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Myra Sadker
Day honors groundbreaking researcher
by Sally
Acharya
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David
Sadker founded Myra Sadker Day to recognize his late wife’s
pioneering work.
Photo by Jeff
Watts
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A revolution
in education began quietly, in an editorial in a mimeographed newsletter.
Myra Pollack Sadker and her husband, David, were both doctoral students
in education at the University of Massachusetts, but they could
have been attending different schools. David was enjoying the idealistic,
visionary atmosphere at “the most avant-garde school in the
nation,” where he not only felt inspired, but respected and
heard. Myra and other women students spoke less, and their opinions
seemed to bear less weight. Any article the husband-and-wife team
co-authored would be referred to as “David’s article.”
So Myra Sadker
wrote an editorial in the school newsletter called “The Only
Socially Acceptable Form of Discrimination.” The article was
read by a professor, who suggested a book exploring the experience
of girls in school. The rest is education history.
Sadker’s groundbreaking 1973 book, Sexism in School and
Society, was one of the first to describe sex bias in the classroom,
and laid the foundation for education reforms, such as Title IX.
It also sparked a lifelong research interest in gender issues for
both Myra and David Sadker, who two decades later, as professors
of education at AU, revisited the issue with Failing at Fairness:
How America’s Schools Cheat Girls (1994).
Only a year after that influential (and sometimes controversial)
book appeared, Myra Sadker lost her struggle with breast cancer.
But every year since 1998, her work has been remembered at Myra
Sadker Day, when awards are given to people who have worked to fight
gender discrimination—from such prominent activists as this
year’s awardee, Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority, to
AU students, such as James Pearlstein, honored in 2002 for his work
with FLY (Facilitating Leadership in Youth). Events also take place
at schools around the country.
The
Seventh Annual Myra Sadker Day will
be held on Wednesday, March 3, from 5:30 to 8 p.m. in the Mary
Graydon Center, rooms 3, 4, and 5. This year’s Myra Sadker
Equity Award honors Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist
Majority Foundation. Education researcher Gerald Bracey, George
Mason University, will deliver the talk “No Child Left
Behind: Increasing Segregation, Maximizing Failure.”
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The day is
a way of remembering Myra Sadker and the cause to which she was
devoted.
Over the years, the Sadkers, both at AU, often worked together on
research. They focused particularly on classroom interaction, discovering
that, from grade school to graduate school, boys received more attention
from teachers—from praise to punishment to extra help. Boys
were more likely to call out answers in class and less likely to
be reprimanded for it. In classrooms that were gender segregated
(often unintentionally, with friends choosing to sit together),
the teacher tended to spend more time and effort in the boys’
area, giving extra help or keeping them on task or otherwise interacting
with them.
Girls earned better grades on report cards, but as David Sadker
wrote, “boys were more likely to be at center stage, for arguably
good and bad reasons, while girls were more likely to be quietly
learning, or not learning, on the sidelines.” The Sadkers’
work led to numerous publications, including the teacher education
textbook Teachers, Schools, and Society (1980), now going
into its seventh edition.
In recent years, the Sadkers’ work came into the spotlight
again when it was targeted by conservative social critic Christina
Hoff Sommers, who argues in The War Against Boys: How Misguided
Feminism is Harming Our Young Men (2000) that it is boys who
are falling behind, shortchanged by the feminist focus on girls.
David Sadker contends that while boys are often at risk in schools,
education is not a zero-sum game in which the shortcomings of boys—such
as later reading and writing, greater disengagement from schoolwork,
and lower levels of college attendance—can be blamed on improved
attention to the needs of girls.
And it is boys, he says, who are often the biggest losers when an
effort isn’t made to redress gender imbalances. Some of Sadker’s
recent research has focused on such subjects as teacher education
textbooks, which he found in a study with AU doctoral student Karen
Zittleman to have improved since the 1970s, but still to be imbalanced.
Women’s contributions are given less space and tend to be set
aside in boxes, as if they are interesting trivia rather than essential
information. The worst imbalances were found in methods textbooks,
which Sadker says fail to give much useful information on gender-related
issues—whether it’s teaching reading to boys, or encouraging
girls in science.
Sadker’s recent Ford Foundation–funded project, “Gender
Comple-ments,” aims to “fill in the missing chapters”
of the text-books with material that fits into current teacher education
courses. Information on that project can be found at www.american.edu/genderequity/.
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