"Some people will react strongly to this."

 Thomas S. Dee certainly had that right. Mr. Dee is an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, and is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University. He just published Teachers and the Gender Gaps in Student Achievement, a study concluding that boys learn more from male teachers and girls learn more from female teachers. As he construes it, a teacher of the opposite sex hurts the academic progress of a student.

Mr. Dee based his study on a survey of almost 25,000 eighth-grade students conducted by the federal Department of Education. The study was conducted in 1988, and still represents an accurate picture of students at a time when gender gaps emerge.

This column has noted that science is a battleground for gender warriors. Thomas Dee found that in science, social studies, and English, a female teacher raised the achievement of girls but lowered the achievement of boys. Switching teachers could narrow the "achievement gap" that so troubles many observers. That might be tricky because Mr. Dee's study emerges at a time when approximately 80 percent of teachers are women. In the parlance of affirmative action, the teaching profession certainly doesn't "look like America."

Mr. Dee works in a discipline that puts calculation above speculation. He maintains that gender matters, and that we need to think about this important subject. His study did not endorse any educational policy, including single-sex education. He told reporters that he wants his work to fuel more research on the effects of gender and what we ought to do about it. His study, though fully peer reviewed, had not yet hit the press when gender warriors launched their bombardment.

Marcia Greenberg, co-president of the National Women's Law Center, questioned the conclusions of Mr. Dee. Though she had not conducted a study of her own, she explained the benefits of having female and male teachers as "role models," and warned against "generalizations." She left unexplained what that "role model" boilerplate might mean in policy terms. Perhaps, in her view, a teacher like Condoleezza Rice might be a good role model for all students?

In his response to Dee's study, Reg Weaver, president of the massive National Education Association (NEA), the nation's biggest teacher union, told reporters that student success cannot be narrowed to gender. Mr. Dee did not contend this. He recognizes that other factors are also involved. Mr. Weaver wants students to have exposure to "teachers who look like them, who can identify with their culture."

We should mention that the federal Department of Education, which furnished the material for Mr. Dee's study, was a gift to the NEA from the Carter Administration in return for the union's support in the election of 1976. Before that, the nation got along very well without a federal education department. It still could.

Mr. Dee, meanwhile, was right to expect strong and quick reaction. Anything less than strict adherence to feminist dogmas is unacceptable in politically correct circles. One key orthodoxy is that schools serve up an inferior education for girls, while boys supposedly thrive on the pro-male bias. That was the view of How Schools Shortchange Girls, published in 1992 by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) and debunked by Judith Kleinfeld in The Myth That Schools Shortchange Girls: Social Science in the Service of Deception. Also worth a look is The War Against Boys, by Christina Hoff Summers, also the author of Who Stole Feminism?

I fully expect the AAUW and other feminist strongholds to blast Mr. Dee's study without listening to his careful and nuanced conclusions. He is surely right that more attention should be paid to the learning styles of boys and girls, and that the gender of teachers matters very much. He didn't say so, but surely the 80-20 gender gap among teachers should be narrowed. 

Mr. Dee's study was first published in Education Next, a quarterly journal of the Hoover Institution. Those who set education policy would be negligent if they ignore it.

Sally Pipes is President and CEO at the California-based Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. She can be reached via email at spipes@pacificresearch.org.