Customer Reviews

Failing At Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

For every woman who ever sat in a classroom and was afraid to raise her hand, hunched her shoulders, or found a strength in finally speaking out. For their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands and children. Contrary to the negative reviews of this book, Orenstein is not attempting to 'blame the system', but to improve it and make girls and women more aware of how they themselves can get 'more for their money', per say, from the school system. Read this book if you even KNOW a girl.

This book is a meticulous documentation of how our educational system discriminates against girls. An illuminating example is how boys get called on more, even by conscientious teachers who both want to overcome this problem and know they are being observed

In addition to being a well-researched text, Failing at Fairness provides important antedotal evidence on girls' experience in school. I find it amusing that the two negative reviews here either contain substantive grammatical errors (lol) or criticize the authors for using girls' actual experiences -- hello -- social and cultural history provide very acceptable and important insights into human behavior. This text is a "must read" for educators and parents.

This book should be required reading for all teachers and educators of every sort. A very detailed view of how schools cheat girls by marginialising their roles in the classrooms of America. What makes this book so good, however, is that there are some potential solutions available; that is not to say that this book really has THE answers, but it is a step in the right direction. The statistics regarding the prefromance of females at all-girl schools are impressive, and may be of importance, since co-ed instituions often seem to neglect girls to a greater degree, but this only seems a temporary solution, as the workforce itself is co-ed, and females must get used to operating in such environments. The main thing that is necessary is for the educators to get educated themselves in what is going on; it seems all too likely that the most of the teachers who are doing these things are not even aware of it. If useful strategies are taught to future teachers as to how to combat gender bias, schools in the future may be a great deal fairer of their treatment of all students.

This book has really opened the eyes of many parents and teachers on our planning committee. The more we investigated the issues raised, the more validity we discovered. And most of all, even from the "good" teachers who thought they were doing a great job. We have had lots of spin-off research as a result of this wonderful resource.

I found this book to be quite enlightening in the sense that many do not want to recognize the social injustices that have plagued our society and ignored women's achievements throughout history. Not unlike the achievement gap that exists between poor and minority students and their more priveleged counterparts, it is crucial to address and evaluate the institutional barriers that exist within many school cultures today. Students who are disadvantaged because of biases that impede their emotional, career, and academic development in school and in their life deserve the additional support and attention that will allow them to reach the goals that were once not meant for them. Sadker and Sadker have done an excellent job in demonstrating another facet of accountability that teachers must embrace-that of demonstrating and practicing gender equity in the classroom.

The book came in the condition described and when they said it would. The price was great especially because I was buying it for a class.

Loved it. It is a good book about gender bias in schools. It is also a good book to bhave when studying Sociology in college or grad school. This is one of many Sadker books that I have in my collection. You can site many different chapters and I plan on using this for my thesis this coming year.

The issue of gender bias in our school system was identified as a major social problem over two decades ago, yet the problem still persists. Dr. Sadker presents startling research supporting her position--gender bias in our school systems, although not as blatant as in the past, still exists in more subtle, insidious ways. Additionally, the researchers also present a brief history of sexism in education stretching back to the colonial days. There can be little doubt that since our early history, educators have attempted to force girls and women into roles requiring dependence upon men. I'll admit some of the research methods may be open to interpretation or debate, but the overwhelming evidence supporting the authors' position cannot be ignored. If you are an educator, regardless of level, this book will open your eyes.

Failing at Fairness is an interesting blend of history, classroom research and observation, in depth analysis of standardized testing results, interviews and theory as they relate to the schooling of girls and women in the United States. The Sadkers show us how far women have come in the last century, in claiming their place in the classrooms of schools from elementary to graduate school both in front of the class, and behind the desk. They also show us how different that place is from the space filled by our male counterparts, and how sexism has seeped into every aspect of the female educational experience.

The Sadkers studied the numbers ---counting everything from female faces and names in textbooks and among teachers/professors, to school budgets for athletics, to questions and kudos offered to girls by teachers in the classroom. These numbers show that girls attend schools where the bulk of a teacher's attention in the classroom is focused on boys, their studies are centered on men and their achievements, they are taught by men (secondary education and beyond) and the bulk of their schools' budgets (including special ed and athletics) are spent on the boys. It is no wonder that the hopes and dreams of young girls are diminished as they enter adolescence, with doctors settling for nursing degrees, and chemists turning to cooking!

Fortunately, the Sadkers also point to the advances made under Title IX, the refocusing on gender equity by educators, parents, students and politicians in the 1990's after the backlash years under Reagan and Bush, and the media attention garnered by the AAUW's report in 1992 How Schools Shortchange Girls. Sexism is so endemic in our culture, however, that it will take generations of strong women and men to realize true change.

Chapter Nine, Different Voices, Different Schools particularly intrigued me. In it, the Sadkers identified the advantages and disadvantages of single-sex education for boys and girls. As the product of a parochial girls' high school, I was not surprised by the results of the research by Valerie Lee and her colleagues Helen Marks and Tina Byrd of the University of Michigan. They found that in intellectually rigorous girls' schools, few incidents of sexism were uncovered. These schools focused on the intellectual growth, academic curiosity, independence and self-esteem of their female students. With such positive research and new experiments in single-sex public education like the new Young Women's Leadership Charter School in Chicago, we may soon see this option available to girls across the United States.