America's girls are said to face a grave threat: their schools. Word has it that hordes of sexual harassers prey on girls in classrooms and corridors; that teachers routinely ignore or mistreat them; that sexist textbooks degrade them; that gender-biased tests underrate them; and that the entire elementary and secondary education system conspires to break their spirits, cripple their self-esteem, and curtail their careers.
This is the news that certain feminist advocates, with the help of the media, have spread. As a result, "gender bias" has emerged as one of the main concerns of the school-reform movement. School districts have comeunder pressure to eliminate policies and practices that cannot be deemed "gender neutral." Colleges and universities have been overhauling their education departments to ensure that they are not training tomorrow's teachers in the use of gender-biased instructional methods. States have passed laws designed to promote gender equity and crack down on in-school sexual harassment (even when the alleged perpetrators are children in first or second grade). The previous Congress also joined the crusade, voting to amend its chief school- funding bill with language enlisting various federal programs in the battle for gender equity.
It seems an unquestionably noble cause, the rescue of schoolgirls. But the truth is that girls do not need to be rescued. The much-bemoaned schoolgirls crisis is largely a hoax. By most academic and social measures, the nation's girls are doing fine, and it's the boys we should be worried about.
So where ddid this widespread misperception come from? It came not from a consensus of education researchers, but a slick public-relations campaign mounted by the leadership of a single advocacy group, the American Association of University Women. The AAUW commissioned, published, and hyped the three reports on schoolgirls that sounded the alarm in the popular media; these reports compose the bible of the ongoing crusade. The AAUW has also taken the lead in lobbying for a policy agenda meant to remedy the problems alleged in its reports.
While the group's leadership insists it mounted its campaign out of a sincere concern for girls, its own literature betrays ulterior motives: ideology and self-interest. AAUW officials had resolved to instill the belief that schools discriminate systematically against girls long before much of anything besids feminist theory told them this was so. Soon, they came to see a crusade as a way to raise their organization's profile, recruit new members, and solicit new donations.
The AAUW issued the first of its three reports, "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America," in 1991. The report found that girls' self-esteem plunges during adolescenced and that schools bear much of the blame. A 1992 report, "How Schools Shortchange Girls," concluded that girls are the victims of severe educational discrimination that affects their marks, course selections, and career possibilities. A 1993 report, "Hostile Hallways," exposed what the AAUW
The national leadership's vision of a "gender-fair" education system left little to chance. Under the proposed new order, states would not certify prospective teachers and school administrators unless they had taken courses on gender-related subjects such as new research on women. Teacher-training programs would tell prospective pedagogues that they "must not perpetuate assumptions about the superiority of traits and activities traditionally ascribed to males in our society." School systems would evaluate administrators, teachers, and counselors based on their efforts to promote and encourage gender equity.
And schools would have to submit to annual evaluations conducted with the assistance of the AAUW's new "Gender Equity Assessment Guide," which asks: Are girls equally represented in all classes, sports, and activities? Are " multicultural and gender sensitivities . . . raised in every aspect of the curriculum?" Are procedures in place "to review textbooks, teaching methods, and curricula for gender-role stereotyping?" Do the school's health-care providers offer a "full range of reproductive health services?" Etc. The answer, of course, must be yes, and woe to the school official who might defend the standard curriculum or express fear that offering a "full range of reproductive health services" would spark a parent rebellion.
The AAUW's second report, "How Schools Short-change Girls," attempted to explain exactly what makes the status quo so destructive to the women of tomorrow. Conducted under contract by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, it concluded, based on a review of 1,331 previous studies, that schoolgirls are the victims of profound gender bias at all grade levels. Teachers lavish substantially more attention on boys, it said. Textbooks erode girls' enthusiasm for learning by downplaying the achievements and experiences of women. Schools avoid discussing health-related topics, such as birth control, that are especially crucial to girls' development. Although girls enter school on the same footing as boys, they fall behind in key subjects because of their second-class treatment, and then on top of it all, they are asked to take standardized college-admissions tests that are biased against them.
Unfortunately, the report shortchanged its readers by presenting only half the picture. It failed to note that much of the extra attention that boys get from teachers comes in the form of scoldings and reprimands. It disregarded Education Department statistics showing that girls have almost caught up to boys in science and mathematics and are doing much better than boys in reading. It glossed over the fact that girls have substantially narrowed the gender gap in college-entrance test scores and are actually more likely than boys to complete high school and obtain college or graduate degrees.
The report gave no clue that boys generally receive lower grades on their report cards, or that boys are far likelier to be suspended or held back a year, or that boys account for two-thirds of children in special-education programs. Attempting to portray boys as youth's favored gender, brimming with confidence and self-esteem, the AAUW also failed to account for the particular self-destructiveness of adolescent males: Not only are boys two to four times likelier to commit suicide, depending on their age, they also stand much greater risks of being murdered, killed in car accidents, or incarcerated later in life, according to data compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics and other federal agencies.
The AAUW and its researchers denied any sort of bias. "Advocating for girls and women's rights is important, but our business is not advocacy, our business is research," asserted Susan McGee Bailey, executive director of the Wellesley center. Journalists once again took the AAUW at its word and gave currency to its claims. Educators scrambled to show worried parents that they were attentive to the problems described in the report, which was accompanied by an "action guide" telling AAUW members how to whip up public support for certain school reforms.
"The early reports are in and it's clear that the 'Initiative for Educational Equity' is the right issue at the right time for the AAUW," boasted a new letter to AAUW branches. Instead of suggesting how to help girls, the accompanying instructional packet described how to capitalize on the popular appeal of the crusade to help the AAUW. Branch leaders were urged to ask themselves: "How will Initiative efforts help our branch achieve membership growth, visibility, and fundraising goals?"
Much of the packet read like a training manual for door-to-door salesman. It advised branch leaders: View everyone you meet in the course of the gender- equity campaign as a target for membership recruitment. Invite them to branch meetings where you can get their addresses and phone numbers and fellow members can chat them up. Push them to join and, "if possible, take their checks on the spot." When networking with other educational organizations or women's groups, ask for their membership or donor lists. "The overarching strategy is to turn every activity into a membership recruitment opportunity," it coached.
In June of 1993, the AAUW issued its explosive third report, "Hostile Hallways." Its shocking conclusion: 85 percent of girls have experienced sexual harassment in school. In a survey conducted by Louis Harris & Associates of 1,630 8th-through 11th-graders, 65 percent of girls complained of having been touched, pinched, or grabbed in a sexual way, and a fourth of the girls who reported being sexually harassed identified teachers or other school employees as the perpetrators.
But, perhaps due to the seriousness of its allegations, educators and social scientists seemed less inclined to accept this third report on its face. They argued that the AAUW had defined "sexual harassment" too broadly and thus risked trivializing the problem. In many cases, the alleged transgressions were unwelcome comments, jokes, gestures, or looks.
Skeptics asked, Were girls being subjected to a teenagers' Tailhook or just horseplay, adolescent taunts, and the awkward romantic overtures of unpopular boys? Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, complained that the report blurred the lines "between acts that are criminal and acts that are merely rude" and paved the way for schools to adopt new codes of conduct conveying the message that students "have an absolute right never to be offended." The report appeared to assume that the unsavory behavior it described was the product of a sexist society. Conservative scholars and pundits have posed an alternative explanation: that such behavior is actually the bitter fruit of the sexual revolution that feminists helped bring about.
But the AAUW stuck by its guns and called on schools to crack down on sexism. The crusade rolled onward, drawing new support and gaining ground on several fronts. In some school districts, the AAUW forced more changes in education policy in the space of a few short years than had advocates for black children in forty. Philanthropies and government agencies poured money into new programs for girls. All-girls private schools enjoyed a dramatic upsurge in popularity -- as did women's colleges such as Wellesley. A few public schools set up separate classes for girls, even as women's-rights groups elsewhere were trying to block districts from forming experimental academies for black males.
By now, other groups with more overtly feminist agendas were getting into the act. Inspired by the AAUW's research, the Ms. Foundation for Women launched "Take Our Daughters to Work Day." Its curriculum included handouts that lionized Anita Hill and Gloria Steinem and sought to teach children a litany of widely disputed statistics, telling them, for example, that a woman earns 71 cents to a man's dollar and that "10 percent of American women are lesbians." One handout listed a court's ruling that a lesbian couple comprised a "family of affinity" as a key historical event of 1992.
The effort was soon joined by the National Education Association. Working with the Wellesley College center, it produced Flirting or Hurting, a 106- page guide instructing teachers of 6th-through 12th-graders how to fight student-to-student sexual harassment. The authors, both from Wellesley, were Nan Stein, who had recently contributed to the book Transforming a Rape Culture, and Lisa Sjostrom, who had written both the Ms. Foundation's curriculum and a primer called The Mother Daughter Revolution Reader's Companion Guide. Among Flirting or Hurting's admonishments: "When a target complains about being sexually harassed, it should not be within the purview of school staff members to decide whether or not the situation being described constitutes sexual harassment."
In April of 1993, the AAUW proudly announced that Congress had been moved to respond to its "irrefutable" evidence of extensive gender bias in schools. Flanked by officials of the AAUW and other women's groups, the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues announced an ambitious package of House bills dubbed the "Gender Equity in Education Act." Education Week placed the annual cost of the measures at $ 360 million -- three times what the Education Department was spending on school desegregation and nearly half again its budget for bilingual education and immigrant programs. The proposed legislation created an Office of Gender Equity and funded the recruitment of female math and science teachers. Later that summer, members of the Senate offered a similar group of bills.
Congressional support was overwhelming. Elsewhere, however, the fanfare, rhetoric, and additional federal spending associated with these measures caused the gender-equity crusade to pop up on conservative radar screens. Barbara J. Ledeen, executive director of the Independent Women's Forum, denounced the legislation as "feminist pork" and asserted that its underlying philosophy demeaned women by viewing them as victims.
But the most visible critic was Christina Hoff Sommers, a Clark University philosophy professor whose new book, Who Stole Feminism?, debunked the AAUW reports and an assortment of other statistics popularized by feminists. She blasted the AAUW studies as biased "advocacy research" and alleged that the federal legislation they inspired "will enrich the gender-bias industry and further weaken our schools."
Sommers's book attracted wide-spread attention and secured her a place on the talk-show circuit. Outraged, the AAUW became part of a coordinated effort to attack her credibility. "We need to respond and respond loudly," the liberal media-watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting said in a letter mailed to AAUW officials and other feminist activists. Both FAIR and the AAUW sent formal complaints demanding retractions from Simon & Schuster, Sommers's publisher. When Ann Bryant took to the radio to defend the AAUW studies against Sommers's criticisms, an interoffice memorandum urged her staffers to flood the talk show's switchboard with sympathetic questions and comments. "Men usually dominate as call-ins, so we need all the friendly calls we can get," implored Gabrielle Lange, an AAUW public-relations official.
Eventually, gender-equity legislation was passed into law. Since then, however, the new Republican-led Congress has come under pressure from conservatives to repeal some of its measures. Rather than simply defend the AAUW's reports, gender-equity crusaders have been questioning the motives of the critics by asking, What difference does it make if the AAUW's research was flawed? What is important, they argue, is that the reports succeeded in making the nation aware of the educational needs of girls. Only a sexist reactionary would fret over the veracity of reports that so clearly serve the best interests of girls.
Logic of this kind is seductive to those prone to confusion about ends and means. This is because it ignores the harsh truth that our public schools have finite resources with which to address overwhelming demands. Far from fully meeting the needs of all students, most school administrators wrestle with the dilemma of how to apportion neglect. And hard decisions should be based on accurate information, not propaganda.
The AAUW has a point when it says that girls lag behind in science and math and that schools should be doing more about it. But instead of directing its energies toward changing the way these subjects are taught, the AAUW decided that a complete transformation of the school culture was required. The sweeping and diffuse education-policy agenda that it subsequently adopted seems more concerned with having schools produce feminists than with having them produce new generations of female doctors and engineers.
And given that our education system seems to be having enough trouble teaching the basics, parents might question whether schools should be in the business of quizzing students on the glories of Anita Hill or disciplining them for sending a valentine to the wrong classmate. The AAUW, aware that many children learn traditional notions of gender from their parents, has been promoting the slogan "Raise boys and girls the same way." The slogan tips the organization's hand and reveals its true agenda: not a laudable quest for basic fairness, but a radical desire to create a society in which the concept of gender no longer applies. Such thinking ignores both the biological basis of gender and the wishes of many parents, who would rather raise boys as boys and girls as girls and feel it is their prerogative to do so. Even those parents who accept the AAUW's philosophy and want to raise boys and girls the same way often find that doing so is impossible, if not downright cruel to the children.
If the gender-equity crusade were truly motivated by an earnest concern for all children, rather than feminist ideology, one might expect its leaders to be concerned with the serious problems that plague boys. For the most part, they aren't. The AAUW has not just diverted attention from the problems of boys, it appears to have opened the door to outright discrimination against them. One AAUW pamphlet asserts that even when all children are treated exactly the same, "there may be a negative impact on girls because they may experience it differently than boys."
The sorriest truth is that the reforms inspired by the crusade may actually harm the education of both boys and girls. "There is reason to fear [that] such programs and policies will deepen gender stereotypes, 'water' down the curriculum, label girls as having 'special needs,' and ultimately cheat all students," warned Roberta Tovey, a writer and teacher from Boston, in The Harvard Education Letter last year. In pushing for the equal representation of girls in all classrooms, the AAUW may, perversely, be putting schools under pressure to assign more girls to low4evel compensatory and special- education classes, where they are now out-numbered.
If the AAUW genuinely wants to rescue girls, it can start with this: by sparing those, girl and boy, who risk being trampled by its crusade.
Peter Schmidt investigated gender issues as a staff writer for Education Week.