Teacher Attitudes : Sexism in Classroom--a Purge

Gale Agnew squinted at a group of her students. The girls had seated themselves on one side of a table where they were following directions, looking for writing paper. On the other side, the boys were poking each other with pencils, climbing on chairs and singing.

But Agnew, an Azusa teacher trained in anti-sexist teaching techniques, did not allow herself to label the offenders by sex. Instead she chastised them: “Will the people who are supposed to be writing cut out the singing and the noise?”

A small step for sex equity in the classroom, and a small step for equal opportunity in life. But now, in the third decade of the women’s movement and 15 years after a law known as Title IX banned sex discrimination in most American schools, the fight against sexism in education is refocusing on the small steps--the language, actions and unconscious attitudes of teachers in the classroom.

Rigid Notions in Modern Times

Teachers are continually astounded to find children of the ‘80s entering school with rigid notions of male and female roles, despite the changed attitudes and life styles of their parents. What happens in classrooms from kindergarten on reinforces those ideas, to the detriment of both boys and girls, educators say--with girls clearly suffering the most.

“Females are the only group that starts ahead and ends up behind,” said Myra Sadker, an education researcher in Washington.

On standardized tests, females generally test equal to or higher than boys when they enter elementary school. But girls wind up being outperformed on all sections of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the American College Testing Program (ACT) by the end of high school. In 1986, California females trailed males in the math section of the SAT 456 to 508 and in the verbal section by 418 to 428.

Experimental Program

In an effort to come to grips with the more subtle aspects of sex discrimination, Los Angeles County educators have devised an experimental training program that encourages teachers to recognize their own biases and raise their expectations for female students. So far, about 2,000 teachers, Gale Agnew among them, have taken part in the Gender/Ethnic Expectation and Student Achievement program, developed by the county Office of Education.

The county program and a similar effort in Washington draw on 10 years of research that shows that boys and girls receive different messages from the way teachers group, discipline, speak and behave toward them.

Among the findings are these:

--Boys are eight times as aggressive as girls in calling out answers, and teachers from kindergarten through college react accordingly. Los Angeles teachers responded four to nine times as often to boys, according to a study by the gender/ethnic program. While often tolerating interruptions from boys, teachers tend to tell girls who call out answers, “In this class, we’re supposed to raise our hands.”

--When it comes to discipline, however, it is boys who get the harsher treatment--even for identical misbehavior. In cases where a boy might be sent to the principal’s office, a girl might be told to just sit quietly.

--In college classrooms, professors call on women less, listen to them less and interrupt them more. Overall, those groups of students most likely to gain the teacher’s attention are, in order: white males, minority males, white females and minority females.

--Boys and girls segregate themselves--at tables, in lines and games--more than teachers segregate them. But teachers tend to encourage this separation with admonitions such as, “If you don’t behave, you’ll have to sit with the girls.”

--Teachers expect boys to follow directions and do the work themselves but tend to intercede and finish work for girls, fostering “learned helplessness.” One study cited an example in which a second-grade boy had trouble cutting and pasting paper. His teacher re-explained the task and suggested he start again. For a girl with the similar problem, the teacher picked up the pieces, fixed them and remarked, “Doesn’t that look better?”

Teachers want to help girls and refrain from pushing them, said Delores Grayson, co-developer of the Gender/Ethnic Expectation and Student Achievement program. “What makes it difficult is that it’s rooted in a kind heart,” Grayson said.

Hidden Biases

Few educators consider themselves biased, but studies have found that nearly everyone--even those who consider themselves feminists--harbors biased perceptions and attitudes. There is a growing consensus that these attitudes lead to lower self-esteem, limited ambitions and lower-paying jobs for women.

“Schools can have a lot of weight with kids,” said Pam Miller, project coordinator of a single-parent program in the Long Beach schools and a graduate of the Los Angeles county gender/ethnic program.

“At least for the young women in our program, if they had a real solid, good experience in school, if they felt like they had some self-esteem and knew they had some future, I think there would be a lot less dropouts and less pregnancies,” Miller said.

“Girls are still exposed to sex expectations that make them feel like second-class citizens, not as important as boys,” said Theresa Cusik, public policy associate for the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund in Washington. “The way they are treated makes them have lowered self-esteem and fairly traditional expectations of what they’re going to be,”

Despite this second-class status, girls receive better grades in school. There is evidence that teachers grade them more generously, using criteria such as neatness that are not applied to boys.

Many girls, however, don’t think they deserve the high grades they get. “Girls say, ‘Thank you for the A.’ Boys say, ‘I deserved it,’ ” said Elizabeth Fennema, an education researcher at the University of Wisconsin.

“We know teachers feel high-achieving boys are successful due to their abilities, and think high-achieving girls succeed because of their effort,” Fennema said.

Last spring, Fennema conducted a study of about 700 first-grade students in Madison, Wis., which showed that boys surpass girls in problem solving--the most important kind of math taught in school.

Previously the discrepancy in boys’ and girls’ math abilities was not reported before the seventh grade. Some researchers had related the difference to some preteens’ notion that math is not “feminine.”

But Fennema’s study again raises a persistent and much-disputed theory that academic differences may be rooted in biology. Some researchers, for example, have suggested that the male sex hormone testosterone stunts fetal development of the brain’s left hemisphere, thus speeding development of the right hemisphere--the side that determines spatial ability, the skill to visualize two- and three-dimensional space that is a key to solving higher-level math problems.

On the whole, girls do not perform as well on standardized tests that involve visualization, according to Nancy Kreinberg, director of EQUALS, a Berkeley-based teacher training program focusing on sex equality in math and computer classes. The reason, she believes, is not biological but that girls have less experience “manipulating the physical world” through blocks and construction toys often given to boys before they enter school.

“When you look carefully at the studies, what you find out is (that) in people born more recently there are fewer differences in visual spatial ability,” said Elizabeth Stage, director of math education at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science. Non-traditional play experiences may account for the reduced discrepancies, Stage said.

Critics of the biological theory of math differences argue that even if it has merit in some cases, it does nothing to promote a solution and can possibly cause harm by further lowering girls’ self-concepts. One study showed that parents who read about possible biological explanations actually decreased their estimate of their daughters’ math abilities.

And in any case, educators agree, changing teachers’ attitudes, expectations and techniques does make a difference in students’ performances.

In the Los Angeles County program, teachers are encouraged to acknowledge the less-assertive students--male and female--by calling on them more and showing more patience. Specifically, they are urged to wait at least five seconds for an answer. After adopting the five-second rule, some said they heard from children who had never spoken up in class before. One teacher was surprised to learn that a foreign-born student--who she thought did not speak English--had been understanding all along.

The Gender/Ethnic Expectation and Student Achievement program also urges teachers to change their environment--by placing trucks and blocks closer to the play kitchen in a kindergarten room, for example. It encourages teachers to find outside speakers, such as female scientists, plumbers or machinery operators, to serve as role models for older classes.

The program also advocates the use of non-sexist books and films that avoid masculine terms such as “forefathers” and the generic “he,” and which show women performing non-traditional jobs and roles.

Junior high school teachers are told to monitor computer use so that boys don’t hog the machines. To create more positive feelings in girls about math, teachers are urged to de-emphasize isolated, competitive work (in which males tend to feel more comfortable) and increase cooperation and group discussion (which benefit both males and females).

Preliminary data indicates that the gender/ethnic program already is yielding positive academic results, according to program co-developer Grayson.

Grayson tested students in five Los Angeles County school districts before and after their teachers took the six-month training sessions for the county program. In basic skills tests, boys and girls in grades three to six improved 7% in math and 2.1% in reading, she said. “The highest math gain we recorded by students in a class where the students were predominantly Hispanic or Asian. There, the mean gain was 18.7%.”

“You find more gain for those students who were not doing as well. So in math scores, there was more gain for females than for males.”

Preliminary results also show improved attendance and fewer discipline and special education referrals for both sexes, Grayson said.

Studies over the last 60 years have shown a direct relationship between teachers’ expectations and students’ performance, Grayson said. What’s new is the specific evidence for females.

Her studies used no control group, however, and the results with racial and ethnic groups have yet to be replicated, she said.

Although the data is not complete, the gender/ethnic program is already regarded as enough of a success that it is being considered for implementation elsewhere in the country, according to Shari Bradley, national training coordinator for Phi Delta Kappa, an educational fraternity for professional educators.

Azusa teachers who took the Los Angeles County program were skeptical at first, said Joe Peake, a school district administrator who has qualified to teach in the program.

“The fact that it’s called gender equity made it sound more feminist than it really is,” he said. The skeptical teachers “didn’t want minority rights pushed on them. But when they found out how effective the program was in improving teaching and their reactions to all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, their fears were completely dispelled.”

Now, since teachers like Peake and Agnew have been trained to train others, the Gender/Ethnic Expectation and Student Achievement program will be self-perpetuating in the district, he said.

In the program, Peake was surprised to learn that--despite his best intentions--he called on four boys before he called on a girl student.

“It’s like having a scotoma, a blind spot. When you expect certain behavior, that’s the behavior you get,” Peake said.

One music teacher discovered that she was reinforcing stereotypes by having girls march into class to the lighter, high notes on the piano, while the boys marched in to the lower, heavy notes.

Some teachers have been surprised to learn they had been violating state and federal laws when they lined up students by sex, separated them on buses or in the cafeteria.

The principal law governing such matters is Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that grew out of the 1960s civil rights movement. It caused schools receiving federal funds to drop admission quotas for women, to let girls into shop classes and what was then called the boys’ gym, to provide equitable funding for athletic programs, and to set up grievance procedures for sexual harassment cases. A wave of similar laws was enacted at the state level.

But while the laws may have changed how people act, they could not change how people think.

“Laws don’t deal easily with the subtle forms of discrimination,” said Bernice Sandler, a Title IX expert with the Assn. of American Colleges in Washington. “The next frontier is the subtle issues. It involves everybody’s behavior.”

Initially, many teachers have to be persuaded that a problem exists. Two-thirds of the teachers and administrators hearing gender/ethnic program information for the first time either insist that there is no sex discrimination at their school or are unmoved by the research, said program trainer Phyllis Lerner.

“What we get is denial. (They say) ‘This information is really wonderful and it’s not a problem in our school.’ ”

Similarly, in teacher-training courses, there is no comprehensive treatment of the issue of sex differences, said Washington researcher Myra Sadker. “It’s shocking. Most (colleges) don’t touch it at all.

“No one can dismiss it as trivial when one-half of the population coming in is exhibiting extra potential and talent and leaving with a decline in achievement,” Sadker said.

There is some evidence that girls succeed and learn more in all-female schools, educators said. But all-female colleges, Sadker said, are “a disappearing option” as they integrate or close down for financial reasons.

Meanwhile, teachers need to find some way to support girls without coddling them, Fennema said. When a female student bursts into tears over a problem, Fennema said, she refuses to help until the student has tried another solution on her own.

Instead, she reaches into a box she keeps in her desk and hands her a tissue.

If He Were a Girl, He’d Get Married; as a Boy, No Way

Boys: What if you were a girl? Girls: What if you were a boy?

The students in Gale Agnew’s summer school class at Murray School in Azusa gasped in amazement at the question. Some hung their heads and climbed under the table. Some giggled.

The students, aged 7 to 12, came from the mostly Latino neighborhoods in Azusa. Here is a sampling of their answers:

- Alvaro Renteria, age 10 : “When you’re a boy, you can defend the girls, be stronger, be rich, have everything you want. . . . If I were a girl, I’d go into a store (he mimics a gangster with a machine gun) and say, ‘Give me all your Barbies!’ ”

- Oscar Vasquez, 8 : “If I was a girl, I’d get married. If I was a boy, no way. Girls make me sick.”

- Mikey Romo, 8 : “If I was a girl, I’d be scared of mice. (In a falsetto voice ) ‘Help! Help!’ I’d say, ‘Teacher, help me! Teacher, she hit me!’ ”

- An 8-year old girl : “If I were a boy, I’d play baseball and play in the mud all day.”

- Michelle Jones, 7 : “Boys get to go out, girls have to stay home. It’s not fair.” When a boy in the class suggested that a girl’s life is rotten because she has to stay home with the baby, Michelle retorted, “It’s because they’re so cute , that’s why!”

- Yajaira Perez, 9 : She said she wants to be a teacher. But if she were a boy, she would want to be an astronaut. When it was suggested that girls could also become astronauts, she replied, “Yes, but that would be too scary.”