This research focuses on gender inequities in language achievement in the field of school effectiveness and improvement. The main objective of this research is to analyze school effectiveness with a gender perspective in a context of bilingual education in order to identify if the highly effective middle schools manage to reduce the gender gap in both official languages. At the same time, the most equitable middle schools are examined based on the discourse of the professionals who work in these schools.

The research questions that the research project aims to address are the following: Is school effectiveness linked to gender equity? Are the effective middle schools more equitable than non-effective schools in terms of gender? Do highly effective schools manage to reduce the gender gap in both languages?

The Basque Autonomous Community (B.A.C.) is located in Spain. It has been a bilingual community since 1982 (Law 10/1982) with two official languages, Spanish and the Basque, in a diglossia situation; 14.13% of the population speak Basque at home, and 10.22% use both Euskara and Spanish at home (Eustat, 2016). The education system is bilingual with three linguistic teaching models (Decree 138/1983) in which 77.88% of the Basque students are enrolled in model D, which is taught entirely in Basque with Spanish as a subject (Basque Government, 2019a). However, only 18.6% of the secondary students acquire advanced knowledge, 65.9% acquire intermediate knowledge and 15.5% the initial one (ISEI-IVEI, 2023), far from what the law requires, that is, B2 level at the end of secondary schools.

In recent years, inequalities in educational performance, based on the sex of the student, continue to be the subject of interest in educational research, trying to identify to what extent schools affect the educational performance of girls and boys (Van Hek et al., 2016). Most of the research on school effectiveness and improvement has measured school effectiveness based on the average results of all students (Nachbauer & Kyriakides, 2020). However, it is essential to emphasize the need to address the dimension of equity, studying the differential effects on the effectiveness of schools according to ethnicity, gender, economic level, and social class (Gray et al., 2004; Kyriakides et al ., 2019). The existing gender studies at school indicate some inconsistencies. Some found that there are no differential effects in schools concerning gender (Kyriakides et al., 2019; Strand, 2016), so effective schools managed to be effective for boys and girls. Others found a significant but modest variation in the gender effect across schools (Thomas et al., 1997).

A review of international studies that analyze differences between boys and girls in linguistic competence shows that, in general, girls obtain better results than boys, for example, in terms of reading competence (Reilly et al., 2019; VanHek et al., 2018). Kollmayer et al. (2018) and Retelsdorf et al. (2015) found that teacher gender stereotypes related to reading can benefit girls and negatively affect boys' reading competence perception.

However, few studies have focused on the analysis of the gender gap in minority language proficiency (Olmedo et al. 2020) and less from the perspective of school effectiveness and improvement (Intxausti et al. 2023). Studies in the B.A.C. indicate that the linguistic competence of Basque obtained by girls in Elementary Education is higher than that of boys (Gobierno Vasco et al., 2019) as well as with respect to motivation and attitude (Artola et al., 2017).

Given the specific bilingual situation of the B.A.C., this study fills an existing gap in terms of the effectiveness of Middle schools related to the results obtained in linguistic competence and its intersection with issues of gender disparity.

This exploratory descriptive study uses a mixed methodology. For the quantitative analysis, the data was collected from the census sample of educational centers in the B.A.C, a total of 340 middle schools. Every two years, Diagnostic Evaluations (D.E.) are performed at schools by the Basque Institute for Educational Evaluation and Research (ISEI-IVEI). The DE is a standardized exam, like PISA, that evaluates students in the 8th grade of the middle school on their competence in Spanish and Basque language. In the BAC, Linguistic Communicative Competence (LCC) is viewed as having five different dimensions (Basque Government, 2008): oral comprehension, written comprehension, oral expression, written expression and oral interaction. The D.E. conducted in 2015, 2017, and 2019 served as the study’s database. The SPSS 26 program was used to conduct the statistical analysis. This study examines the idea of quality education and gender equity in schools. Multilevel regression modeling methods were used to determine gender equitable middle schools (Lizasoain, 2020). Given that it is widely acknowledged that contextual factors have a significant impact on the academic outcomes achieved by schools, this analysis makes it possible to control the contextual variables such as families’ economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS), the family language, and the percentage of immigrant students. The difference between the score obtained by the school in the D.E. with respect to the expected score, compared to the score obtained by other schools with very similar contexts, was used to calculate three residual values: school effectiveness (quality index), female student effectiveness, and male student effectiveness. The distinction in residual values between girls and boys yields the gender equality index. Equitable schools are those that achieve or come close to having the value 0. 36 schools met the equitable criterion in Basque competency and 48 schools in Spanish. 18 agreed to continue the project, and 3 of those centers achieved equitable outcomes in the Basque language and Spanish, 5 of them in Basque and 10 of those in Spanish. For the qualitative study, semi-structured interviews have been held with managers of those equitable Basque and Spanish-language schools. 34 professionals participated in total. A common protocol was established for the interviewers: school students’ findings regarding gender equity in Basque/Spanish language were presented to participants, and the professionals’ opinions regarding it were analyzed. Instrument was designed with the aim of collecting data about five different areas.

Results indicate that only 36 schools, that is, 10.6% achieve equitable results in the Basque language competence and 48 schools (14.1%) achieve it in Spanish. Moreover, those considered effective are not always equitable since only 13 schools of those 36 equitable ones are effective in Basque competence and 24 schools in Spanish. The results do not confirm that the gender balance among students from effective schools is more equal in terms of linguistic competence as it is found in other studies (Kyriakide et al., 2019). Greater confluence of school effectiveness and gender equality implies specific proposals to improve the outcomes of all students, regardless of their gender. There is a greater equity in the results of Spanish competence than in Basque, which obtains much better results in girls than in boys. A trend among young males from bilingual context to use the more prestigious language in informal social domains might explain it (Altuna, 2017; Price & Tamburelli, 2020). Altuna (2023) observed that boys find it hard to speak in Basque when joking around and in situations of anger or provocation, and that they associate the minority language with the school context, with one way of challenging formal school rules being to speak in Spanish. The qualitative study have shown that professional have not carried out an exhaustive analysis of gender-based inequalities in students’ performance at schools. In general, the gender equity plan is a priority objective within the schools’ educational projects but the scope of the actions focuses on attitudes and gender stereotypes, and not linguistic competences. Thus, few schools systematically introduce the gender perspective in the curriculum but not in intersection with language competence. The obstacles to improving school equity are the lack of training, awareness, and support for this cause, the job rotation among professionals, and school size.

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