Stanford Research Shows How Classroom Discipline Perpetuates Racial and Gender Biases

Michela Musto's research scrutinized two classroom dynamics: how educators—mostly white college-educated women—enforced rules or responded to boys breaking them; and how educators disciplined white, Asian-American, and Latino boys differently.

Today, girls outperform boys in almost every academic subject. On average, girls earn higher grades and graduate from high school at higher rates, and women enroll in college in much greater numbers. While these gendered achievement gaps have created the impression that boys are the newly disadvantaged at school, education researchers say that growing talk of a “boy crisis” belies reality in the classroom. They have consistently found that from kindergarten through college, students view boys and men as more intelligent than girls and women. How does school reproduce this traditional gender hierarchy?

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