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

THE WELLESLEY REPORT 169was prepared to discuss the difficulties of applying their recommendationsin the classroom. For my part, I was grateful to have the opinion ofan experienced educator.Once on the air, the Sadkers held forth on their ideas. I raised questionsabout their research methods and conclusions. After a while, themediator, Ira Glass, introduced Dr. Steindam as someone who was preparedto talk about "some of the problems of being attuned to gender biasin the classroom" (his emphasis).But Dr. Steindam had no problem to report. She had only the highestpraise for the Sadkers' program and she told us how "aghast" teacherswere to discover how sexist they had been. Ira Glass clearly had notexpected this response. He said: "Now were there problems implementingit (his emphasis)?" Again she raved on about how enlightening the workshopshad been. She was pleased that the state of Virginia had given a"$5,000 or $10,000 grant to fund the Sadkers' workshop" and assured usthe money was "absolutely minimal."After the program aired, my phone rang: it was a colleague of theSadkers from American University. He told me that Ms. Steindam wasnot the objective outsider she appeared to be on the PBS show. She hadbeen a student of the Sadkers and had written her doctoral thesis withthem. She had even coauthored an article with them called "GenderEquity and Educational Reform." 47I could not believe that PBS knew about this relationship withouttelling me before the show, so I called Ira Glass. He knew that Ms.Steindam was acquainted with the Sadkers' training methods but had noidea she was their colleague and coauthor.The professor from American University was skeptical of the Sadkers'data-gathering techniques in general. "They, or their graduate students,sit in classrooms and tally up how many times teachers praise, criticize,etc., boys versus girls. The possibilities for subjective interpretation areendless."He also told me about his encounter with one of the Sadkers' students,who was doing research for her own thesis:A doctoral student of theirs used one of my classes in her research.At the end of her first visit, she said, "You are screwing up my data."When I showed surprise, she said, "Yes, you're one of the controlclasses and you're supposed to show bias but you don't." She cameto that class two more times, and each time she discovered morebias. In fact, the last time she observed, the numbers looked solopsided and not at all reflective of the way the class went, I asked