Are My Pants Lowering Your Test Scores? Blaming Girls for Challenges Facing Boys

Background and Purpose: The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 focused on improving the educational performance of low-income youth of color, particularly that of boys. Single-sex education is viewed as a means to do so. By 2012, between 500 and 1,000 public schools in the U.S. offered single-sex education, compared with just 12 in 2002. Because single-sex public education is such a recent phenomenon, very little is known about its effects. In 2011, the school board in a rust-belt city combined its worst-performing schools, overwhelmingly populated by low-income African American students, into two “single-gender academies.” This project had two goals: 1) to document students’  and other stakeholders’ perceptions and experiences of single-sex public education, and 2) to train youth as co-researchers and thus empower them to participate in community change efforts.

Method: This qualitative study used community-based participatory methods to explore stakeholders’ experiences the year that single-sex education was introduced. The research team included university researchers and students recruited from 11th and 12th grade classrooms at the school. Through regular meetings and a structured mentoring process, the research team conducted 27 individual and 4 small group interviews with students, teachers, social workers, and parents. All youth interviewed were African American; two-thirds of adults interviewed were African American and one-third White. The research team took ethnographic field notes at the school throughout the year. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and data from interviews and field notes were analyzed inductively through an iterative process based on principles of grounded theory. 

Results: The “boy crisis” was understood by many respondents as the impetus for the move to single-sex education in this school. Unexpectedly, analyses revealed that girls and “girl power” were both implicitly and explicitly blamed for this crisis. Two specific ways in which girls were blamed emerged in analyses, namely, by being sexually distracting to boys through their behavior and dress and by being difficult, catty, and aggressive. Striking is the invisibility of boys and their behavior, though they are the unspoken focus of the girls’ attention-seeking behavior. Particularly noteworthy is the juxtaposition of rhetoric that blames girls with participants’ discussions of very specific instances and threats of boys’ and men’s violence against girls.

Conclusions and Implications: Separating students by sex to improve school performance implies that distraction from the other sex is the reason they are not learning. Thus, it reinforces problematic stereotypes about Black hypersexuality and diverts attention from the real causes of their challenges – racism and poverty. Further, it blames girls and their sexuality for challenges facing boys. Focusing on girls’ (supposed) sexually-distracting behavior and dress limits attention to hegemonic masculinity and the violence it facilitates, other family and neighborhood violence, and, most importantly, structural inequality. We cannot successfully intervene in the lives of marginalized young people if we identify sexual distraction and girls’ empowerment as the problem. Both boys and girls at this school face enormous challenges, and social workers should redress the endemic racism and poverty in our society that marginalize these young people.