EDUCATION - GENDER Boys and educational achievement Flashcards
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Literacy
The Department for Children, Schools, and Families found the gender gap is primarily a result of the boys’ poorer literacy and language skills.
May be because mothers do most of the story reading and also because parents spend less time reading to their sons.
Girls stereotypically have a bedroom culture where they stay in and talk to their friends.
Government has tried to combat this by creating Reading Champions, for example, which was developed by the UCL institute for Education and aimed to encourage independent reading.
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Globalisation - crisis of masculinity
Mac an Ghaill
Francis
crisis of masculinity is a reaction, according to Mac an Ghaill to the changing structure of employment and the decline of traditional, male, WC jobs.
globalisation = moved traditional male, WC jobs abroad to developing countries and kept the UK in a service sector position.
men become demotivated etc.
boys and men develop hegemonic responses and hegemonic masculine identities to gain status which leads them to reject education as it is not masculine which leads to underachievement:
Francis argues that laddish behaviour is a response to political correctness and feminism in the late 20th century.
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Feminisation
Sewell:
2006 - ‘we have thrown the boy out with the bathwater’
Tony Sewell believes that Education has become too feminised and that this alienation encourages boys to turn to gang violence to vent their anger.
Schools no longer nurture masculine traits such as competitiveness or leadership because they rather celebrate qualities that girls associate with such as organisational working and attentiveness.
He believes the growing importance of coursework over exams means that coursework should be replaced with exams and greater emphasis should be on outdoor adventure… a trait that boys often develop at a young age.
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Shortage of teaching staff
The lack of male role models both within the home and at school is also a contributor to underachievement… 1.5 million lone parent families means that boys face detriment.
76% of teachers were women, and there were more female than male teachers in every ethnic group (2020) (but only 65% of them were in headteacher positions)
The culture of primary school is so feminised that female teachers are unequipped to deal with or control boy’s behaviour.
Male teachers are also more likely to impose stricter discipline for their boys.
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Do we need more male teaching staff?
Barbara Read’s 2008 findings on teaching discourses
It may not be as big an issue as people think…
Read found that there were two forms of discourse:
DISCIPLINARIAN - teacher’s authority is made visible and explicit e.g., shouting
LIBERAL - teacher’s authority is invisible… ‘pseudo adultification’ means the teachers approaches the child as if they were mature adults.
51 primary teachers… 25 male, 26 female. Most teachers used the masculine disciplinarian discourse to control behaviour.
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Barbara Read’s conclusions
She found that the idea of feminisation is disproved because her study showed that female teachers also provide a stricter classroom culture where boys are supposedly said to thrive.
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Why we DON’T need more male primary school teachers
Malcolm Haase
Malcolm states that although women make up the majority of P.S teachers, it is more appropriate to describe primary schools as masculine but numerically dominated by women.
across all English state schools, we have 74% female teachers but only 65% female head teachers.
GENDER + CLASS + ETHNICITY
Laddish Subculture
Paul Willis - Learning to Labour
Learning to Labour = WC boys in midlands focused on the ‘lads’ who were disruptive and misbehaved and had very negative attitudes to education.
they formed anti-school subcultures where they thought it was cool to mess about and not be ‘ear’oles’ - they truanted, had bad behaviour, had discriminatory attitudes, and were sexist/homophobic/racist.
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Moral Panic
Jessica Ringrose 2013
Those critical of feminists argue that policies that solely promote girls’ progression are no longer needed.
Jessica Ringrose believes that views such as these have led to a moral panic about failing boys… this reiterates the fear of underachievement and it stems from the fear that W.C boys will grow up to become dangerous and part of the unemployable underclass.
WHY ARE GIRLS PERFORMING BETTER?
Why the moral panic is unnecessary
‘failing boys’ is too narrow a statement which ignores the problems of the disadvantaged W.C and minority ethnic pupils.
Secondly, it neglects the issues that girls face e.g., sexual harassment and bullying and identity issues.
GENDER + CLASS + ETHNICITY - which is more important in determining success?
the class gap at GCSE for achievement is three times wider than the gender gap.
GENDER + CLASS + ETHNICITY
Gillborn and Mirza
Connolly - intersectional approach
perspectives on what feature is most important
Gillborn and Mirza believe that class has 5 times the effect on educational achievement that gender has.
ethnicity has twice the effect on educational attainment that gender has.
Connolly believes that certain combinations of gender, class and ethnicity have more effect than others…being a girl benefits black Caribbeans more so than it would when in addition to being white
