A study by a Swarthmore professor that suggests a teacher’s gender affects student learning is stirring the debate over how students learn and whether race and gender are major mitigating factors.

But the author of the report cautions against concluding that he is an advocate for same-sex schools or classrooms.

“I think the main importance of this study is there’s something in the classroom and we need to figure out” ways to improve learning outcomes for students in all classroom environments, said Thomas Dee, an associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College outside of Philadelphia.

Dee, who is a visiting professor this school year at Stanford University in California, told BlackAmericaWeb.com the outcomes he found in the study might be fueled by something other than gender.

“I’m not exactly sure what is going on in the classroom,” Dee said. “Male teachers may identify better with boys, and female teachers may identify better with girls, but it may be unintentional biases in how men and women teachers look at male and female students. It may even be biases in changes in curriculum, like the decision whether to read ‘Wuthering Heights’ or ‘Moby Dick.’ It may be role model effects.”

Dee analyzed Education Department national survey and test-score data of nearly 25,000 eighth-graders from 1988. Dee said he used the data because it provided comprehensive data for middle-school students and included self-reporting data from teachers and students about their experiences, expectations and outcomes.

Dee’s study was to be published this week in Education Next, a quarterly journal published by the Hoover Institution, a conservative and libertarian public policy think tank founded by Herbert Hoover at Stanford University, his alma mater. In 2004, a similar study by Dee, suggested that the race of a teacher also seemed to make a difference for students, although, in his conclusion, he wrote that it was not entirely clear why those differences existed.

Dee told BlackAmericaWeb.com he became interested in education issues when “I started off looking at teacher quality and I looked at class size, then I noticed the racial dynamic, and that encouraged me to look at the demographic dynamics of learning.”

He said his studies are not aimed to be conclusive as much as they aim to get researchers and educators thinking about the best ways to improve student outcomes, regardless of race and gender. He said he focused on 8th graders in his study because “that’s where the action is” and where student performance begins to diverge, based on gender.

“My fondest wish is for us to (create) some intervention that will help,” Dee said.

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, said the biggest issue for many students is how invested the teacher is in them.

“As a former teacher, I know that kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. If they know you care, they will give you their best,” Weaver told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Students, Weaver said, need “a quality, certified teacher.”

“The caliber of individual teachers trumps gender every time,” said Jocelyn Samuels, vice president of education and employment for the National Women’s Law Center.

Samuels also cautioned that news media reports that provide only a thumbnail summary of what studies like Dee’s produce sometimes do the public a disservice.

“News reports tend to lend themselves to generalities that the study results do not support,” Samuels told BlackAmericaWeb.com. “The danger of this kind of facile report in the media is that it will reinforce stereotypes.

“Whether what goes on in the classroom is the product of stereotyping, that ought to be opposed or resisted as the opposite to being acceptable,” Samuels said. “If boys have the perspective that female teachers are not going to keep them in line because women are weak, are we helping to break that down by assigning boys to male teachers?”

“If you assume that role modeling has any value, then I think you can draw some conclusion that same-sex teachers can have influence or can impact the ability of students,” said George Garrow, Jr., executive director of the National Organization of Concerned Black Men.

That said, Garrow added, “the expectations of the teacher can be empowering in how well a student does.

“If the teacher has low expectations and black boys are on a higher scale to try to perform for their teachers, (those teachers) could have the greatest impact on the ability to achieve,” Garrow told BlackAmericaWeb.com, citing a study by A. Wade Boykin, director of the Center for Research on Education of Students Placed at Risk, at Howard University, which said that black middle-school students are much more likely than their white counterparts to achieve to please their teachers rather than their parents.

Boykin said the research showed that in middle school, 72 percent of black students said that when they do well, it’s to please their teachers, compared to 30 percent of white students. The breakdown by gender was much smaller, Boykin said.

Boykin declined to comment in detail about Dee’s study because he had not seen it, but told BlackAmericaWeb.com that in general, “the issue is much more neural and complex” than saying simply that girls learn better from women and boys learn better from men. “Learning is a complicated phenomenon.”

Garrow said Concerned Black Men is launching the Young Males of Color Achievement Initiative that will seek to address the low high school graduation rates for minority children, particularly black and Latino boys.

“We are looking at these kinds of issues and studies to find and develop some strategies that ultimately can work in smaller communities and come up with a national strategy for these types of boys,” Garrow said.

He said the initiative would look at the pros and cons of same-sex classrooms, as well as the benefits of all schools simply “having more teachers who are African-American and male.”

Weaver said the lack of black male teachers is tied to a number of factors.

“High schools can usually pay a little more than elementary schools,” Weaver said. “Sometimes the elementary school is seen as a female domain and that men are not needed there."

“As long as there is a lack of support, a lack of respect and a lack of being able to be involved in the decision-making process at the school or the salary,” there will be a lack of black men teaching in the nation’s public schools, Weaver said.

“It’s up to the public to take it to policymakers,” Weaver said. “If you’re going to get quality people into the profession, you’re going to have to pay them. That’s a known fact.”

Weaver, Garrow and Samuels all cautioned that the public not see Dee’s study as the final word on the benefits of same-sex schools or classrooms, but as one avenue worth exploring to determine what makes those interactions successful and how that success can be extrapolated for all classrooms.

“What I take away -- not only from this study, but in general from stories about these kinds of studies -- is that we shouldn’t lose the forest for the trees and go off making social policy based on generalizations or students that purport to show the difference between race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status and learning style,” Samuels said. “Instead, we should be focusing on ensuring every child, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status has quality teachers in classrooms that are enabled to help students learn, whatever their learning style.”