while in Ireland where the survey found boys from rough areas of Belfast were particularly looked down on, and so marked down.
Dr. Ken Harland and Sam McCready from the University of Ulster said that the problem of apparent boys underachievement at school has been clear for “several decades.”
But they said “it was extremely difficult for the research team to find specific strategies addressing boys’ underachievement.”
“Although teachers who were interviewed as part of this study recognised the predominance of boys with lower academic achievement, they generally did not take this into account in terms of learning styles or teaching approaches,” Dr Harland said.
The Belfast Telegraph quoted one pupil who told the researchers, “Teachers should understand better the way boys think and why they do some things. They’re out of touch.”
The problem of boys’ underachievement in primary and secondary school follows them into their later lives.
Research from 2006 has tracked the decline in male academic performance over the same period as the rise of feminist-dominated ideologies in academia and policymaking.
Radical feminism was first embraced as an actual political policy in the United States.
In the US the ratio of males to females graduating from a four-year college stood at 1.60 in 1960, fell to parity by 1980, and continued its decline until by 2003, there were 135 females for every 100 males who graduated from a four-year college.
Another study found that half of the current gender gap in college attendance can be linked to lower rates of high-school graduation among males, particularly for young black men.
The work of one American researcher may offer clues to the question of why and how.
Professor Christopher Cornwell at the University of Georgia has found that a heavily feminist-driven education paradigm systematically favours girls and disadvantages boys from their first days in school.
Examining student test scores and grades of children in kindergarten through fifth grade, Cornwell found that boys in all racial categories are not being “commensurately graded by their teachers” in any subject “as their test scores would predict.”
The answer, Cornwell found, lies in the way teachers, who are statistically mostly women, evaluate students without reference to objective test scores.
Boys are regularly graded well below their actual academic performance.
The expert discovered that boys are falling significantly behind in grades, “despite performing as least as well as girls on math tests, and significantly better on science tests.”
After fifth grade it’s almost completely up to the teachers personal opinion whether a student passes or fails.
Cromwell says student assessment becomes a matter of “a teacher’s subjective assessment of the student’s performance,” and is further removed from the guidance of objective test results.
Teachers, he says, tend to assess students on non-cognitive, “socio-emotional skills.”
This has had a significant impact on boys’ later achievement because, while objective test scores are important, it is teacher-assigned grades that determine a child’s future with class placement, high school graduation and college admissibility.
It’s entirely to blame for the supposed ‘failure’ of boys, which teachers regularly speak of and bemoan, but never seem to want to do anything about.
Eliminating the factor of “non-cognitive skills…almost eliminates the estimated gender gap in reading grades,” Cornwell found.
He said he found it “surprising” that although boys out-perform girls on math and science test scores, girls out-perform boys on teacher-assigned grades.
In science and general knowledge, as in math skills, the data showed that kindergarten and first grade white boys’ grades “are lower by 0.11 and 0.06 standard deviations, even though their test scores are higher.”
This disparity continues and grows through to the fifth grade, with white boys and girls being graded similarly, “but the disparity between their test performance and teacher assessment grows.”
The disparity between the sexes in school achievement also far outstrips the disparity between ethnicities.
Cornwell notes that “the girl-boy gap in reading grades is over 300 percent larger than the white-black reading gap,” and boy-girl gap is about 40 percent larger than the white-black grade gaps.
“From kindergarten to fifth grade,” he found, “the top half of the test-score distribution” among whites is increasingly populated by boys, “while the grade distribution provides no corresponding evidence that boys are out-performing girls”.
These disparities are “even sharper for black and Hispanic children” with the “misalignment of grades with test scores steadily increases as black and Hispanic students advance in school.”
The study, he said, shows that “teachers’ assessments are not aligned with test-score data, with greater gender disparities in appearing in grading than testing outcomes”. And the “gender disparity” always favours girls.
The American thinker Christina Hoff Sommers wrote that “the idea that schools and society grind girls down has given rise to an array of laws and policies intended to curtail the advantage boys have and to redress the harm done to girls.”
Sommers wrote in The Atlantic,“These are things everyone is presumed to know. But they are not true.”
She notes an incident at New York’s tony Scarsdale High School in which, at a conference on student achievement, a male student presented evidence from the school’s own records showing that far from being pressed down, girls were far outstripping boys.
When the teachers checked the student’s data, “they found little or no difference in the grades of boys and girls in advanced-placement social-studies classes. But in standard classes the girls were doing a lot better.”
The revelations, she said, were not well received. Scarsdale is a school that has thoroughly accepted the received wisdom that that girls are systematically deprived, and this belief has led their gender-equity committee to offer a special senior elective on gender equity that continues to preach the message.
“Why has that belief persisted, enshrined in law, encoded in governmental and school policies, despite overwhelming evidence against it?”
Sommers traces it back to the work of one academic feminist, Carol Gilligan, a pioneer of “gender studies” at Harvard University.
Gilligan’s speculations launched a veritable industry of feminist writers, citing little or no reviewable data, lamenting the plight of girls “drowning or disappearing” in the “sea of Western culture”
“Most of Gilligan’s published research, however,” Sommers points out, “consists of anecdotes based on a small number of interviews.”
Sommers has identified the work of Gilligan and her followers as “politics dressed up as science” and points out that she has never released any of the data supporting her main theses.
Nevertheless, the idea that girls are lagging behind boys continues to lead the discussion at nearly every level of public policy on education, and not only in the U.S.
The global reach of American left-wing feminism has led to similar changes, and similar outcomes, in nearly every Western nation.
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