a reply to dianne hallman

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A Reply to Dianne Hallman Author(s): Trevor J. Gambell Source: Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2000), pp. 68-71 Published by: Canadian Society for the Study of Education Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1585870 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 16:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Canadian Society for the Study of Education is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 16:52:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: A Reply to Dianne Hallman

A Reply to Dianne HallmanAuthor(s): Trevor J. GambellSource: Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2000),pp. 68-71Published by: Canadian Society for the Study of EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1585870 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 16:52

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Canadian Society for the Study of Education is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l'éducation.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.55 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 16:52:23 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: A Reply to Dianne Hallman

A Reply to Dianne Hallman

Trevor J. Gambell

Dianne Hallman's response to the article Darryl Hunter and I recently published in the Canadian Journal of Education continues the debate about the meaning of gender equity in education without acknowledging that some of its premises have been inverted. We demonstrated that boys in public schools systematically score lower than girls on measures of literacy. We posited five possible explanations for gender imbalance that transcend economic conditions, cultural values, and educational precedents. Our purposes were threefold: to reconsider underlying presuppositions about the literacy development of young people; to suggest new directions for educational research in literacy development now that basic presupposi- tions have changed; and to argue that educators can improve the reading and writing skills of half our youth population if we jettison the sexist notion that biology is destiny in literacy, just as we have moved beyond that 19th-century claim in numeracy and scientific ability.

Given these fairly straightforward purposes, Hallman's response ap- pears off point. It has an associated but distinctly different purpose - to describe women's inferior position in the workplace and in society - as if she wished we had dealt with adults, literacy, and power. Her central concerns are power imbalances between men and women and the oppres- sion of women in adult life, not the literacy skills of young people. Yet, perhaps incongruously, recent international adult literacy and educational attainment studies demonstrate similar female superiority in reading skills and performance across virtually every age group in every region of Can- ada (Statistics Canada, 1996, 2000). None of these issues was our concern. We concentrated on literacy development between the ages of 8 and 18 and began sketching possible explanations for provocative trends (see also Gambell & Hunter, 2000).

Hallman suggests that the results come only from standardized tests, frequently lampooned as mis-measures, presumably in both mathematics and literacy. But our data and sources are recent criterion-referenced prov- incial and national assessments of Canadian adolescents; pan-Canadian, Atlantic Canadian, and Saskatchewan student survey results involving tens of thousands of students; international low-stakes assessment find- ings; norm-referenced tests that are a frequent source of critics' miscon- ceptions about testing; large-scale research studies (as opposed to narrow, qualitative case studies); and a variety of Canadian education indicators

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 25, 1 (2000): 68-71

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Page 3: A Reply to Dianne Hallman

DtBAT / DISCUSSION 69

reports. To belittle this wealth of data as standardized test results is to misunderstand the basic tools of quantitative research.

Hallman prefers revisiting historical issues to discussing the current classroom situation reported by adolescents and in recent large-scale evaluations. By appealing to history, she avoids confronting contemporary issues and having to refute our evidence and the arguments and impli- cations we propose. It is as though all the evidence is simply ignored. And there is an abundance of even more recent and compelling evidence from public schools to depict the span of the gender crevasse. For instance, the most recent pan-Canadian education indicators report (Council of Min- isters of Education, Canada, 1999) shows that male secondary students have weaker reading and writing scores than their female counterparts, are more likely to drop out of school and not graduate, are less likely to make the transition to university, and are less likely both to participate in and to complete postsecondary education.

So Hallman's judgement that the literacy results are "a minor imbalance" must be questioned. The implications of the gap are profound for secon- dary school promotion and retention, high school completion, admission to universities, scholarships and awards, and tertiary educational decision making. We do not yet know the specific impact of gendered high school literacy results on the transition to both full-time and part-time university studies in Canada, in which since the early 1990s there has been a growing educational disequilibrium, the "missing college-man conundrum" (Coun- cil of Ministers of Education, Canada, 1999; Globe & Mail, 1998; Statistics Canada, 1998).

Nor is women's superior literacy an "anomaly" of Western developed nations, as Hallman claims. The International Association for the Eval- uation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Reading Literacy Study, a comparative examination of reading achievement among 9- and 14-year- olds across 32 countries (Wagemaker, 1993), shows that total score dif- ferences tended to favour girls in all countries and in both age groups, except in Nigeria, Portugal, Singapore, Zimbabwe, and France, where boys outperformed girls at the 14-year-old level. Among 9-year-olds, girls outperformed boys in the narrative domain in all countries; boys did better than girls with documents in 8 countries and were better than girls with expository text in only 1 country. Among 14-year-olds, boys did better than girls on expository tasks in 9 countries, were better with documents in 18 countries, and had higher average scores for the narrative tasks in only 1 country.

Hallman's argument that women in developing African nations con- sistently have lower literacy levels just does not hold either, given these IEA findings that their daughters have higher literacy scores: Botswana,

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Page 4: A Reply to Dianne Hallman

70 DtBAT / DISCUSSION

Nigeria, and Zimbabwe all took part in the 1988 IEA reading study. And a recent UNESCO synthesis (Brousselmans-Dehais, Henry, Beller, & Gafni, 1997) demonstrates that historical trends cannot be transposed onto contemporary data.

Altering the terms of the debate by changing the point of comparison from Saskatchewan, Canada, and the Western industrialized world to developing countries is not justifiable. Hallman implies that we can ignore the Saskatchewan, Canadian, and OECD findings because they do not conform to those in Africa (although they do) or the developing world. We discuss educational problems in North America, not the Third World. Developing countries often have very different public policies, which do not support equity; Canadian public policies do, and our evidence sug- gests that Canadian educators are not succeeding in achieving equity and may be accentuating inequity. This is our point.

Yes, there are inequalities in the workplace. But we question whether they stem from the language arts classroom. To claim that the classroom causes the inequity, and to teach and conduct research on such assump- tions may be a post hoc, propter hoc fallacy: K-12 language arts curricula and instruction precede labour force participation, therefore they cause the structural inequities of the workplace. When the economy is doing well, we praise business, not schools; yet when it is doing poorly, we blame schools. Let business take the blame along with the credit. Schools can do many things but not rebuild socity (of which they are part) singlehandedly. And should we not all challenge an educational strategy that blindly or delib- erately handicaps the literacy and communication abilities of a generation or more?

We did not consider power and its distribution in world nations, a political science issue, but the literacy performance of males and females in Canadian schools, an education issue. Hallman's implicit argument is that social justice necessitates the perpetuation and perhaps institution- alization of an educational injustice. If that line of reasoning is applied to educational policy and practice, we must keep clearly in mind the personal, educational, and amortized social costs involved: one or two generations of males with second-rate communications skills and restricted access to postsecondary education. Let us hope that our sons and grandsons are not too literacy-challenged to sustain the dialogue.

REFERENCES

Brousselmans-Dehais, C., Henry, G., Beller, M., & Gafni, N. (1997). Gender differences in learning achievement: Evidence from cross-national surveys. Paris: UNESCO.

Council of Ministers of Education, Canada. (1999). Education indicators in Canada: Report of the Pan Canadian Education Indicators Program. Toronto: Author.

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Page 5: A Reply to Dianne Hallman

DABAT / DISCUSSION 71

Gambell, T. J., & Hunter, D. M. (1999). Rethinking gender differences in literacy. Canadian Journal of Education, 24, 1-16.

Gambell, T., & Hunter, D. (2000). Surveying gender differences in Canadian school literacy. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 32, 689-719.

Globe & Mail. (1998, December 28). Where have all the smart men gone? p. A18. Statistics Canada. (1996). Reading the future: A portrait of literacy in Canada. Ottawa:

Author.

Statistics Canada. (1998). Census monograph series (Catalogue No. 96-321-MPE). Ottawa: Author.

Statistics Canada. (2000). Literacy in the information age (Catalogue No. 89-571-XPE). Toronto: Renouf Publishing.

Wagemaker, H. (Ed.). (1993). Achievement in reading literacy: New Zealand's perform- ance in a national and international context. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education, Research Section.

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