Bad Boys
“Peer effects” are hard to measure. Girls’ schools produce good academic results, for example, but that could be because particular types of parent favour such schools, because those schools have a strong historical record, or because of selection.
A new working paper (”Mechanisms and Impacts of Gender Peer Effects at School”; .pdf file here) from Victor Lavy and Analia Schlosser attempts to unpick the peer effects associated with gender, using data on nearly half a million students passing through Israel’s school system in the 1990s. They compared consecutive year groups passing through the same school, figuring that if one year group was 55% boys and the next year was 55%, that difference was likely to be random.
Boys, it turns out, benefit from being in a classroom with girls, but girls do not benefit from being taught with boys. Boys wear down teachers, disrupt classes and ruin the atmosphere for everyone
“Miss match,” by Tim Harford