Slate's Bizbox
the undercover economist: The economic mysteries of daily life.

Snips, Snails, and Puppy Dog TailsThere's finally proof that boys do ruin schools for girls.

By Tim Harford
Posted Saturday, Sept. 1, 2007, at 7:33 AM ET
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand.

My colleague at the Financial Times, Isabel Berwick, recently mourned the closure of her fondly remembered all-girls' school and regretted "a slow societal shift away from girls-only schools and colleges." As the father of two young daughters, I am paying attention.

Yet "slow" is the operative word. Girls' schools are clinging on tenaciously in the public sector here in Britain: More girls go to single-sex schools than boys. In inner London, parental preferences for girls' schools are particularly pronounced. The Guardian has reported that more than half of inner-London girls attend girls' schools, and just over a quarter of boys attend boys' schools. The result, of course, is that the mixed schools contain a disproportionate number of boys.

Parents make these choices because of a widely held belief that girls thrive in single-sex environments. But is that true? And what are the implications for the girls left surrounded by emotionally retarded adolescent males?

We are in the realm of so-called "peer effects" here, and they are notoriously hard to measure. Girls' schools produce good academic results, but that could be because particular types of parents favor such schools, because those schools have a strong historical record, or because of selection. I was lucky enough to go to a state-funded, single-sex, selective school in a prosperous neighborhood. My classmates did well in their exams, but there is an embarrassingly large range of explanations as to why.

A new working paper from economists Victor Lavy of Hebrew University and Analía Schlosser of Princeton attempts to unpick the peer effects associated with gender, using data on nearly half a million students passing through Israel's school system in the 1990s. They compared consecutive year groups passing through the same school, figuring that if one year's group was 55 percent boys and the next year's was 55 percent girls, that difference was very likely to be random and thus susceptible to meaningful number crunching.

Their answer chimes perfectly with the conventional wisdom: Boys benefit from being in a classroom with girls, but girls do not benefit from being in a classroom with boys. What is interesting about Lavy and Schlosser's work is that it uses survey data provided by the children to work out what is causing the effects. The survey questions ask, for example, about violence in school, respect for teachers, classroom distractions, and relations among students.

Boys pollute the educational system, it seems, for a number of unmysterious reasons: They wear down teachers, disrupt classes, and ruin the atmosphere for everyone. And more boys are worse than fewer boys, not because they egg each other on but simply because more of them can cause more trouble in total.

It is all rather troubling, especially for the parents of little angels like my daughters. Evidently, it is impossible to satisfy the—apparently justified—parental demand to educate girls in single-sex schools and boys in mixed classes. (Not for the first time in my life, I conclude that the world doesn't have enough girls in it.)

Researchers from the University of London's Institute of Education have asked a related question, comparing mixed schools with single-sex schools (from the 1970s, when nonselective single-sex schools were more plentiful) rather than the varying gender balance within mixed schools. Their conclusions, published last year, were subtly different. They found that boys disrupt mixed classrooms, but found that boys did not do any worse if locked up in a single-sex school.

A social planner might thus conclude that all education should be single-sex. The difficulty is to combine this perspective with the principle of parental choice. I have the answer: a congestion-charge-style tax on parents who insist on polluting girls' education with their testosterone-fuelled little monsters. The money could go toward hiring extra teachers—and riot police.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Tim Harford is a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of The Undercover Economist, and his latest book is The Logic of Life.
Illustration by Rob Donnelly.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks from the Fray:

Even in jest your article failed at getting the point. Perhaps the problem is that the education system is not built to accommodate boys. In this case the problem could be that the system itself hurts boys. Girls, then, would thrive is a single sex classroom because they would exist in a system perfect for their temperaments without being "polluted" by the square pegs being forced into the round holes.

--tvdrpr

(To reply, click here.)

Boys do present behavioral and academic challenges that girls simply do not - statistically speaking. They do complicate the classroom environment. And girls are far more likely to read and do their homework, on the whole.

That said, I know I relate better to my young male students, and given my style, I don't have that many discipline problems in my classes.

It is worth stating that acclimating the sexes to each other is important. It's also worth mentioning that both genders dumb themselves down in efforts to be more attractive to the other. And THAT is perhaps one of the strongest selling points for single gender schools - the unburdening of students from all that counterproductive tension.

--bsdetector

(To reply, click here.)

Why discriminate against boys institutionally? Don't they have enough problems? Their suicide rates are triple that of girls, their achievement less, and on and on.

That said, I agree with Mr. Harford that there aren't enough girls, even in the Western World where, by and large, we don't selectively abort their pregnancies, so let me make my own appalling suggestion. Ban helmets and other measures that reduce the attrition rate of boys that nature clearly intended when we evolved to give birth to boys almost 51% of the time. The boy who swallows too many marbles or skateboards in traffic doesn't get to grow up to have boys of his own. A little passive eugenics will go a long way to restoring the balance that civilized society craves.

--Outrager

(To reply, click here.)

In the end, it's not about the students, but about the teachers. Whatever environment that is easier for teachers to control their situations would yield better academic results. The key factor is homogeneity. In other words, ANYTHING that increases homogeneity would be better for academic achievement simply because it's easier for the teachers to manage. Diversity or heterogeneity has the opposite effect. The academically worst scenario is a class consisting of hugely diverse students: different genders (including gays and lesbians), different age groups, different IQ levels, different cultural backgrounds, different income levels, etc... The teacher in such a classroom won't be able to assume anything to be in common among them, and so teaching one simple thing would be far more time-consuming than it would be in a homogeneous classroom. This was painfully obvious in high school when I first moved here from Japan.

So, they should not be surprised by this finding. This isn't about gender; gender happens to be one of many factors that causes the classroom to be more diverse, which is bad for academic achievements. BUT, the kids might be learning something that is not academic; things that cannot be measured, such as the ability to understand human beings. In the long run, the latter might actually be more important.

It could also be argued that boys adapt better to heterogeneous situations. In other words, it's not that boys ruin schools, but that girls are not as good at handling heterogeneous situations. The reason why boys could afford to be "emotionally retarded" is because they could operate more independently. Girls are more inter-dependent; their strengths are realized through inter-connections to others. And, homogeneity encourages more inter-connections.

--dyske

(To reply, click here.)

The people who do these studies about girls faring better in all girl schools are studying this from a liberal arts academic perspective. They usually find that girl students get higher grades in maths and science when there are no boys.

But one is not sending boy or girl children to school only to become better academic achievement machines. Children and teens need to be raised to be whole people, because that is what counts in your real life, not whether you got a 4.0 GPA or a 3.79. I mean really, now that you are an adult, when was the last time anyone ever asked you your HS GPA? You are judged in real life by what you do, not what academics you did long ago.

What is needed are more male educators in the primary and junior high school levels, to understand boy-thinking in co-ed schools. Female teachers try to make the boys behave in girl ways, and judge boy-behavior as misbehavior. When the boys don't sit still and act as passively as the typical girl student does, they see the boy as being bad.

When boys are no longer judged by predominantly adult female perspectives, they will not be seen as mis-behaving versions of girls.

--Andrea Enthal

(To reply, click here.)

(9/4)

Washington Post