Are girls taught to fail?

A controversial new study claims that girls get second-class treatment from first grade on. Patrick McCormick examines the best-selling Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls and how sexism may be shortchanging our hope for the future.

If you're a parent or teacher, or if there's even one female student anywhere you care about, I would recommend getting a copy of Professors Myra and David Sadker's 1994 best-seller, Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls (Scribner's) and reading it cover to cover.

Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision condemned racial segregation for providing black and white children with separate but distinctly unequal schools, the Sadkers make a persuasive case that in classrooms across America girls are sitting in the same rows with boys but receiving very separate and unequal educations.

Building upon their research for the 1992 American Association of University Women's report, "How Schools Shortchange Girls," the authors argue that from kindergarten to postdoctoral studies our schools provide girls with a secondhand education that leads to disastrous results both for these young women and for the society at large.

After two decades of investigating the presence and impact of sexism in American classrooms and textbooks, the Sadkers contend that we teach girls differently from boys: paying less attention to them in the classroom, offering them less feedback and encouragement in discussions, providing them with fewer role models in examples and textbooks, and even actively discouraging them from academic success, particularly in the fields of math and science.

The Sadkers and their researchers observed teachers in thousands of classrooms at every grade level, and in the vast majority of these settings, boys received a hugely disproportionate amount of attention. Teachers called on male students three and four times more often than females, even when the instructors seemed well-intentioned and were personally opposed to sexism.

Further, when volunteering information, girls were normally expected to raise their hands and get permission to speak while boys were often allowed to interrupt teachers and other students with unsolicited opinions. And even when girls did get the teacher's attention, they were often treated differently from boys in three significant ways: when asked questions, girls tended to get less time than boys to come up with an answer; when they did offer an answer, girls often got less praise or advice than boys, usually receiving a simple yes or no from their instructors; and finally, when students were confronted with a particularly difficult task, teachers tended to encourage boys to try harder to work out the problem for themselves while offering to provide the solution for struggling girls.

In these same classroom observations and in an examination of hundreds of academic textbooks, the Sadkers also uncovered a severe shortage of vibrant role models for girls. In endless classroom examples, boys and men were described as active agents and problem solvers and the protagonists and heroes of stories while girls either failed to appear at all or were cast as passive foils and victims.

In textbook after textbook, boys could find legions of male characters to emulate, with men dominating every list of leaders, discoverers, inventors, healers, artists, and authors.

These same textbooks, however, provided girls with the names of few, if any, great women in these categories, implying that there are not many important women and that women are not as important. This lesson was evidently not lost on our sisters and daughters, for when the Sadkers asked thousands of girls and young women to list 20 famous American men and women (excluding athletes, entertainers, and the wives of presidents), most students had no trouble listing that many males, but few could remember even half a score of important females.

And finally the Sadkers' research indicates that girls and young women are often actively discouraged from trying to excel in academics and are taught that success in this area is somehow unladylike. At home and in grade school many girls discover that their parents and teachers have lower expectations of their academic performances because they are females and are more likely to be prized for being neat, deferential, and well-mannered than for being smart and hardworking.

By junior high and high school these same girls often learn from their peers and prospective dates that their popularity depends much more on being attractive than bright and that, indeed, too much intelligence could leave a girl dateless. By the time these women apply to colleges or grad schools, they have often been counseled to avoid challenging courses in the sciences and to pick majors that will not be as demanding and won't lead to careers that are as lucrative.

And what are the results of this sometimes subtle but pervasive sexism in American education? According to the Sadkers, the girls and young women who go through our schools are affected in a number of critical ways: the educational process renders them progressively more silent, invisible, and deferential; their academic test scores fall further and further behind their male counterparts; they suffer a significant loss of self-esteem; they are shunted away from many of the most academically challenging fields of study; and they are faced with the threat of sexual harassment from peers and instructors.

The Sadkers discovered that by the time many young American women enter colleges or grad schools, they have accommodated themselves to a classroom setting where they are not called upon as often as men and where their insights are not as highly regarded. After years in which they have had far fewer opportunities to express their opinions and received much less help in refining them, many young women lose their academic voice and become progressively more silent and even invisible coeds who habitually defer to their male colleagues.

Furthermore, even though girls entering grade school score the same or better than boys in every sort of standardized intelligence test (except math), by the time they are ready to take their college aptitude tests (either the SATs or College Board Achievement Tests), girls have fallen behind boys in every academic area of testing. And this gap only deepens as their educations continue, with women doing noticeably worse than men on every graduate- and professional-school aptitude test, including the GRE (for arts and sciences), GMAT (for business), LSAT (for law), and MCAT (for medicine). The longer women stay in this educational system, the worse it gets for them.

And not all the damage of sexism can be measured in aptitude test scores. As girls are educated in a system that places them at a disadvantage and teaches them that they are not as gifted or important as boys, they often experience a long, slow slide in self-esteem. The Sadkers point to studies indicating that as boys and girls enter adolescence, a significantly larger number of females experience a noticeable drop in their self-esteem - a drop that the Sadkers argue is at least partially caused by an educational system that undermines their confidence in their own intellectual skills and worth.

As this confidence diminishes, girls are often encouraged by teachers and advisors to avoid courses and studies in the admittedly demanding fields of science and math and are told, subtly or otherwise, that such work is not really for women.

Moreover, as these girls become young women in high schools, colleges, and graduate schools, they must often come to grips with unwanted sexual advances from other students or sexual harassment from male counselors, professors, and advisors. With one-in-four college women claiming to have been the recipient of unwanted or forceful sexual advances and as many as 25 percent of female doctoral students reporting sexual encounters with the faculty members responsible for their academic careers, it is easy to see why so many women would feel vulnerable and powerless in this area - and why so many of them might never report such incidences of sexual harassment.

In spite of the fact that Failing at Fairness takes a long, hard, and often painful look at the ways in which the subtle and pervasive influences of sexism in America's schools cheat our sisters and daughters out of their academic birthrights, I didn't find the Sadkers' book depressing or overwhelming. Instead, it stimulated a good deal of thought and offered useful insights, as well as concrete suggestions, for addressing the problem at hand.

Let me pass on a few.

To begin with, the Sadkers make it clear that parents and teachers have tremendous capacities to encourage their children and students. Often it is our belief in these girls and young women that invite and challenge them to reach beyond their grasps and imagine themselves doing and being all sorts of things. Again and again the two professors relate how a parent's or teacher's obvious confidence in his or her daughter's or student's intelligence enabled her to break beyond controlling stereotypes and to accomplish wonderful things - while parents or teachers who expected little from girls tended to undermine these young women's efforts to learn and grow. If we can imagine our daughters and sisters as brilliant and accomplished in every sort of academic endeavor, it will be easier for them to do the same.

Second, as a teacher, I was struck by the Sadkers' research on classroom exchanges and was forced to acknowledge the disproportionate amount of time and energy, as well as the different sorts of attention, I give to male students. But there are ways to redress that imbalance and work at creating more and more spaces for women's voices in the classroom.

Whether or not we demand that all students play by the same hand-raising rule, we should set limits on the number of times particularly loquacious male or female students can contribute to a conversation or use some rotation method for asking questions. We can begin to send a message that we want to hear what girls and young women have to say. And if you're not a teacher, you might want to observe how your daughters are being taught and offer some feedback of your own.

Third, we need to look at the stories we are telling our students and children. Far too many of our classroom examples, storybooks, and texts describe a world in which boys and men are bright, curious, brave, inventive, and powerful, but girls and women are silent, passive, and invisible.

We need to be vigilant in retrieving women's stories for our daughters and students. For when we deprive girls and young women of their own stories, adventures, and dreams, we impoverish their imaginations and rob them of their futures. No one should be asked to borrow another person's dreams and stories. Fortunately, at the close of their book (pages 327-336), the Sadkers have included a wonderful list of recommended readings titled, "Wonderful Women and Resourceful Girls: Books for Children to Grow On."

I'd like to add two extraordinary books to that list, books recommended to me by a friend who is herself the mother of two very bright daughters. In The Road from Coorain (Random, 1990) and True North (Knopf, 1994) author Jill Ker Conway offers an engaging and inspiring two-part autobiography of her travels from the Australian outback and life as an international scholar and first woman president of Smith College in Massachusetts.

In The Road from Coorain, Conway takes us from her childhood struggles and adventures on the family sheep ranch at Coorain to the lecture halls of the University of Sydney, where the young student explores her love of learning. And later, this young history instructor discovers her identity as a blossoming scholar.

In the second volume, True North, Conway relates her graduate studies at Harvard University, as well as her teaching and scholarship at the University of Toronto, which led to her selection as the president of Smith. Together these two books introduce us to the voice of a woman who is both adventurer and scholar - a character fully alive and deeply in love with learning. It would be hard to find a better model for academic women looking for their own voices and stories.

Somehow it would seem wrong to me to bring these reflections on Failing at Fairness to a close without mentioning a couple of recent events in the church. At the end of October the Vatican overturned an earlier decision approving the use of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible for liturgy or catechesis, even though this translation had already been approved by the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and Sacraments and the U.S. and Canadian bishops and, also, was currently in use in Canada.

The reason for this reversal, such as the Vatican's decision earlier in the year not to use this translation in the new universal Catechism, was that Rome is opposed to the use of inclusive language. After having read all of the Sadkers' research on the disastrous impact of sexist education, it is hard to reconcile the church's call to be teacher with this continuing refusal to make room for women's voices, language, and stories. If our liturgies, scriptures, and catechisms don't have a place for women's names and stories, then they need to.

Samples of recommended readings for young people from Failing at Fairness:

Contemporary Realistic Fiction:

* Blume, Judy, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great (Dutton, 1982), 9 to 12 years.

* Cleary, Beverly, Ramona the Pest (Morrow, 1968), 8 to 12 years.

* Cleaver, Vera and Bill, Where the Lillies Bloom (Lippincott, 1969), 11 years and up.

* Fitzhugh, Louise, Harriet the Spy (Harper, 1964), 9 to 12 years.

* Konigsburg, E.L., From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Atheneum, 1967), 8 to 12 years.

* Moore, Yvette, Freedom Songs (Orchard, 1991), 10 years and up.

* Naidoo, Beverly, Journey to Jo'Burg. (Lippincott, 1986), 11 years and up.

* Thesman, Jean, The Rain Catchers (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 10 yeaars and up.

* Wrightson, Patricia, The Sugar Gum Tree (Viking, 1991), 7 to 10 years.

Historical Fiction:

* Brink, Carol Ryrie, Caddie Woodlawn (MacMillan, 1936), 9 to 12 years.

* Burnett, Frances Hodgson, The Secret Garden (Lippincott, 1938), 8 to 12 years and up.

* Greene, Bette, The Summer of My German Soldier (Dial, 1973), 12 years and up.

* Lyons, Mary, Letters from a Slave Girl (Scribners, 1992), 12 years and up.

* Uchida, Yoshiko, Journey to Topaz: The Story of the Japanese-American Evacuation (Scribners, 1971), 9 to 12 years.

* Wilder, Laura Ingalls, Little House in the Big Woods (Harper, 1932), 7 to 11 years.