Harassment and Bias in the Classroom
How was School Today?
Listen to your daughter's answers to that question. These three shortcomings of co-ed education may put her education, her future, and even her safety, at risk.
Classroom Bias
Professors David and Myra Sadker spent over a decade observing classrooms, before they published their book, Failing at Fairness. When the Sadkers showed video footage of their observations to teachers, the teachers were shocked by what they saw.
For example, teachers were more likely to call on a boy during class discussion and praise a right answer. If the boy gave a wrong answer, the teacher would spend time to help him reason out the correct answer. When a girl answers, her teacher is more likely just to say "okay," if her answer is correct, or to move on to another student if her answer is wrong. When teaching something new, one teacher handed a book to the girls, and then turned her back on them as she actively explained it to the boys. This was a teacher who knew she was being observed and thought she was very fair.
There are people who say that this doesn't prove an anti-female bias in co-ed schools. Some things are so common that we think they're unavoidable. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." It may be true that boys are louder, that you have to give them extra attention or you'll lose control of your class.
But note this: If a girl behaves like a squeaky wheel, she doesn't get more teaching. She's more likely to be labeled a problem. She gets sent out of class. Girls who don't behave like squeaky wheels may get along better at school, but their achievement and ambitions drop from previously high levels, the more years they spend in school.
Sexual Harassment
Co-ed schools also do a poor job of protecting girls from sexual harassment. In "Hostile Hallways," a study by the American Association of University Women, 85% of middle and high school girls reported sexual harassment at school. The most common complaints in this study where inappropriate jokes, looks, or gestures.
While much of this verbal sexual harassment goes on right in front of teachers, the second most common complaints happen in the hallways. In the hall, for instance, crowds of boys do not move aside to let girls pass. Instead, the girls are forced to move in between boys who touch, grab, pinch, or rub up against them on their way to class. As a result, these girls were afraid while at school and less confident about themselves.
"Mean Girls" Syndrome
So why don't girls band together? "Everybody knows" that teenage girls are mean to each other. Why? In schools that value boys more than girls, and where girls are unprotected, it becomes very important to girls to attract boys to be on their side.
Girls in co-ed settings form cliques as alliances of power to attract boys' attention. In an environment that is unfriendly to girls, maintaining the ability to attract boys to the group is all-important, so unattractive girls are excluded, gossiped about, and teased cruelly. A Canadian study documented that the mean girls syndrome is an expression of feminine self-hatred, when it found that the meanest girls had the lowest sense of the value of females.
Another study in Ireland found that perceived physical attractiveness was the best predictor of a girl's self-worth in co-ed schools. In other words, when girls go to school with boys, they feel good about themselves if boys think they're attractive.
In all-girls schools, this study found that girls' feelings of self worth came from their actions, and they were much less critical of their own behavior than girls in co-ed schools. They were also much less critical of each other.
Girls in all-girl schools are not being ignored and intimidated. The higher level of self-acceptance that girls experience in all-girl schools may be the reason they perform better academically and look forward to the future they deserve.
How was school for your daughter today?
