Breaking the Glass Ceiling: The Educator’s Bias
By: Mckenzie Diep
Tags: Racial Justice, Children, Gender Gap, Schools, Education

The negative social stereotypes that an educator subconsciously plays into may be furthering the race and gender gap in education.

A teacher has two students, Jack and Jim. Although both students have the same potential for growth, the teacher believes that Jack is a better student than Jim. From that moment on, she goes out of her way to make sure Jack is understanding the curriculum, giving him extra practice problems to do and encouraging him whenever he answers her questions correctly. At the same time, the teacher neglects Jim, and Jim realizes this. He does not look forward to class anymore and starts falling asleep in class and stops turning in homework assignments. In the beginning, both students had the same potential, yet the teacher decided to put her energy into fostering one student. In doing so, she creates an implicit bias that only the neglected student is aware of, and eventually her projections become true.

Source: Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings

Although Jack and Jim are hypothetical students, this situation is common in a variety of educational settings. Except, the students that are being neglected are Black and Latino students who are labeled “troublemakers” or girls who are deemed dumber than their peers. According to a 2013–2014 study presented by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Black boys made up 7.9 percent of students yet 25.2 percent of suspended students. With Black students making up the majority of suspended students, small misbehaviors of these students may be seen as more severe by teachers, growing the mistrust between students and teachers.

“When students and teachers both begin school aware of negative stereotypes that label boys of color troublemakers, small initial differences can compound” — Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton

Source: Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings

On the flip side, girls are held to an impossible double standard from a very young age. Girls as young as elementary school aged are often expected to behave as role models for boys their age, yet they are constantly underestimated in subjects such as science and math. Using data provided by the Early childhood Longitudinal Study, researchers found that kindergarten girls and boys did not perform differently on math tests, but a gap of approximately 0.25 standard deviations emerged, favoring boys, by as early as second grade.

Shockingly (or not), this data is practically identical to a graph of the growth of the racial test score gap. However, while the race gap can be partially attributed to factors such as socio-economic differences and differences in school curriculum, the educational gender gap is prevalent in boys and girls that have similar socio-economic status and attend the same schools, which provides further evidence that the preconceived notions that teachers form about a student’s ability can contribute to this gap.

A paper written by Joseph P. Robinson-Cimpian and Sarah Theule Lubienski from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated that within boys and girls that performed equally well on math tests and were rated equally well behaving in school, the teacher rated the male student as more mathematically able. Basically, a female student must perform better than her male counterparts on the physical exam and be seen as more hardworking and well behaved as them. This implicit assumption in teachers account for approximately half of the gender achievement gap growth in math from kindergarten through third grade.

This mindset stays with the majority of female students as they grow older, pushing them away from pursuing higher education in STEM fields and other specific academic fields like philosophy, economics, and criminal justice. Furthermore, the most important factor for predicting the gender of students in each college major is the degree of perceived discrimination against women in each major. The amount of math or science curriculum a major had did not affect the amount of women or men pursuing that major; instead, fields that women expect to be discriminated in deter women from entering them.

Even if a woman wants to pursue a major where she encounters more discrimination, she is likely to be underestimated compared to her male peers, have her looks discussed when trying to find employment, and receive less credit for her work.

In order to battle these negative stereotypes, teachers should actively work to ensure that students are comfortable in their learning environment and that they feel as if they belong instead of being singled out for misbehavior or shamed for being less talented. One example of promoting a sense of belonging is to create a growth mindset in students. Instead of punishing students for small mistakes, educators should help students understand different ways to overcome learning obstacles. Compared to a situation where the teacher has complete control over the classroom and students, the growth mindset exercise reduced reports by 75 percent and healed the relationship between teachers and their students.