Beautifully written… for a boy!
Meredith Kleykamp, who is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, tweeted a photo of her son’s schoolwork that ought to raise eyebrows. Apparently her teacher thought that her son’s writing was good… for a boy.
My 3rd grade boy’s schoolwork. No lie. Why write this? pic.twitter.com/R4mZ5ZXIJO
— Meredith Kleykamp (@kleykamp) March 19, 2014
This should be interesting in light of two studies which concluded that female teachers (80% of elementary and middle school teachers are female) give boys lower grades. Boy’s test results show that their GPA should be higher than what they get if they have a female teacher.
From the Journal of Human Resources:
“Boys get lower grades than what their test scores would suggest and girls get higher grades than what their test scores would suggest,” said Jessica Van Parys, a co-author of the study published this month in The Journal of Human Resources and doctoral economics student at Columbia University.
“It shows that the gender differences in education emerge very early and it points to one potential explanation for why girls are outperforming boys in years of schooling and academic achievement,” Van Parys said. “It’s a piece to a very big puzzle.”
The boy’s writing could be good. That’s a stereotype that the writing of a girl needs to be beautiful and if you’re a boy you must be a sloppy writer. So if you’re a boy or girl who does need writing services, or want to pay for a research paper, Study Clerk has plenty of options available.
And from Time Magazine:
It seems like out-and-out discrimination, except there is an interesting wrinkle: teachers didn’t downgrade boys who had identical test scores to girls if they seemed to share the girls’ positive attitude toward learning. In fact, the opposite seemed to occur: the well-socialized boys received a small grade “bonus” for their good behavior relative to other boys, suggesting that teachers may be overcompensating when they encounter boys whose behavior exceeds expectations. In other words, boys who match girls on both test scores and behavior get better grades than girls do, but boys who don’t are graded more harshly. Which means that the issue of what to do with underperforming boys just got a lot more complicated.
Well then, the problem really isn’t that complicated after all. We just need to teach boys to be more like girls, right? Oh, we’re already doing that? Great. I’m sure that will make everyone happy.
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