The Gender Equation in Schools

How to Create Equity and Fairness for All Students

Jason Ablin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000585889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

This compelling book takes you inside a teacher's journey to explore the question of gender in education. Jason Ablin uses his background in math teaching, school leadership, and neuroscience to present expert interviews, research, and anecdotes about gender bias in schools and how it impacts our best efforts to educate children. He provides practical takeaways on how teachers and leaders can do better for students. There is also a handy Appendix with step-by-step guides for facilitating faculty-wide conversations around gender; writing learning reports without gender bias; using student assessments to check gendered attitudes about learning; evaluating learning spaces; and creating an inquiry map of your classroom. As a teacher, administrator, DEI director, or homeschooling parent, with the strategies and stories in this book, you'll be ready to embark upon your own journey to balance the gender equation and create greater equity for all of your students.

About the Author

With over thirty years in education and educational leadership, Jason Ablin has served as a teacher, department chair, principal, and head of school. He holds national certification in leadership coaching and mentoring from the National Association of School Principals and has been supporting and mentoring new leaders throughout the country for over ten years.

In 2008 in a sabbatical year, he partnered with top developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience researchers to bring research findings into the classroom and education. He has written for the prestigious journal, Mind, Brain and Education, about the research findings of Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of USC who examined the impact of two boys who received functional hemispherectomies and its impact on their capacity to learn.

As an instructor at American Jewish University’s graduate programs for teacher training and master’s degrees in education and in school-based teacher workshops, he trains teachers to create gender aware classrooms and has taught year-long courses to teams of educators in graduate level seminars regarding the relationship between cognitive neuroscience and education. He is also the founder and director of AJU’s Mentor Teacher Certification Program.

A native of the Lower East Side in New York, with a BA from Vassar College and an MA from New York University, Jason Ablin now lives in Los Angeles for thirty years with his wife, Lisa Bellows Ablin, and daughters, Kayla Danit and Noa Sarit.

Follow Jason on Twitter @JasonAblin and continue the conversation using the hashtag #thegenderequation!

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003217022-1

I decided to go for it. After twenty-five years in formal education, working as a teacher and administrator in middle and high schools, I decided it was time to challenge some assumptions and see what would happen. In the fall of 2013, I took the position of principal at a well-regarded private Pre-K through eighth grade day school in the middle of Los Angeles. I was ridiculously excited about the opportunity; I had never been a leader in a school with an early childhood and elementary school. I had read reams of papers and research regarding children as young as newborns through ten years old, but I had never seen them in action day in, day out. I was excited to get to know them, to support their growth, and to learn.

Few doctors grew up in a hospital, few lawyers cut their teeth in a courtroom, few senators had their first life experiences in the halls of government. Teaching is the only profession where we distinctly return to the scene of the crime. Teaching is the only profession where you will already have spent, modestly, somewhere between 17,000 to 20,000 hours in the place you will later call your workplace. Yet for teachers, summoning the memories of childhood experiences can be productive, but can also be fraught with complications, reinforcing social trends that need a true revolution such as the issue of gender.

Many of my past students would gladly share that I never felt shy or inhibited about rattling them to push the larger agenda of growth. One of my favorite expressions for new teachers is that our job is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” In a crowded auditorium at the beginning of back-to-school night, at my new school, in September 2013, with over 500 parents in the room, I decided it was time to make everyone uncomfortable.

After introducing myself and expressing how excited I was about the coming year, I announced that I had a homework assignment for everyone in the room. I told the parents that over the course of the year I wanted to hear reports back from them about how it was going. I made pointed eye contact with a number of women in the audience before making my next statement.

‘Moms, you are now responsible for doing your math homework with your daughters when they need your help. No waiting for Dad to come home, no telling her that you’re not good at it, no saying, ‘Call a friend.’ You need to dive in and support your daughters with their math studies this year. Use the Internet, call someone and ask for help, look at the materials sent home from the teacher to support. And, no telling your female students that you were ‘just not good at math in school.’

‘Dads,’ I turned my gaze towards several of the men in the audience. ‘Your homework is to read to and with your sons. The Internet does not count. It can be newspapers, magazines, preferably books. Pick subjects you both like, do the assigned reading logs that come home from school, go to the library together. Whatever. You’re to show your sons that reading matters.’

I paused for emphasis. “I am calling many of you during the year to see how it is going.”

The crowd was silent except for a few surprised guffaws. Looking at the women, I saw some nervous smiles. I imagined they were thinking, “How am I going to do this? I hate math. Is he serious?”

The men were harder to read. Many remained expressionless.

Was I successful? I would give myself a fifty percent in touching a nerve or getting parents to respond as I requested. Starting with this first public speech in front of the school’s parent constituency, I spent the next five years engaging the mothers of our community in this conversation. I received anxious phone calls asking how to do it right. Success stories, epic failures, mothers who, after their children had graduated and matriculated into high school, were still doing the emotionally grinding work of putting their past insecurities aside to make a difference with their daughters. Teachers reported to me that, for the first time, mothers were asking for videos demonstrating how the math was being taught. The teachers felt pressed to find more supporting materials, but also felt validated and proud. They were experiencing parents who were seeing how tough it was to instruct students in complex subjects like math. The teachers were also having, many for the first time, gender conversations with parents. The mothers were willing to try to transcend their own anxiety about math for the best interests of their children. In other words, they got it. It was humbling and a good reminder what pain and discomfort parents are willing to endure for their children.

One mother, who found that her seventh-grade daughter was quite advanced in math, decided to take a parallel online algebra class. Her daughter, despite her talent in math, would grow nervous before exams, so the mother wanted to set a good example about overcoming stress. “When I came to my first online test for the class,” the woman told me,

I broke down in tears. I couldn’t get through the first three problems before I had to stop and shut my laptop. I was at work doing the test during lunch, and all my co-workers thought something terrible had happened. I told them it did. I had to take a math test!!

Mom shared this experience with her daughter and the girl smiled throughout the conversation because she finally felt heard. “I was sitting in an office by myself with nothing really at stake except my ego,” the mother recounted. “I had forgotten what it must be like to sit in some classroom with a group of overachieving math students constantly trying to prove that you belong.” I had similar conversations with other mothers; nothing that I have said to a room full of parents has mattered so much. In that regard, it felt like a victory and a major breakthrough. At least for the women.

The fathers? Not so much. Just one dad over the next five years engaged me about the task I had placed before them. One.

This didn’t entirely surprise me. Now, some of them might have taken on the challenge and just didn’t communicate with me about it (how shocking coming from men!). But I believe most dismissed my homework assignment for many reasons, obvious and subtle, which also speak to the profound work that we need to do regarding gender roles in our homes and our schools.

Some said it was the wife’s job to take care of schooling, or the teachers at this expensive private school. Some said their boys weren’t interested in reading. Some said they spent time with their kids in other ways – playing sports, going to their games. Others said they were too busy, as the breadwinners, working long hours to support their families. And others were just plain afraid.

“I’m afraid that my son will see that I am not a very good reader,” confided one father. “English is not my first language, and it was hard for me in school when I came to America and had to learn how to read.” Others admitted that they didn’t like to read, that there was a contradiction between what they say and what they do.

I say education is so important, but I never read, I do not take the time to learn new things. That I am a bit stuck, that I would rather wind down in front of a television than pick up a book – perhaps people will think there is something different or wrong about me if I am an avid, passionate reader – that this is not what boys do with their fathers.

I get upset, sad, and feel the pain when some father tells me, with a bizarre sense of pride, that he “got through” school without reading much or ever finishing a book. Statements like these represent a type of compensation in which men engage. As we will see further on, activities like reading can be associated with the feminine, very much challenging masculine constructions of the self. But I am by nature an optimist and hope that some fathers saw the point of what I was trying to communicate and decided to take some action, even if they never came to tell me about it.

Now, some of you may be asking the obvious question and the answer is, yes. Mothers should also be doing math with their sons and fathers should read with their daughters. Families and homes are complex, and throughout a child’s development, they need different gender experiences at different times. But gender alignment and modeling, the idea that children look to the parent of same sex for all sorts of cues, gestures, and attitudes to define gender, is very real. We cannot ignore how important it is to dispel the myths that have plagued both our boys and girls whether regarding areas of learning such as math or literacy.

Why the Gender Issue in Schools? Why Now?

It is 1983 and I am a freshman at Vassar College in upstate New York. I am sitting in my American Politics 101 class with Professor Sy Plotkin. He is notable in my life for two reasons. He gave me a “D” on my first college paper and his passion as an educator inspired me to major in Political Science and ultimately go into education.

But something else happened for me in Sy Plotkin’s class my first year of college that set me on a personal and professional journey for the next thirty-five years. He was discussing the galvanizing social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and how they shaped our current political system. The civil rights movement, labor, and indigenous peoples to name just a few. What he said next stuck with me ever since. Without dismissing the impact of all these minority movements, Prof. Plotkin said the women’s liberation movement was the most important. Not because the others didn’t matter. Far from it. But because of the numbers.

“It’s simple,” he continued, “How can you have over fifty percent of the country and the world’s population live under oppressive circumstances, treated unequally, and it not have severe ramifications for our ongoing development as a human race?”

For the first time in my short life, I was overtaken and overwhelmed by an idea. Not just its rightness, but also its clarity, logic, and moral imperative.

And, yes, it did matter for this eighteen-year-old that an older man was making this statement. Gender matters both in terms of the message being delivered and in terms of who is delivering that message.

Not only have too many men not taken the feminist movement seriously, but we refuse to significantly come to terms that we are at the heart of the problem. This is really on our shoulders to fix, within our schools, workplaces, within our families, within our houses of worship and, most importantly, within our hearts. For me to hear a man say these words was more than just coming to terms with a highly rational and thoughtful argument; it was a form of revelation. Plotkin was willing to humble himself and insert into his professional and personal framework this critical realization without apologetics. He knew and hoped he was shaping the minds of his students. I, at least, can account for the power of that moment.

So why is this the beginning, for me, of this story? Why is this the personal origin, at least consciously, of your author’s passion about gender in education?

The beginning of the 1980s was an inflection point in the history of American education. It was the start of our country’s turning away from the value of education as a central driver for the American Democratic experiment.

When the French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the early nineteenth century, he noted that every town he visited had two institutions, a house of worship and a school.¹ Schools represented the promise and training ground for a free mind and the flourishing of this new democratic experiment. The fight for equal education has been hard fought and continues today, crossing gender, racial, and socio-economic lines. There is no hiding from the fact that African American and Indigenous people’s school systems were specifically established and funded in such a way as to maintain inequalities and disparities. And the battle to create equal opportunities for women was a long and hard fight for justice. But I would contend that the argument for an equal education based on universal access is deeply rooted in our country’s philosophical soil. Those in power who wish to subvert this reality do so with largely perceived callousness and are regarded as attempting to subvert a fundamental American natural right.

By the late nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, this was nothing less than a revolutionary idea. This idea of an American education smashed notions of caste, social class, and institutionalized inequality and gave legs to the idea of the American Dream. American students had access, throughout their schooling years, to both an academic and industrialized education which was denied to other students in other countries beyond the age of thirteen, often based on tests which created elitist systems that favored the privileged or maintained deeply entrenched social and ethnic caste systems. In 1955–1956, nearly eighty percent of American students fifteen to nineteen were enrolled in full time general education, versus a high of thirty percent in most European countries. And there, many more students could only aspire and were relegated to technical training, having been sifted out of the road to a college education by the time they were thirteen.²

Regarding gender, while acknowledging that access for women to the entire curriculum was restricted, scholars Claudine Goldin and Lawrence Katz note that by “the end of the 19th century, coeducation existed in all schools and in all grades in most US cities. Rural schools were…uniformly coeducational by 1890.”³ They also record the reaction by education...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the Author