Introduction

`LETTING GIRLS LEARN`

When I was young, I thought that a life of equality, wisdom and justice would be my birthright if only I worked hard at school … I was wrong.

—HOPE CHIGUDU

I AM GOING TO START THIS BOOK where most people end. I conclude that to let girls learn, schools must first protect them. Then, they must teach them three skills: confidence, strategy, and transgression. Finally, and perhaps most important, they must reimagine what it means to achieve.

Allow me to explain.

I begin with the premise that no one selects the circumstances of their birth, yet one’s circumstances directly affect one’s life chances. Children born poor, female, a person of color, differently abled, or LGBTQ+, for example, suffer disruptions to the length and quality of their lives. And that is unfair.

Because it is unfair—and a central tenet of liberal democracies is nondiscrimination—if we claim to value fairness, we must intervene. To be clear, we must ensure that the circumstances of one’s birth do not dictate the remainder of one’s life.

The question is, How?

I argue that no institution or social system is more likely to improve the life trajectory of the disadvantaged than schools. Not voting. Not infrastructure. Not employment. Schools.

John Dewey noted, “the moral responsibility of the school, and of those who conduct it, is to society. The school is fundamentally an institution erected by society to do a certain specific work,—to exercise a certain specific function in maintaining the life and advancing the welfare of society.”¹ It is unsurprising, then, that past systems of education were used by countries to maintain inequality—take Jim Crow segregation in the United States or Bantu Education in South Africa. Conversely, systems of education have been used by countries to repair past injustices and advance equality—take school desegregation, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in the United States and the provisional constitution of South Africa in 1994.

In modern liberal democracies, schools are tasked with providing all students with the tools they need to achieve (as a mechanism for becoming productive workers and good citizens). To do this, schools focus on improving the “quality” of schools, measured by the cognitive development of students or the instructional skills of teachers. These improvements are aimed at reforming school leadership, approaches to teaching, and classroom structure.

However, as schools work to become higher quality institutions, they often fail to provide certain groups, the largest of which is girls, with an educational environment that protects them. Nor do they imbue them with the confidence to believe in themselves, the strategies they need to navigate barriers, nor the audacity to transgress societal norms. In fact, most schools are completely unprepared to educate girls in an equitable fashion, if equitable is defined as girls receiving what they need to succeed. I offer the story of Ezra and Jude as an illustration.

Ezra and Jude attend public school in a large city. Yet while Ezra attends school the full twenty-three days in each month, Jude only attends school eighteen days in each month. What explains the difference in school attendance between Ezra and Jude? And does it matter if they are both high academic achievers?

Ezra attends a school that anticipates and alleviates potential gendered challenges, like the fact that sanitary pads are expensive and thus being able to afford them can impact her ability to attend school during her menstrual cycle.² Accordingly, Ezra’s school offers its students sanitary pads at no cost and as needed.

Jude, on the other hand, attends a school that does not address the gender inequities she might face. The school, like most across the globe, does not provide complimentary sanitary pads to its students. Additionally, the school hasn’t had flush toilets since it was constructed. In fact, only 60 percent of the schools in Jude’s city have flush toilets at all.

Although many do not realize the effect a lack of access to these basic resources may have, such a lack has a major impact on Jude’s education. Jude cannot attend school during her menstrual cycle—up to six of every twenty-three days.

The difference between Ezra and Jude does not represent a dichotomy between the West and the Global South. It does not represent disparate countries, but disparate times. In developed and developing economies, Jude is our present, but hopefully Ezra might be our future.

The current reality is that a growing population of girls across the globe attend schools that never had them in mind to begin with. Schools that are assumed safe but give them their first experiences with sexual abuse and rape at the hands of male peers and teachers. Schools that are assumed accepting but bully and suspend girls for not meeting traditional conceptions of femininity. Schools that are assumed habitable but lack basic sanitary needs, including flush toilets, toilet paper, and sanitary pads.

The schools that overlook gender inequities are not exceptional or unique. They are the default. This means that even an academically rigorous school can be an inequitable one.

At the very least, Jude, like Ezra, is enrolled in school. Globally, over 130 million girls—more than twice the total population of students in the entire United States—are not in school at all.³ This is a tragic waste in part because educating girls is associated with a plethora of positive outcomes: Educated women raise healthier children, are more likely to become economically independent, and are more likely contribute to social and economic development.

Fortunately, over the past two decades we have seen the emergence of widespread global initiatives (for example, Girl Rising and #62MillionGirls in support of the Let Girls Learn initiative) that are designed to increase the number of girls in school. Unfortunately, despite these initiatives, most schools do not address the educational experiences of the girls who can get educational access: the experiences of girls like Jude, who struggles to achieve at an institution that values her good grades but discounts or disregards the gender inequities that keep her from attending school consistently.⁴

Today, many schools across the globe reproduce and perpetuate gender inequities. They are hostile toward girls and women. Still, many of us who care about gender, identify as feminist, or show up at women’s rallies overlook the ways in which schools fail to practice the equity we preach, so long as they are “quality” schools where students “achieve.” This needs to change.

What It Means to Achieve

Current measures of achievement fail to capture the educational experiences of the whole student. Instead, achievement is typically defined by students’ academic performance. Education literature describes a link between academic achievement and the level of parents’ education or economic status. It is theorized that parental resources enable children to have the insights, access, and assistance necessary to do well in school. Thus, differences in social and economic background are often used to explain educational disparities in academic achievement within the classroom.

A growing field of study on noncognitive skills demonstrates how they can contribute to academic achievement as well, even though they are traditionally left unmeasured on standardized exams. For example, noncognitive characteristics such as grit, tenacity, and self-control have been found to positively contribute to grade point average and career success.⁵

Noncognitive skills can also take the shape of an academic mindset. There is perhaps no academic mindset more well known than the growth mindset, one half of a concept developed by Carol Dweck. The growth mindset theorizes that students who do well in school typically have an attitude of potential success (for example, “I can be good at math”) while others have a fixed mindset of failure (“I am not good at math”). Differences in mindsets may help explain gender gaps in academic achievement. For example, a nationally representative longitudinal study of US tenth and twelfth graders over a six-year period found that boys rate their ability to do math 27 percent higher than girls, even if they have identical math abilities.⁶ This disparity is, in part, related to a finding in the same study that boys are more likely to have a growth mindset and thus view their mathematical abilities as skills which can be developed and improved. In fact, the literature on noncognitive skills suggests that the early and more widespread adoption of a growth mindset partially explains the advantage of boys over girls in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Girls, on the other hand, are more likely to have the noncognitive skills of self-discipline and self-regulation, which enable them to earn high grades across most other subjects.⁷

At face value, these studies of noncognitive skills appear to provide comprehensive explanations of gender disparities in achievement, but they focus too narrowly on how these skills shape performance outcomes.⁸ This focus on performance outcomes contributes to an oversimplified narrative of “girls versus boys,” wherein a category of high-achieving girls become evidence for individual-level success and proof that education policies are effective. Instead, studies based on noncognitive skills must account for the fact that school-aged girls have multiple negative experiences with sexual harassment, criminal justice, poverty, and racism. These experiences affect their well-being, even if they are not affecting girls’ academic success.⁹ In other words, educators worrying about whether their students have enough grit and adequately high test scores should be even more worried about what their students are experiencing in school and how it affects their overall well-being.

In this book I reimagine achievement not only as a measure of academic performance but also as the absence of damage from experiences with learning. In sum, to achieve is both to attain academic success and to build a healthy educational identity that allows a student to attain in different settings. I call this net achievement: the term net implies that the cost of the academic achievement is taken into account.

The Role of Schools in Improving Net Achievement for All

Schools can improve net achievement, in part, through the development of educational identities and strategic skills among their students. Like a growth mindset, these identities and skills can be unique and potentially contradictory across a population of students.¹⁰ Most notably, studies that focus on minority students in the United States illustrate how these students must often take on multiple personal and academic identities to perform at levels similar to their majority peers.¹¹ One study, for instance, documents how African-American and Latinx youth in the United States form academically oriented peer groups and develop strategies for managing the multiple identities they take on at home as well as at school. The researchers attribute the development of these identities and the related management strategies to their schools’ ability to enable students to “believe in their own efficacy and the power of schooling to change their lives.” The researchers also note that these students “do not adopt a romantic or naïve commitment” to the ideology, thereby acknowledging that students adopt these beliefs in the context of the respective barriers they face.¹² The students’ contextualized belief in themselves and the role of the school in generating this belief demonstrate how identity can be constructed by schools and used among minority youth to strategically achieve in a way that accounts for cost borne as well as benefits received.¹³

How Quality Schools Should Teach Lessons about Gender

As schools foster educational identities and strategies to manage them, they also impart (whether implicitly or explicitly) lessons about gender. Since no other institution, outside of the home, can so clearly shape the trajectory of a child’s life, the way in which schools impart these lessons becomes extremely important. For example, masculinity and femininity are taught and performed through the cues sent to girls on how to be “ladies” and to boys on how to be men. When schools impart these lessons, they often do so in a way that polices gender and thus negatively contributes to students’ overall educational experiences. (Examples include rules that encourage girls to cross their legs and instruct boys not to cry.) These negative educational experiences shape students’ ability to effectively engage in their schools’ central activities and achieve, whether academically or otherwise.

While scholars in the United States and Europe have discussed the importance of evaluating gender socialization in schools to some extent, with few exceptions these studies are typically focused on improving girls’ educational access and academic performance in western settings rather than alleviating the disparate costs girls around the globe suffer for such academic performance.¹⁴ Accordingly, efforts to improve school quality fail to create equitable experiences that produce positive educational identities for all girls.

A critical way to ensure that schools do not simply become reflections of inequity in the world around them—even as they seek to transform into academically superior institutions—is to create schools that take seriously the role of inequitable gender relations in their educational practices. In other words, dismantling inequitable gender relations must be included as part of an expanded approach to the ways we think about improving the quality of a school.¹⁵ When quality schools dismantle inequitable gender relations, they ensure that the price of achievement is not dependent on an accident of birth. They prioritize net achievement and encourage students to develop their educational identities as a function of their minds and not their reproductive organs.

Eliminating Institutional Sexism

For quality schools to address inequitable gender relations properly and thus act as positive contributors to net achievement, they must take action to eliminate sexism—a system that assigns value based on sex and unfairly values one sex over the other. Before sexism can be eliminated, it must be understood. How does sexism reveal itself in society? Camara Phyllis Jones, a physician and public health scholar, has described a three-level taxonomy of racism.¹⁶ I adopt her approach to discuss how sexism reveals itself in society. Recognizing that systems of racism and sexism often work alongside each other, these levels are not meant to be comprehensive but rather to document some ways in which sexism constrains the ability for certain persons, in this case women and girls of color, to achieve their potential. Accordingly, based on her framework, I describe three levels of sexism:

Internalized sexism and self-devaluation. The acceptance of negative messages about the limits of one’s abilities based on sex, leading to behavioral shifts consistent with these negative messages. Examples include thinking, “I am not a math person and girls can’t do math, so I don’t want to be a mathematician.” These attitudes can lead to lower levels of self-esteem and limited aspirations. They usually stem from routine interactions with negative messaging about abilities.
Personally mediated sexism. Differential assumptions about the abilities, motives, and intent of others based on sex, as well as differences in action or in response. Represented by acts of commission and omission, such sexism can be unintentional and can include micro-aggressions. Examples include the failure of teachers to assign value to girls’ ability to do math, which leads them to track girl students into home science courses rather than biological science courses.
Institutionalized sexism. Differential or uneven access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society based on sex. This type of sexism is represented by acts of commission, omission, and inaction in the face of need. Examples include being charged higher insurance premiums as a woman and being educated in a school without bathrooms. Institutionalized sexism denotes the way that sexism is embedded in our everyday societal practices and experiences, and the way it is perceived as normal.

Using this framework, we could try to address inequitable gender relations at school by fixing internalized sexism. We might stress “grit,” “resilience,” “girl power,” and the need to “lean in,” but this won’t change the situation in which girls find themselves. Such approaches only force them to deal with it, alone. We can address personally mediated sexism by holding workshops and classes on implicit gender bias to make people aware of their assumptions in order to change their behavior, but even if people change their biased behavior, it will not change the biased institutions in which girls find themselves.¹⁷ Thus, schools must address institutionalized sexism—unequal access to goods, services, and opportunities of society based on sex. Solving or remediating the problems associated with institutionalized sexism may diminish the impact of the other two types. So what type of school facilitates the elimination of institutional sexism?

The Elusive Promise of Gender-Sensitive Schools

To be sure, there is already significant discussion on the importance of schools developing “girl-friendly” or “gender-responsive” environments, which are commonly defined as classrooms that are sensitive to gender-based experiences.¹⁸ Most of these proposals emphasize the importance of acknowledging how policies and practices affect girls and boys differently and removing the barriers identified; creating opportunities to develop peer networks and friendships; encouraging women role models and using women as examples for classwork; and ensuring girls participate in the classroom and that their voices are represented as co-creators of their education.

Nonetheless, policies and practices that seek to make schools more girl-friendly often only reconstruct boundaries protecting the status quo; in other words, they allow girls to have access to education in a way that simply extends rights which are already available to men but in their existing form and without accounting for their gendered realities. Furthermore, although the distribution of sanitary pads and toilets increases girl students’ attendance rates and self-confidence in class, these initiatives (which I clearly support and promote) risk reducing educational solutions for girls to tangible items.¹⁹ What good are sanitary pads and toilets if the educational institution itself is a site of trauma and institutionalized sexism? This focus on tangible items can overshadow the need for larger structural changes in gender relations. Structural changes are an important prerequisite for improving the net achievement of all students, but especially girls.

Even if girls attain high academic marks and greatly increased access to educational institutions, this does not mean that equity has been achieved.²⁰ It does not mean that schools, and for that matter society, have eliminated sexism. In fact, it does not mean much at all if girls and women are subsequently prevented from controlling their life trajectory.

Schools, therefore, must be guided by a shared mission or value system around the education of girls. This mission cannot be one of assumed understanding, based on blanket references to equality between men and women. It must be a mission that specifies the role of power in defining gender relations and then works toward its destruction through changes in institutional policies, practices, and general culture. Gender-sensitive schools, in their traditional conception, do not do this.

Defining Gender Equity as Liberation

In her book Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks emphasizes the importance of teaching critical thinking as a mechanism to enable students to transgress gender confines, thereby enabling equity and ultimately liberation: “Education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowledge, it’s about a liberatory practice in the classroom.”²¹ Her work focuses on liberation as a pedagogy that can incite the interests of students and transform them into active learners who believe that the content of the knowledge they consume is socially meaningful.

For a school to consciously engage in practices enabling liberation, it must embody “an idea of change that dismantles unequal power relations.”²² It requires an explicit and intentional acknowledgment of gender and the ways in which it shapes socioeconomic inequity.²³ It requires schools to teach girls not only how to deal with challenges but also how to reshape them, subvert them, destroy them, and reconstruct them. In sum, for schools to take on the work of equity and thus liberation, they must disrupt inequitable power relations and redistribute them. Institutions that do this work are not simply friendly to girls or sensitive to gender. They are feminist schools.

Becoming a Feminist School

In short, feminism refers to equality of both sexes. Given the various connotations—both negative and positive—associated with the term feminism, it may be valuable to clarify what I mean by using the term feminist schools. Broadly, when I reference feminism, I am incorporating elements from all the various existing forms of feminism—classic feminism, Black feminism, Third World feminism, womanism, Africana womanism—because, as it has been pointed out, “it is necessary to think of a plurality of feminisms and emphasize the diversity of women’s experiences.”²⁴ The feminism that I refer to in this book embodies the need to enact anti-racist, anti-sexist, and thus liberatory practices and ideologies.²⁵

In thinking about what feminist schools look like, my central premise is that schools should act not as microcosms of society, but as models of equity. Schools can act as models of equity by engaging in practices that ensure all burdens are shared fairly and that innate biological differences in sex—to a first approximation—are accounted for.

Feminist schools protect children from threats that impose a differential cost on their ability to secure equivalent net achievement. These threats can be related to infrastructure, or they can be social, physical, sexual, or economic elements. For example, feminist schools know it is unfair for a girl to work two years and save while her parents fund her brother’s schooling, or for a girl to monitor how she dresses to avoid harassment and assault by male teachers because of a characteristic she cannot control (that of being a girl).

Feminist schools assess and evaluate the gender equity of institutional practices, from hiring to instruction, and then develop targeted interventions based on the results. They design curricula that strip restrictive gender roles from homework questions or sample word problems and instead implement those that emulate the overlapping identities of gender, race, and class by which those most marginalized identify. They educate girls on their rights related to issues such as sexual abuse, empower girls to report when their rights are violated, and institute measures to ensure they are not rebuked for it.

FIGURE I.1. How feminist schools shape achievement-oriented identities

Most important, feminist schools are attentive to the power dynamics that shape students in the classroom. In doing so, they disrupt power relations and provide girls with the tools to do the same in the many contexts they will traverse thereafter. They encourage the use of democratic educational practices by ensuring members of the school community are responsive, respectful, and representative. They act as safe spaces, thereby creating a climate of tolerance and full acceptance of gender fluidity. Finally, they enable students to transgress traditional gender practices, thereby encouraging young people to transition from passive learners to active agents of social change. Students can then emerge from school with the skills needed to respond to hostile environments and defend themselves through the construction of what I call achievement-oriented identities (AOIs).

Constructing Achievement-Oriented Identities

In the following chapters I will explain how feminist schools construct achievement-oriented identities, defined as positive beliefs in individual abilities and the facility to translate those beliefs into realizable actions.²⁶ Achievement-oriented identities, or AOIs, are not reflective of any single trait, such as grit or self-control, but rather encompass a set of traits, primarily those of self-confidence, strategy, and transgression. Feminist schools provide students with practical and emotional tools useful for developing AOIs. Such schools help students construct them through their practices, policies, and general culture. Evidence of these identities can be seen in students’ positive attitudes toward learning and strategic behavior toward challenges they confront.

The concept of achievement-oriented identities must account for the gendered nature of the challenges faced by girls. Undoubtedly, schools play a significant role in the process of upholding and upending norms and thus act as key engines of gender socialization. Most commonly, schools’ various practices send cues to students about gender based on traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity. For example, when students are separated by gender in class, sports, and other recreational activities, they are often being trained to act in ways that align with gender stereotypes found in society rather than making room for diverse gender expression.²⁷

In response, the school that produces achievement-oriented identities among its girl students builds their self-confidence, shows them how to behave strategically, and encourages them to transgress societal norms. The development of these skills is facilitated by feminist schools that intentionally dismantle the intersecting race and gender barriers constraining girls, thus protecting them from harm. In doing so, feminist schools provide students with the proper social conditions to experience net achievement and build achievement-oriented identities. Girls can then use their newly formed skills to move toward power (or rather disrupt power) globally.

Maximizing the Potential of Every Student

I have written this book to recenter gender equity in debates on global education reform as a mechanism to maximize human potential, now and in the future. It is more than an empowerment narrative about girls.

However, in focusing on girls, I have two primary objectives. One objective is to emphasize how the educational experiences of girls have been undermined by limited measures of assessing achievement, measures that reify gender inequity. In making this point, I also offer the idea of net achievement as an inclusive concept that accounts for institutional sexism and the direct and immediate ways in which it continues to constrain students’ life chances.

Another objective of the book is to put forth a theory of feminist schools and the construction of achievement-oriented identities. In proposing feminist schools, my goal is to promote institutions that ensure girls have positive and equitable experiences, regardless of their academic ranking. I make the case that a feminist school’s ability to produce positive and equitable experiences for its students creates the conditions necessary for students to construct achievement-oriented identities. These AOIs teach girls how to successfully engage with a world that is inequitable and thus hostile. In short, feminist schools protect girls now, and then provide girls with the tools—AOIs—to protect themselves and others in the future.

With that said, the notion of achievement-oriented identities is not meant to be a trickle-down strategy. Instead, it is what I view as the ultimate product required in any remediation: acknowledgment. The construction of AOIs requires schools to acknowledge the inevitable barriers along the lines of gender that students will face and to provide proactive redress. But such measures are necessarily short term. They will not eliminate sexism in society; they only respond to it. The long-term solution is for society to become a more equitable place. Still, feminist schools that help students develop achievement-oriented identities contribute to this effort in important ways.

Schools must answer difficult questions in order to transform themselves into feminist institutions that promote achievement-oriented identities:

How does our refusal to address gendered barriers in our educational practices constrain our ability to serve all students equitably?
How can we expand what we mean by achievement to include not only equitable academic outcomes but also equitable educational experiences for all genders?²⁸
How can we expand discussions around “quality schools” to include gender and make gender central to the education reform process?

How Girls Achieve answers these questions through an academic investigation of the experiences of girls who attend schools in South Africa, Ghana, and the United States—all countries that have an explicit commitment to achieving gender equality. As shown in the analysis, South Africa is a middle-income country where boys and girls attend most levels of school at equivalent rates but where issues at the intersections of race, poverty, and violence exacerbate negative educational experiences. The United States is a high-income country where the overall rate of girls accessing education surpasses that of boys, and yet the country also contends with serious and persistent racial and socioeconomic inequities. Ghana is a low-income country where poor girls attend higher levels, or grades, of school at lower rates than boys. Across these case studies, achievement-oriented identities are discussed as a mechanism for developing policy solutions that circumvent barriers for girls in both the developed and developing world. From my analysis, the importance of developing feminist schools that produce achievement-oriented identities is revealed.

Chapter 1 expands the theory through an analysis of how schools facilitate the learning of young girls from poor households in the middle-income country of South Africa, where girls attend school at similar rates to boys but where both race and economic disadvantage intersect with gender. Despite South Africa’s economic prowess on the continent, its educational system is known as one of the worst in the world.²⁹ As the country’s most vulnerable population, poor Black girls are especially at a disadvantage. Utilizing qualitative data on Cape Town, South Africa, I profile one of the most successful schools serving the poorest communities. This school facilitates the successful learning of populations facing high levels of violence. In centering the stories of girls who perform at high levels academically, I highlight the danger of focusing on grades as an indicator of achievement. How do schools ensure girls’ net achievement when educational spaces may be unsafe? This chapter examines what it takes to create safe spaces for girls, and how these spaces encourage the formation of AOIs and feminist schools.

Chapter 2 brings these conversations to the United States, with a focus on the achievement of Black girls at a single-sex school in a large, urban school district. Disadvantaged Black girls in the United States have access to education but suffer from negative educational experiences that intersect with race, gender, and poverty. By focusing on a context where girls perform at higher levels relative to others, I explore the power of feminist practices for propelling students toward not only net achievement but also social change. How do schools promote net achievement, achievement-oriented identities, and social change while serving a population with intersecting disadvantages? Chapter 2 explores how feminist schools may address these concerns.

Chapter 3 returns to Africa, to a typical urban school in Ghana, where we see the theory of achievement-oriented identities in practice. In the developing country of Ghana, poor girls attend school at lower rates than boys. The girls we meet in this chapter are striving to be the first in their families to go to college.³⁰ These identities promote not only self-efficacy and confidence but also strategy and transgression, thus acting as protective factors against the specific gender-related challenges impeding the girls’ ability to succeed in the future. How can a feminist school affect the achievement-oriented identities of girls even after they leave the schoolhouse? In Chapter 3, I explore factors that can protect students not only at school but when they leave school.

The findings in these three chapters have practical implications for reducing educational inequities across class, gender, and school quality, in both developing and developed countries. Nonetheless, these findings largely overlook established research on noncognitive skills and traditional measures of academic achievement. How should we weigh noncognitive skills? How do these skills relate to academic performance in the context of feminist schools and achievement-oriented identities?

Chapter 4 examines the limits of confidence and other noncognitive skills. I work with data on standardized scores and attitudes toward math and science in South Africa, the United States, and Ghana. The data examine how confidence—a key aspect of achievement-oriented identities—and socioeconomic background work together to shape the academic performance of girls across these various contexts. These data show why confidence and other noncognitive skills, which AOIs emphasize, are by themselves insufficient measures of achievement, academic or net. Rather, girls need feminist institutions that eliminate the gendered barriers they face and teach them the strategies they need to respond to barriers thereafter. Noncognitive skills have their limits when they are used to address structural poverty across diverse countries. Feminist schools are essential to securing equitable net achievement.

In the Conclusion I summarize the empirical findings and their contributions to current research on the education of girls globally. I highlight how a focus on educational access and performance ignores negative and inequitable experiences that occur when girls are actually in the classroom. While access to school for girls across the globe is important, as is the need to secure high grades in school, girls must also have positive and equitable educational experiences to ensure that they may thrive beyond the classroom. Feminist schools take actions to mitigate the inequitable costs girls absorb while striving to thrive, and in doing so, define an institutional solution to the problem of gender inequity.

For Girls, and to Those Who Nurture Them

I make it a point to engage primarily in methods that enable a deeper dive into the educational environments in which girls participate routinely. Accordingly, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations, compared and tested against data collected by others. I have emphasized studies that are accessible online, thereby encouraging replication.³¹

I largely avoid discussions on how these findings apply to boys directly. By concentrating on the most marginalized group, low-income girls, we can develop solutions that will help all students achieve. Although I devote my attention to marginalized girls, if boys are safe from the confines of toxic masculinity in a feminist school, they should be more liberated to act feminine of center as well. I discuss class, disability, sexuality, and mental health, but these are by necessity not the focus of this book. Future research is needed in this regard. I hope this book will spur others to think about gender broadly in the very practice of education equity, and that those who live and do this work might take up where I leave off—and be kind about it.

As a Black woman studying mostly Black environments, I found that it was relatively easy to eliminate research subjects’ fear around the intent of the research. Nonetheless, I also had to be intentional about my own preconceptions to ensure the systematic nature of the data collection and analysis. These data are in no way perfect, but they are an accurate portrayal of what I observed about the educational experiences of girls over the years and the commonality of those experiences across different countries. Thus, the solutions proposed should be those most necessary to enable students to have equitable access to net achievement.

Throughout the book, my focus on the experiences of poor Black girls is intended to broaden, not limit, the scope of my work. Much of the literature on the relationship between gender and educational achievement addresses the experiences of White women and girls, and thus completely fails to address the experiences of everyone else. Because poor Black women and girls often occupy the most marginalized positions across global contexts, focusing on their narratives allows us to think about feminism as inclusive of dismantling multiple systems of oppression—racism, classism, and sexism—thus creating a more equitable society for all people.

At this point, it is important that I clarify what I mean by the term girl. The term is often fraught. While there are biological elements to one’s sex, gender is constructed based on societal context. This book is very clearly about those who possess a uterus. But it is also about those who are perceived to be “girls” based on traditional notions of gender. This distinction is an important one, as the book is premised on the assumption that society is hostile toward those who, biologically speaking, are not or are not perceived to be boys or men. I am concerned specifically with the social impact of being a “girl,” based on these preconceived ideas. By using the term girl, I refer first to children with “female-gendered bodies” because there are baseline commonalities in the challenges they face irrespective of their sexuality or gender identification. But I am also addressing children who express so-called feminine traits irrespective of their physical body-gender.³²

Nonetheless, I am fully aware that heteronormativity and cis-male privilege continue to constrain our actions every day, even as we seek to build more equitable institutions. I have no doubt that even as I have tried to write my way out of these constraints, at various times in this book I have slipped right back in.³³ Still, my aim for the reader is the same: to understand the challenges that traditional conceptions of gender pose for girls; to conceive how schools can and should respond to them to create a feminist environment in which all students can thrive; to imagine how schools can be and should be models for democratic institutions generally; and to comprehend how the status of girls, not only in terms of educational access and performance but also in terms of general well-being, is a measure of society’s ability to live up to its promise.

Finally, I must remark on who this book is for: I write for girls and to parents, policy makers, educators, organizers, academics, and administrators. I hope the conception of school as a shelter for the minds and bodies of girls exposed to a world that would consume them incites them to build. I write to offer a seed for those on the ground, that they may alter it to fit their needs and give it life. I write this as a scholar because my colleagues have done their utmost to catalog inequity, and I believe now is the time to offer a vision of how to proceed. If this is not the path forward, I hope it is the first step.