Content area
Full Text
For 20 years education researchers Myra and David Sadker have been observing in classrooms, analyzing teacher and student behavior, looking for evidence of gender inequity--especially bias against girls.
Now in their new book, Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls (Scribners, $22), the Sadkers report the results of that research. The first sentence tells the story: "Sitting in the same classroom, reading the same textbook, listening to the same teacher, boys and girls receive very different educations."
Married 28 years (they met in the Harvard Master of Arts in Teaching program) Myra and David Sadker are professors of education at American University in Washington, D.C. NEA Today staff Writer Nancy Needham recently talked to them on the A.U. campus about the state of schooling for girls today.
Educators have been talking about equity for girls for 20 years. Why hasn't there been more progress?
DS: In some areas there has. Proportionately more law school and medical school students are women than 20 years ago, and the math performance of females has improved.
MS: But not the science performance. Not enrollments in engineering, physics, or computer science.
DS: People assume that interaction in the classroom should have changed by now, but why would it have?
You mean awareness only goes so far?
MS: Right. Knowing is not enough. We tell in the book about a Dateline episode we taped for Jane Pauley. A thoughtful, professional teacher agreed to teach a real class in front of a camera operator, a boom operator, and a technician--all looking for gender bias--and the teacher knew it.
We thought, we'll never get any biased behavior on tape, but we did. The teacher made all the classic mistakes: she had the...