A STUDY published last week by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University is likely to have some political fallout.
The study, “The Why Chromosome” by Thomas Dee, indicates that girls learn better from female teachers and boys learn better from male teachers. Dee suggests that the disparity may be responsible in part for the lagging test scores of middle school boys and the decline in the number of boys going to college. He points out that the majority of middle school (and elementary) teachers are women.
Dee’s work, which seems tailor-made to provide ammunition to all sorts of conservative causes in education, immediately drew fire from parts of the education establishment and women’s groups. They fear that the study will be used in arguments to attempt to split schools by gender and reduce the number of women teaching. Right now, 80 percent of all public school teachers are women.
To be fair to Dee, he specifically warns against such cavalier use of his findings. He says he hopes that the study will prompt more research into the effects of gender in education and more thought about how to use that knowledge to improve education.
More research is certainly indicated. Dee’s study was based on information that is now 18 years old. In 1988, the U.S. Department of Education took a statistical snapshot of nearly 25,000 eighth-graders. Dee used that information to draw his conclusions.
Much has changed in American education and teacher education in those 18 years and it would be presumptuous to assume that the same study repeated today would produce the same results.
Some thought is also required about the meaning of Dee’s findings.
The one thing his study does not mean is that men are bad teachers for girls or that women are bad teachers for boys. What Dee has attempted to do is evaluate teachers’ relative effectiveness with the boys and the girls in their classes. What he could not do is pin down the ultimate causes of the differences he found.
Those causes must be identified if teachers are to learn how to lessen the effect of gender differences in the classroom.