More female teachers

The argument

Those who hold that the school system favours girls begin with the composition of the teaching workforce. In the UK, only 15% of primary school teachers and 38% of secondary school teachers are male, so the education sector is dominated by female teachers and female voices. The claim is not that individual teachers intend to disadvantage boys. It is that when one group supplies almost all of the judgement about what good classroom behaviour looks like and what content is worth teaching, that group's own norms become the unexamined default against which every pupil is measured. Two mechanisms are said to follow. The first concerns conduct. Female teachers, on this account, are more likely to enforce behavioural expectations that require students to sit still in the classroom and work independently. Those capacities are not distributed evenly: boys develop these abilities later than girls, so the same expectation is a modest demand for one group and a difficult one for the other. Because conduct in class is assessed continuously and shapes how a pupil is regarded by staff, a boy who cannot yet meet the standard is not merely failing a behavioural test; he accumulates a reputation that colours the teaching he subsequently receives. The second concerns content. Teachers are also likely to teach content that appeals to their own interests, and a predominantly female staff will tend to select accordingly, setting more literature with female protagonists that female students can more closely relate to. A boy given a curriculum chosen against someone else's tastes has less reason to engage with it, which further alienates boys in the classroom and demotivates male students. Conduct and content therefore pull in the same direction rather than offsetting one another, and on this view the result is a system that benefits girls more than boys.

Context

Female teachers are more likely to adopt teaching strategies and enforce behaviour norms that are better suited to female students. This disadvantages male students.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Existing data doesn’t indicate that the larger volume of female teachers in schools is hindering male students’ academic performances. The percentage of female teachers in the US has been increasing since the 1990s. However, over the same period, male students have been able to close the reading gap. This does not support the argument that female teachers are forcing unattainable behavioural expectations on boys. Nor does it support the theory that female teachers teach literature that alienates male students. If this were the case, we would expect the reading gap between male and female students to widen as the percentage of female teachers increased. Another German study which tracked male and female student academic achievement up to the age of ten found that teacher gender, age, pay and qualifications had no impact on male or female students’ academic performance. Similarly, a study undertaken in the UK looked examined 8,978 11-year-old boys across England and found that the teacher's gender was unrelated to academic performance. Male teachers did nothing to boost academic performance and, by contrast, researchers concluded that female educators actually improved the boys' attitude to learning. It could, therefore, be concluded that female educators bring out the best in both male and female students in primary school.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] This conclusion is not supported by the data.