The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools

7. Schools, Classrooms, and Peers

157 chapter 7 Schools, classrooms, and peers i n the preceding chapters, we documented two salient facts about the connection between gender and educational performance. First, girls generally do better in school than boys. Second, a wider variance exists in the math performance of boys, such that more boys than girls score in the upper tail of the performance distribution. This is true in kindergarten (penner and paret 2008) and remains true in secondary schools, where the gender disparity grows with the sensitivity of the test to extreme performance in mathematics (ellison and Swanson 2010). The male achievement deficit contributes to the gender gap in educational attainment, while the female deficit in the upper tail of math performance affects the gender distribution of college majors. in this chapter, we examine the connection between schools and the gender gap in overall educational performance. Then, in chapter 8, we turn our attention to the gender gap in mathematics and science and its implications for gender segregation in college majors. how might school-based policies help improve the educational performance of boys? First, better schools could improve the performance of students in general, which would help boys in particular even if such policies did not close the gender gap. Second, school improvements could target underperforming students. Because boys underperform relative to girls, boys would differentially benefit from any programs that improve students’ underperformance. Third, schools could devise programs that directly benefit boys in particular, regardless of their level of achievement. Boys face particular challenges stemming from the dual nature of masculine identity during adolescence. in schools with cultures that treat academic success as compatible with a respectable status within the adolescent culture, boys are more likely to perform on a par with girls. in other words, we expect the male shortfall to be relatively small in high-quality schools. Much of the literature on school effects from the coleman report (1966) forward determined that school effects were relatively small in 158 The Rise of women comparison with family effects and therefore that “schools are not an effective agent for the redistribution of societal resources” (hallinan 1988, 255; see also hanushek 1981, 1989). This pessimistic view of schools began to change with the rise of the accountability and standards movements , which focused renewed attention on improving schools in order to improve learning (united States and National commission on excellence in education 1983; Murphy 1991; Schneider and Keesler 2007). Three promising arenas of school policy intervention have the potential to improve student outcomes: teachers, student culture, and instructional and evaluation techniques. a growing literature suggests that teacher quality affects academic performance (Rockoff 2004; Rivkin, hanushek , and Kain 2005; clotfelter, ladd, and Vigdor 2006), and some recent reports suggest that good teachers have long-lasting effects (chetty et al. 2011). Scholars also increasingly recognize that, along with cognitive skills, social and behavioral skills affect academic achievement and later success in the labor market (Rosenbaum 2001; heckman, Stixrud, and urzua 2006) and that teachers differ in their ability to promote these skills (Jennings and diprete 2010). Beyond teachers, other support staff, such as guidance counselors, may play an important role in students’ educational outcomes and their transition to work (Rosenbaum 2001). The second promising arena of policy change, student culture and peer effects, has been a focus since the publication of The Adolescent Society (coleman 1961). instructional effects are the most difficult of the three school policy interventions to study, partly because instructional curricula are not readily quantifiable. considerable research suggests that small class sizes are better than large ones (Krueger and whitmore 2001), that tracking is generally detrimental to poorly performing students (Gamoran and Mare 1989), and that grade retention and tough academic standards for high school graduation do not boost educational achievement for poorly performing students (dee and Jacob 2006; Reardon et al. 2009). These policy arenas clearly overlap with each other; for example, teachers can contribute to student climate, better instructional techniques may improve teacher quality, and academically oriented student cultures may improve both the effectiveness of some teachers and the impact of some instructional techniques. The original focus on “school effects” developed out of a concern for equality of educational opportunity by social class and race. Now that a female advantage in educational attainment has emerged, it is natural to ask whether and how schools affect gender inequality as well. we need to consider whether school policies that help one gender also help the other, or whether the interests of boys and girls...