The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  The climatic section of SchoolGirls is entitled “Anita Hill Is a Boy: Tales from a Gender-Fair Classroom.” Orenstein describes the classroom of Ms. Judy Logan, an award-winning English and social studies teacher at the Everett Middle School, a public school in San Francisco. Logan has gone as far as anyone in transforming her classroom into a woman-centered community of learners. Indeed, Logan is something of a pedagogical legend among girl-partisan activists. Jackie DeFazio, former president of the AAUW, says that a teacher like Logan, “who puts equity at the center of her classroom,” fills her with hope.46 Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, praises Logan for offering “a new vision of what our schools can give to our children.”47

  When Orenstein stepped into Logan’s classroom for the first time she found it “somewhat of a shock.” There are images of women everywhere:

  The faces of Abigail Adams, Rachel Carson, Faye Wattleton, and even a fanciful “Future Woman” smile out from three student-made quilts that are draped on the walls. . . . Reading racks overflow with biographies of Lucretia Mott, Ida B. Wells, Emma Goldman, Sally Ride, and Rigoberta Menchú. . . . There is a section on Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. . . . A giant computer-paper banner spans the width of another wall proclaiming, “Women are one-half of the world’s people, they do two-thirds of the world’s work, they earn one-tenth of the world’s income; they own one hundredth of the world’s property.”48

  At first, Orenstein found herself wondering “Where are the men?” But then in one of those characteristic “click” moments that feminists often report, the light dawned and all was clear: “In Ms. Logan’s class, girls may be dazzled by the reflection of the women that surround them. And, perhaps for the first time, the boys are the ones looking through the window.”49

  Logan’s classes are unusual and fun. She is popular with her students. But, according to Orenstein, many students complain that she is unfair to boys. One sixth grader, Holly, says, “Sometimes, I worry about the boys, that they kind of get ignored.” Another says that her brother had taken one of Ms. Logan’s classes, and “all she ever talked about was women, women, women. And he did not like it.” Even the girls get tired of all the “women-centeredness.” Orenstein reports one as complaining, “Ms. Logan, I feel like I am not learning anything about men, and I do not think that is right.” Orenstein attributes the girls’ objections to their low self-esteem; because of the “hidden curriculum,” girls “have already become used to taking up less space, to feeling less worthy of attention than boys.” By contrast, one older student, Mindy, who spent three years with Logan (Orenstein describes her as “a model of grunge chic”), has clearly learned the lessons that Logan strives to impart. Here is how this student explains the boys’ resentment:

  I think it’s the resentment of losing their place. In our other classes, the teachers just focus on men, but the boys don’t complain that that’s sexist. They say, “It’s different in those classes because we focus on the important people in history, who just happen to be men.”50

  As Orenstein describes her, Mindy rolls her eyes to indicate the incredible cluelessness of the boys. Mindy’s reference to those other classes shows she has, indeed, learned her lesson well. The new pedagogy justifies its intense focus on women by reminding us that allegedly gender-neutral classes on such subjects as the Age of Discovery or the Rise of Science are “all about men” like Columbus and Isaac Newton. Now it is time to put women in their rightful place at the center of attention.

  In one history class, the girls take over the discussion and go after the boys for being sexual predators. As the girls get angrier, Logan gets more animated. The girls’ anger is the sign that her pedagogy is working. “This is a very important, scary, and profound conversation you are having.”51 What do the boys have to say for themselves?

  One boy tries to placate the girls: “It’s true that some guys are assholes in school. But there are nice people too.” During a subsequent male-bashing session, a girl points out that though sexual harassment happens to girls more often, the girls are doing it to boys as well. “We go up and feel on guys too.”52

  “That’s a good point,” says Logan. But not one she chooses to pursue. She soon stops the discussion, “We’ve gotten a lot done on this, but the class isn’t about sexual harassment. It’s American Women Making History.” But later, she will return to the topic of sexual harassment and explain to her students how it is a part of a “hidden curriculum” that teaches girls to be second-class citizens. “They learn to become silent, careful, not active or assertive in life.”53

  Logan’s pedagogy turns out to have its own hidden curriculum, which she teaches in every class, regardless of the subject. It is unflattering to males, and they learn the lesson. Luis, a seventh grader, later confessed to Orenstein, “I couldn’t really defend myself, because it’s true. Men are pigs, you know?”54

  As a final “unifying project,” Logan’s sixth-grade social studies class made a quilt to celebrate “women we admire.” Logan was alarmed by one student’s muslin square. A boy named Jimmy had chosen to honor the tennis player Monica Seles, who, in 1993, was stabbed on the court by a deranged man. He had drawn a bloody dagger on a tennis racket. It’s not the sort of thing a girl would think of. Jimmy’s square may be unique in the history of quilting, but Ms. Logan did not appreciate its originality. In his own defense, he said, “I thought it was kind of important, a tennis player stabbed just so she wouldn’t win.” The teacher insisted he start again and make an acceptable contribution to the class quilt.

  I can see why Logan did not want Jimmy’s square on the class quilt. But perhaps Jimmy was looking for some way—within the confines of a feminist quilting environment—to assert his young maleness, which was under direct assault by his teacher. Logan, clearly exasperated, did not see it that way. She confided to Orenstein: “When boys feel like they’re being forced to admire women, they try to pick one that they think behaves sort of like a man.”55 Jimmy is left looking “despondently” at his rejected square.

  Jeremy, another boy in the class, showed more progress. His muslin quilting square celebrating Rosa Parks had been done to Logan’s specifications. When he handed it in, Logan turned to Orenstein, saying, “This is how you teach about gender. You do it one stitch at a time.”56 Much taken by that remark, Orenstein used it to end her book.

  Interdicted Research

  A female colleague of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, once told him, “Look, I know that males and females are not identical. I see it in my kids. I see it in myself. I know about the research. I can’t explain it, but when I read claims about sex difference, steam comes out of my ears.”57 Feminist Gloria Steinem has called research on sex differences “anti-American.” She says, “It is what is keeping us down.”58 According to Gloria Allred, such research simply should not be done. “This is harmful and dangerous to our daughters’ lives, to our mothers’ lives, and I am very angry about it.”59 Feminist critics have a term for neurologists who study sex differences: “neurosexists.”60

  From a historical perspective, apprehension over research on sex differences is understandable. The idea of natural difference was once the thinking man’s justification for keeping women in their place, socially, legally, and politically. Before the women’s movement took root in the nineteenth century, patriarchal thinking was the norm. It was then taken for granted that women were not just innately different but naturally inferior to men. Even an enlightened moral philosopher such as Immanuel Kant comfortably held the view that women were by nature ethically substandard. Kant believed that women have little respect for concepts like right and obligation, which are at the very foundation of ethical living: “Women will avoid the wicked not because it is unright, but because it is ugly; and virtuous actions mean to them such as are morally beautiful. Nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation! Woman is intolerant of all commands and all morose constraint. They do something only because it pleases them. . . . I
hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.”61

  It was also widely believed that women are less intelligent than men. Stereotypes that demeaned women were commonly accepted, and women everywhere paid the price. Soon eminent scientists were weighing in to confirm women’s inferiority. In the mid-nineteenth century, when anatomy and physiology were gaining scientific respectability, Paul Broca, a French professor of clinical surgery and pioneer in brain anatomy, concluded that “the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority.”62 A contemporary of Broca, French psychologist Gustave Le Bon, went further: “In most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that one cannot contest it for a moment.”63

  Given the history of interpreting natural differences between men and women as proof of male superiority, it is understandable that women like Allred and Steinem and Lawrence Summers’s tormentors react with suspicion to the suggestion that men and women are innately different in any way. But the proper corrective to bad science and rancorous philosophy is not more of the same but rather good science and clear thinking. For the moment, bad science and rancor are ubiquitous.

  The ACLU Goes to War Against Single-Sex Schools

  When students, especially boys, were falling behind academically at the Van Devender Middle School in Parkersburg, West Virginia, school officials decided to experiment with single-sex classes for sixth and seventh graders. Leonard Sax, a physician and prominent advocate of single-sex education, had visited the school and offered teachers suggestions for classroom activities. Many boys think of reading as “feminine,” but following Sax’s advice, teacher Mackenzie Lackey found a way around their resistance. For the past two years, she has divided her all-male sixth-grade classes into two teams and organized a Battle of the Books competition. Her students read a series of books and then competed to see which team could answer the most questions about the readings. The boys started reading like mad. The exercise was so successful that in both 2010 and 2011, in a schoolwide Battle of the Books, Lackey’s sixth-grade boy teams beat the entire school, including coed teams from traditional seventh- and eigth-grade classes. To her delight, her pupils asked for more books to read over the summer. “Imagine,” says Sax, “boys from a low-income neighborhood who demanded more books to read.”64

  But on May 21, 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union sent the school authorities a ten-page cease-and-desist letter demanding that they terminate their “gender-specific” programs post haste. “Our analysis demonstrates that this program is unlawful because it is premised upon and likely promotes harmful stereotypes about the different learning styles and development of boys and girls.”65 Failure to terminate the programs, warned the ACLU, could result in a lawsuit and/or a formal complaint with the pertinent federal agency. “We expect your response no later than June 4, 2012.”66 Similar letters were sent to school districts with single-sex programs in Florida, Mississippi, Maine, Virginia, and Alabama.

  Wealthy families have always had the option of sending their children to all-male or all-female academies, but parents of lesser means have rarely had the choice. That changed in 2002, when the No Child Left Behind Act sanctioned innovative programs—including single-sex classes and academies—in public schools.67 Then-senator Hillary Clinton, a coauthor of the provision, urged that the single-sex option be broadly expanded and not limited to a fortunate few: “There should not be any obstacle to providing single-sex choice within the public school system. . . . We have to look at the achievements of [single-sex] schools that are springing up around the country. We know this has energized students and parents. We could use more schools such as this.”68

  There are now nearly 400 public schools that offer single-sex classes and about 116 public all-girl and all-boy academies.69 Single-sex programs are especially popular in low-income neighborhoods where parents are worried about their daughters and panicked about their sons. The Claremont Academy in Chicago, for example, offers a single-sex academic program for seventh- and eighth-grade, mostly poor, African American students. “It helps us to focus more,” said one eighth grader. According to a profile of the school in Phi Delta Kappan magazine, students’ test scores have improved dramatically since the program began in 2007.70

  The Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School in Dallas opened in 2004 and enrolls 4,525 girls in grades six through twelve. Its success has been dazzling. The school has scored at or near the top of all Dallas public schools on state tests for the past five years.71 Dallas has now opened a comparable academy for young men—the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy. Madeline Hayes, a mother of a young man attending the school, said she’d always dreamed “that there would be a boys’ school that doesn’t charge $25,000 a year, but would give the same academics, the same level of interaction and leadership.”72

  Galen Sherwin, an attorney for the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, explained why she and her organization want such programs eliminated: “Over and over we find that these programs are based on stereotypes that limit opportunities by reinforcing outdated ideas about how boys and girls behave.”73

  It is hard to see how the classes limit anyone’s opportunities. In West Virginia, boys are behind girls about one year in reading and two and a half years in writing. And West Virginia places close to last in national reading tests.74 Put another way, boys in West Virginia are among the worst readers in the nation. The reading classes seem to be improving their abilities and opportunities. The seventh and eighth graders at the Claremont Academy are scoring higher on standardized tests. Children at the Irma Lerma Rangel School and Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy appear to be thriving. What is wrong with a voluntary program that seems to be helping? Plenty, says the ACLU—and they claim to have the research to prove it: a 2011 critique of single-sex education published in the prestigious journal Science.75

  Eight Professors and a “Study”

  Teachers visiting the website of the American Council for CoEducational Schooling (ACCES) are invited to take a quiz that measures their gender inclusiveness.76 The quiz asks how often they do the following:

  A. I say “Good morning, boys and girls”;

  B. I call students “boys” and “girls”;

  C. I refer to my students as “ladies” and “gentlemen.”

  Any teacher guilty of using such gendered language receives low marks on “gender mixing.” The executive director of the ACCES, Rebecca Bigler, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, explained her organization’s logic in Education Week. “If you compare it to race, if you said to your first-grade classrooms, ‘Good morning, whites and Latinos; let’s have the Latinos get your pencils,’ what would happen is you would go to federal prison. . . . Labeling children routinely by race in your classroom is a violation of federal law, and, of course, you can do this routinely with gender.”77

  Bigler’s mention of federal prison is hyperbolic, but it highlights her passion and moral certainty. Success stories from schools like the Claremont Academy do not impress her. As she told the Phi Delta Kappan, “African American males should be schooled right next to white girls because they would benefit from it. And those white girls need to know and understand the views of other people.” She and her fellow ACCES officers, all professors, view “male” and “female” as arbitrary and invidious distinctions that should be left behind. They are now waging a major campaign against single-sex schools.78

  Bigler and seven ACCES colleagues are the authors of the article cited by the ACLU, “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling.” Because it appeared in Science, it has proved to be a potent weapon against programs like those in West Virginia and Chicago.79 What does the article say?

  The Science article is a two-page summary of the state of the literature on single-sex education. That cou
ld be useful, were the authors not so blatantly biased. It is little more than a compendium of their opinions, supported by cherry-picked findings. They try to persuade the reader of two propositions: (1) There is no well-designed research that proves that single-sex education improves academic achievement, and (2) there is good evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and “legitimizes institutional sexism.”80

  On the first point, it is certainly true that the research connecting single-sex schools to improved performance is inconclusive. Historically, students have flourished in such schools; throughout the world, wealthy parents have sought them out for their children (think of England’s Eton and Harrow). But critics reply that the purported success of single-sex institutions is due to the social standing of the parents, the schools’ resources, the quality of faculty—some feature other than it being single-sex. What was needed was a study that controlled for such factors. That came in 2012, when three University of Pennsylvania researchers looked at single-sex education in Seoul, Korea.81 In Seoul, until 2009, students were randomly assigned to single-sex and coeducational schools; parents had little choice on which schools their children attended. After controlling for other variables such as teacher quality, student-teacher ratio, and the proportion of students receiving lunch support, the study found significant advantages in single-sex education. The students earned higher scores on their college entrance exams and were more likely to attend four-year colleges. The authors describe the positive effects as “substantial.”

  They note that their study is inconclusive. For example, the proportion of male teachers is much higher in Seoul’s all-boys schools than in coeducational schools. The sex of the faculty could be importantly connected to student achievement. Further research is in order. But these findings are more than suggestive and may point the way to one solution to the boy gap—with positive outcomes for girls as well.