Boys, Girls and Grades: Introduction

Boys, Girls, and Grades: Academic Gender Balance in British Columbia's Secondary Schools provides insight into our schools' relative success in meeting the individual needs of their students. It does this by comparing the performance, in a number of dimensions, of two identifiable sub-populations of the student body, boys and girls.

What Should We Expect
from Our Schools?

The quality of a school's academic program is defined to a considerable degree by its ability to help all its students reach their potential, regardless of their personal characteristics, background, aptitudes, and interests. An effective school will design its programs and their delivery to ensure that individual differences are taken into account. It makes little sense to develop highly sophisticated academic programs that are beyond the capabilities of the majority of students or to teach courses in a manner entirely unsuited to their established patterns of learning behaviour. It is not enough simply to throw the ball. Sound educational practice also ensures that the intended recipient is able to catch it.

The concept of accounting for differences among students in the teaching process--teaching in context--is routinely touted as a critical component of the school system's mission and as an achievable goal of effective teaching and counselling. It is a cornerstone of the mandate of British Columbia's Ministry of Education:

The purpose of the British Columbia school system is to enable all learners to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy, democratic, and pluralistic society and a prosperous and sustainable economy.' 1

The British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF) is equally forthright. It maintains:

Children with economic disadvantages do not see those disadvantages perpetuated through the education they receive. Indeed, we consciously address that disadvantage by trying to ensure equal learning opportunities for all students in all parts of the province . . . Two of the key principles of public education are equity and inclusion. Public schools in B.C. have established strong guarantees that children with special needs have those needs met. 2

While we assume that the BCTF's statements speak to students with specific physical, mental, or social challenges, we suggest that every student has special needs--some quite probably associated with their gender--and that each student should be entitled to these same guarantees. We doubt that the Ministry or the BCTF would disagree.

How Can We Determine the Extent to Which Schools Take Student
Context into Account?

Fortunately, there are data that reflect our schools' effectiveness in taking into account one aspect of context: student gender. 3 These sub-populations--young men and young women--do not always fair equally well in every school.

This finding is not entirely a surprise. There has been tremendous public interest in recent years about the perceived difference in the academic accomplishment of male and female students. This interest was heightened by the 1992 publication of a study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), How Schools Short-change Girls. 4 The report laid partial blame at the feet of the education system for a variety of shortcomings in girls' education. There were specific concerns about: opportunities for intellectual development; access to advanced education, specialized training and employment opportunities; and personal physical and psychological development. The ensuing debate led to a proliferation of so-called gender-equity programs. The expressed purpose of these programs was to ensure a classroom atmosphere in which girls would have the same opportunities to succeed as boys had apparently always enjoyed.

The gender equity program introduced by British Columbia's Ministry of Education predates the AAUW's report by two years and survives to this day. Its mandate is as follows:

Program Goal

To improve the opportunities, access, and support for all girls and women in the British Columbia school system by promoting the principles of gender equity.

Program Objectives

To both inform about, and actively promote, gender equity in the education system through a consultative, collaborative process.

To support initiatives generated throughout the education community that actively promote gender equity.

To assist the education community in identifying and removing the barriers girls and women face in pursuing their education.

To provide learners with information about a wide variety of career options, and to encourage them to explore these options fully.

To recognize, value, and encourage the diverse ways women provide educational leadership. 5

While the program recognizes the value of equitable treatment of both genders, it remains single-sexed in its approach:

The negative consequences of stereotypical conceptions and discriminatory practices adversely affect males as well as females. However, in the short term, greater emphasis in the gender equity initiatives will be placed on improving conditions and attitudes as they affect girls and women. In the long term, these initiatives will also improve the situation for boys and men. 6

Recently, the question of poor general school performance by male students has been raised among educators and parents alike. A particularly interesting challenge appeared in a recent issue of the BCTF's news magazine, Teacher. 7 The author, Pat Clark, then an assistant director in the Federation's Professional Development Division, draws attention to the apparent absence of boys in school honours lists, in the ranks of student leaders, and among post-secondary entrance scholarship winners. More recent commentary, occasioned by the relatively poor showing of male students on literacy tests of the 1998 School Achievement Indicator Program, also sounds alarm bells. Nathan M. Greenfield, the Canadian correspondent for the Times Education Supplement, writes in The National Post:

Put simply, boys have been socialized to believe that it's cool to be semi-literate.

Nowhere in our culture does a 13-year-old boy find support for being a good reader. Schools used to provide this, but over the past 15 or so years, schools and educrats have viewed boys as things to be contained, controlled and, to be blunt, made nice. 8

A recent editorial in The Globe and Mail put it even more bluntly.

[I]t would seem that, at the very least, we as a society have been complacent about the less-than-literate boys of our culture. At the most, we have been practising a form of gender bias. What the disproportionate attention paid to girls' schooling problems says is: boys' deficiencies matter less, because boys matter less. 9

However, it is Mr. Clark's challenge that put the matter into focus. After worrying about the emergence of a "growing underclass of rogue males," he asked his fellow teachers these questions: "Is this a problem or not? Is there anything teachers, schools, trustees, and government can do, or are we doing the best we can now?" 10

As we will show in a later section, there appears to be no compelling evidence that girls and boys should, given effective teaching and counselling, experience differential rates of success. Thus, since neither nature nor policy lead one to expect them, it is important to determine the extent of gender-based performance differences.

info@fraserinstitute.ca You can contact us at the above email address for any comments or information requests. Please report any dead links or technical problems.

If you know someone who would be interested in this web page, please enter their email address below, and we will forward this URL to them: Email Address:

Last Modified: Thursday, May 20, 1999.