Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

THE WELLESLEY REPORT 165criticism. Praise accounted for about 11 percent of interaction; 33 percentwas remediation. The remainder (approximately 51-56 percent) wasbland acceptance. 30Although boys and girls got close to the same amountof bland acceptance ("Okay"), boys got a larger share of the other categories.The exact number is difficult to determine from the data. In theirmany published articles, the Sadkers generally do not specify the actualsize of the difference, but instead make claims about discrepancies withoutspecifying them: "Girls received less than their share in all categories."31In the kind of observations the Sadkers and their researchers made, thechances of observer bias in selecting the data are extraordinarily high. Itis all too easy to "find" just what one believes is there. As I have noted,the Wellesley Report relies strongly on research by the Sadkers that purportedlyfound boys calling out eight times more often than girls, withboys being respectfully attended to, while the relatively few girls whocalled out were told to "please raise your hands if you want to speak."Professor Jere Brophy of Michigan State, who is perhaps the most prominentscholar working in the area of classroom interaction, is suspicious ofthe Sadkers' findings on call-outs. "It is too extreme," he says. "It alldepends on the neighborhood, the level of the class, and the teacher.Many teachers simply do not allow call-outs." I asked him about theSadkers' claim that boys get more careful and thoughtful teacher comments.According to Brophy, any differences that are showing up arenegligibly slight. Did he see a link between the ways teachers interactwith boys and girls and their overall achievement? "No, and that is why Ihave never tried to make that much of the sex difference findings."For details of the Sadkers' findings, the Wellesley Report refers toresearch reported in a 1981 volume of a journal called The Pointer. 32ThePointer is now defunct, but when I finally got to read the article I wassurprised to see that what it said about classroom discipline in particularwas not, in my view, at all indicative of bias against girls. This portion ofthe Pointer article focuses not on "call-outs," but on how teachers reprimandboys and girls differently, emphasizing that boys are disciplinedmore than girls. Here is what the Sadkers and their coauthor, DawnThomas, found:Boys, particularly low-achieving boys, receive eight to ten times asmany reprimands as do their female classmates. . . . When both girlsand boys are misbehaving equally, boys still receive more frequentdiscipline. Research shows that when teachers are faced with disruptivebehavior from both boys and girls, they are over three times as