Q: Do public schools shortchange girls on educational opportunities?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 14, 1998

Yes: Girls still face barriers in schools that prevent them from reaching their full potential.

The American Association of University Women, or AAUW, has been a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocate for equal opportunities for women and girls for more than a century. Specifically, we work to improve education for girls.

The need for this is clear. AAUW's 1992 report, How Schools Shortchange Girls, reviewed more than 1,300 studies and documented disturbing evidence that girls receive an inequitable education, both in quality and quantity, in America's classrooms. In particular, we found girls faced a gender gap in math and science.

In October, the AAUW Educational Foundation released Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children. Synthesizing 1,000 research studies, Gender Gaps measures schools' progress in providing a fair and equitable education since 1992. While girls have improved in some areas, such as math and science, they face an alarming new gap in technology that threatens to make women bystanders in the 21st-century economy.

Gender Gaps found that girls make up only a small percentage of students in computer-science classes. While boys are more likely to enroll in advanced computer-applications and graphics courses, girls take data-entry and clerical classes, the 1990s version of typing. Boys enter the classroom with more prior experience with computers and other technology than girls. Girls consistently rate themselves significantly lower than boys on computer ability, and boys exhibit higher self-confidence and a more positive attitude about computers than do girls.

Critics such as Professor Judith Kleinfeld have questioned why research should focus on the educational experiences of girls. They contend that girls are in fact doing quite well in school. The attention AAUW brings to girls and gender equity, they argue, leads to the neglect of boys.

AAUW believes that all students deserve a good education. To make sure that all students are performing to high academic standards, educators must address the learning needs of different groups of students -- boys and girls, African-Americans and Hispanics, rich and poor. AAUW agrees that boys, like girls, face academic challenges. In fact, Gender Gaps clearly highlights the fact that boys still lag behind in communications skills. These gaps must be addressed by schools so that all children, boys and girls, have equal opportunity to develop to their full potential.

AAUW's work to eliminate gender bias in the classroom and address gender gaps in education benefits both boys and girls. Rather than pit one group against another, we believe this is a win-win scenario for all students. However, since Kleinfeld does make some specific charges against AAUW's research, allow me to address her claims.

First, Kleinfeld's report -- commissioned by the conservative Women's Freedom Network -- uses 1998 figures, which show girls improving in math and science, to critique our 1992 finding that there was a gender gap in math and science. That's like using today's lower crime rates to say a 6-year-old study on increasing crime rates created a false alarm. AAUW recognizes and applauds the gains girls have made during the last six years. In fact, Gender Gaps documents the improvements girls have made in math and science since AAUW brought national attention to the problem in 1992.

Even if you look at the most recent data, the way Kleinfeld does, there still are significant gender differences in schools that must be addressed, including grades and test scores, health and development risks and career development.

As both How Schools Shortchange Girls and Gender Gaps reported, girls earn better grades than boys. Despite this fact, boys continue to score higher than girls on high-stakes tests -- the Preliminary Scholastic Assessment Tests, or PSAT, the Scholastic Assessment Tests, or SAT, the American College Test, or ACT -- that determine college admissions and scholarship opportunities. Boys score higher on both the math and verbal sections on these exams, with the gender gaps being the widest for high-scoring students.

As both Gender Gaps and Kleinfeld point out, girls' enrollment in advanced placement, or AP, or honors courses is comparable to those of boys, except in AP physics and AP computer science. In fact, more girls take AP English, foreign language and biology. However, girls do not score as well as boys on the AP exams that can earn college credit, even in subjects such as English where girls earn top grades.

Girls' academic success also is affected by the tough issues facing students -- pregnancy, violence and harassment -- that rarely are discussed in school. AAUW believes that schools can play a key role in developing healthy and well-balanced students.

Although Kleinfeld tries to discredit AAUW's work by pointing to the large number of boys in special education, our 1992 report paid careful attention to the fact that boys outnumbered girls in these programs by startling percentages. It also cited studies on learning disabilities and attention-deficit disorders that indicated that they occurred almost equally in boys and girls.