Barbara J. Bank

Some Dangers of Binary Thinking: Comment on "Why Smart People Believe that Schools Shortchange Girls"

Do American schools shortchange girls? The American Association of University Women (1992) says that they do, as do many educators and social scientists, often citing evidence about classroom interactions that suggest teachers take boys more seriously than girls. In the Spring 1998 issue of Gender Issues, Judith Kleinfeld says that differences in male-female patterns of class participation are "inconsistent, small, and variable"; that the belief that schools shortchange girls is "an absurdity"; that the persistence of this belief is due to a tendency to focus on outstanding men whose highly visible successes mask other men's failures and the "greater male variability in many human characteristics"; and that the "shortchanged group is African-American males, not girls." By posing the question of whether schools shortchange girls in an either-or manner, Kleinfeld--and some of those she criticizes----obfuscates the complexities of both schooling and the social construction of inequalities. As Tyack and Hansot (1990) have brilliantly demonstrated, schooling has given American girls opportunities, fostered their achievements, and also perpetuated their gender inferiority. To note correctly, as Kleinfeld does, that girls get better grades than boys, score higher on many verbal tests, and go on to earn more baccalaureate and master's degrees does not mean that schools are not shortchanging girls in some other ways. The difficulty in demonstrating these other forms of shortchanging in a manner conAddress all correspondence to the author at Department of Sociology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211.

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vincing to disbelievers like Kleinfeld is that few of them are solely due to schooling. Let me cite two examples. My first example is the one Kleinfeld dismisses: classroom participation. Whether or not teacher attention has important educational outcomes, most of us would agree that all pupils, regardless of gender (or race/ethnicity), should receive a fair amount of attention and equitable treatment in the classroom. But the determination of what is fair is difficult to make, not just because classroom research is expensive and difficult to conduct, as Kleinfeld concedes, but also because pupils are not equal in their demands for attention. Most of us who have taken a careful look at the research literature on classroom participation are convinced that one reason boys get more attention is because they are more active and demand more attention. While researchers have developed reliable coding schemes to determine whether the attention pupils get is positive, negative, or neutral (contrary to Kleinfeld's claims about "highly subjective" research), it is not so easy to determine whether the teacher is being fair. Should s/he ignore students (boys?) who seek to monopolize her time and spend more time encouraging quiet students (girls?) to speak out, or should she respond to all student initiatives even if they exhibit gender bias? What about the various preferences that students bring to class? Does treating students fairly mean that teachers encourage students to pursue those subjects in which they are most interested and at which they do best (math for boys, reading for girls) or does fairness require that students be encouraged to improve their skills in their areas of least interest? Pupils do not enter classrooms in an unsocialized, genderless state, and teachers are more likely to reinforce familial and peer influences than to counteract them. Are schools shortchanging girls if they fail to challenge gender-typed behaviors and interests even if their pupils prefer them? Shouldn't public schools provide an egalitarian corrective to a sexist, racist society? My second example is one that Kleinfeld ignores: the material consequences of schooling. At present males get higher returns, in the forms of average pay and occupational prestige, for each year of schooling than women do (and whites get higher returns than blacks). Among full-time, year-round American workers twenty-five years of age and older in 1990, women with four years of college earned only 3.7 percent more, on average, than men with only high school diplomas. In contrast, men with four years of college exceeded the earnings of men with only high-school diplomas by 44.1 percent. In addition, American women are now more likely than men with equivalent years of education to find themselves living below the poverty line. Does this mean that schools shortchange girls? Those whose answer is "no" can point to the many other explanations for women's lower

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pay and greater poverty that seem not to implicate schools, explanations such as occupational segregation, overcrowding in women's jobs, the continuing lack of structural supports for combining motherhood and careers, no-fault divorce laws, and sexual harassment, which drives many women out of certain jobs. There are also explanations that do implicate the schools, such as the continued tracking of girls and women into courses, curricula, and majors that lead to low-pay clerical and social service jobs. (The fact that many girls "choose" these courses, curricula, and majors should not blind us to the complicity of the schools any more than we would pardon the schools because they allow some African American male pupils to exercise their "choice" to drop out.) The consequences of schooling, like classroom interaction patterns, result from the complex interplay of many institutional, interpersonal, and psychological forces. Although schools are not solely responsible, they are not always as beneficent in their treatment of girls as Kleinfeld's analysis implies. If schools are only partly to blame, why do they attract so much--perhaps too much---of the criticism for shortchanging girls? While Kleinfeld rightly claims that boys show greater variability on some measures of "human characteristics" than girls do (a defense of this position with regard to gender differences in verbal skills appears in Bank, Biddle, and Good 1980), this finding does not account for much, if any, of the tendency to criticize schools for their treatment of girls. Instead, we should look to the high expectations Americans have for schooling that they believe should and will lead to better jobs and a better life. As a consequence, they are willing to commit large amounts of time and money to their educational "investments." Educators reinforce these expectations with their promises to parents and exhortations to students . . . . "education is the key to success in life," "stay in school if you want a good job." As long as school officials continue to make such claims and women continue to have poorer job and economic outcomes than men, schools will be blamed. The term "shortchange" is revelatory, focusing as it does on returns for education. Those returns are lower for women than men among bluecollar and service workers as well as among the law students or others in "the right tail of the normal curve" that are central to Kleinfeld's analysis. Although Kleinfeld dismisses any responsibility schools that might have for women's inferior status, she is quick to assign them major responsibility for the plight of African American males. Here, again, a less binary mode of analysis would be more appropriate. As is true of girls and women, the fate of black males is an outcome of the complex interplay of institutions, including the schools, but also embracing families, communities, and the political economy (Wilson, 1987). Although it seems plausible to argue that American schools are shortchanging African

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American males, accepting this premise does not mean, as Kleinfeld argues, that those same schools are not also shortchanging females, albeit possibly in somewhat different ways. Above all, we should avoid pitting gender and racial minorities against one another. The dangers of this game of "my (or his) oppression is greater than your oppression" have been explicated by African American feminists who have criticized both racism among white feminists and sexism among African Americans. Many of them (Collins, 1990; Terrelonge, 1995) have written with eloquence about the importance of being concerned with multiple oppressions and with the intersections of gender, race, and class. Kleinfeld's approach is definitely a giant step backward. Perhaps Gender Issues needs to adopt some anti-sexist publication policies: no group's oppressions should be demeaned or diminished, and it seems particularly inappropriate for a journal concerned with gender to publish articles dismissing the importance of such issues.

References American Association of University Women. 1992. How Schools Shortchange Girls: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education. Washington, DC: The AAUW Educational Foundation. Bank, Barbara J., Bruce J. Biddle, and Thomas L. Good. 1980. Sex Roles, Classroom Instruction, and Reading Achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology 72:119-132. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Harper Collins. Terrelonge, Pauline. 1995. Feminist Consciousness and Black Women. In Women: A Feminist Perspective, Jo Freeman, ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, pp. 607-616. Tyack, David, and Elisabeth Hansot. 1990. Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wilson, William Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.