ID EAS ED UC ATIO N

All Teachers Should Be Trained To

Overcome Their Hidden Biases
Soraya Chemaly @schemaly

Feb. 12, 2015

Soraya Chemaly is a media critic and activist.

They dont mean to play favorites, but its happening anyway with critical consequences for
young girls
Last week, two studies revealed that unexamined teacher biases are having a
significant effect on girls education. The first found that gender stereotypes are
negatively affecting girls math grades and positively affecting boys. The second
revealed how disproportionately penalized young black girls are for being
assertive in classroom settings. Together, they make the clearest possible case for
making it mandatory for teachers to be trained in spotting and striving to
overcome their implicit biases.
The findings of the first study reveal both the short and long-term effects of
primary school teachers implicit beliefs about gender on childrens math skills
and ambitions. Researchers found that girls often score higher than boys on
name-blind math tests, but once presented with recognizable boy and girl names
on the same tests, teachers award higher scores to boys. The long-term effects are
amplified by socioeconomic factors and family structuregirls from families
where fathers were better educated than mothers and who are from lower
socioeconomic communities were the most negatively affected.
The impact of unconscious teacher bias is long understood and well-documented.
This new research confirms decades of work done by Myra and David Sadker and
Karen R. Zittleman. Through thousands of hours of classroom observations, the
Sadkers and Zittleman identified specific ways in which implicit and stereotypical
ideas about gender govern classroom dynamics. They, as others have, found that
teachers spend up to two thirds of their time talking to male students; they also
are more likely to interrupt girls but allow boys to talk over them. Teachers also
tend to acknowledge girls but praise and encourage boys. They spend more time
prompting boys to seek deeper answers while rewarding girls for being quiet.
Boys are also more frequently called to the front of the class for demonstrations.
When teachers ask questions, they direct their gaze towards boys more often,
especially when the questions are open-ended. Biases such as these are at the root
of why the United States has one of the worlds largest gender gaps in math and
science performance. Until they view their videotaped interactions, teachers
believe they are being balanced in their exchanges.
The two reports released last week were focused on girls. However, the same
biases have been implicated in teachers unconsciously undermining boys interest
in the arts and language, enabling harmful gender gaps in self-regulation, and
tacitly accepting certain male students propensity to believe that studying is for
girls all factors that contribute to boys lower academic performance. An
understanding of implicit bias, coupled with data analysis, shows the degree to
which what is typically portrayed as a boy crisis in education is actually more a
crisis of income disparity and related to class-based constructions of masculinity.
However, while boys lives are impoverished in these ways, boys within each
racial/class category benefit overall from beliefs that institutionalize boys being
boys attitudes, a problem directly related to the second report released last week.

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The report, which included data on black girls heightened vulnerability and
overpolicing, showed extraordinarily high rates of school suspension for African
American girls in New York, where Black girls are twelve times more likely than
their white counterparts to be suspended. In Boston, eleven Black girls face
suspension for every white girl that does. U.S. government surveys show that
while Black children make up less than 20% of preschoolers, they make up more
than half of out-of-school suspensions. Black boys have the highest rates of
suspension overall, but nationally up to 12% of black girls are suspended
annually. This is twice the rate of suspension of white boys. In effect, teacher
biases are resulting in black girls being disproportionately punished for behavior
that boys-crisis-in-education advocates want schools to accommodate by
becoming more boy friendly. In the words of researcher Megan McClelland, In
general, there is more tolerance for active play in boys than in girls. Girls are
expected to be quiet and not make a fuss. This expectation may be coloring some
teachers perceptions.
Teacher (and parent) biases regarding science and math reflect the profound
degree to which the target student implicitly remains white, male and of higher
social status. Last year, rates of girls taking STEM-related advanced placement
tests reached a record low. In two states not a single girl (in some states there
were also no boys of color) took the Computer Science AP. Parental and teacher
biases are the root cause of the systemic inhibition of diversity in the tech pipeline
that we face today. Our two-decade long flat lining of girls STEM participation
will affect sex-segregated wage and wealth gaps for years to come. If we want to
disrupt this reality, we need to understand why, by the time American girls reach
the age of 10, simply checking off a female box at the top of a test results in
lower test scores. For girls of color, gender and race create a double jeopardy
stereotype threat. If anything at all is evident from studies of classroom
interactions it is how dynamic the interplay between gender, race, ethnicity and
social class are.
The issue of whose assertive qualities, self-expression, and imagination are being
cultivated and whose are being penalized speaks directly to the broader harms of
not taking a nuanced intersectional approach to the problem of education.
Everyones lives are impoverished by these bias and the stereotype threats they
cultivate in children. When we tackle the ugly sexism of the tech industry, try to
understand why young boys are killing themselves, or contemplate the aggrieved
racialized and gendered entitlement at the heart of so much of our violence, we
are fighting rear-guard actions. Its too little, too late. Very little of this is done
with malicious forethought. Training teachers to understand bias will not
eliminate it, but it could create an institutional environment in which it is clear
that understanding bias and its effects is critically important. The long-term
return on investment is inestimable.

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