Do Teachers Really Discriminate Against Boys?

Worries about the declining academic performance of boys, a topic of increasing alarm this past decade, have intensified recently. It seems that boys are being judged both unduly harshly and leniently at school. A new study on gender disparities in elementary school performance — the first study to examine both objective and subjective performance—found that boys were given lower grades than girls, even in cases (such as math and science) where their test scores were either equal to, or higher than, the girls’ test scores.

It seems like out-and-out discrimination, except that 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 towards 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 grades better than girls, 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.

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