Interesting when you combine this with the recent article (http://health.yahoo.com/news/177766) discussing the 'socially contagious' aspect of obesity - the more you're around obese people, the more likely you are to gain weight (and become obese) yourself. As your expectations of what's acceptable change, your habits tend to change.
So it's a self-reinforcing behavior that will tend to expand until some exogenous event changes things.
It may be true enough that white, upper-middle class males are doing OK, but what's clear is that the way in which schools have changed over the past 30-odd years have made them far more conducive to female achievement and less conducive to male achievement. Personally, I see no reason schools couldn't do both - even in same sex schools if necessary. In the dark dim past, the boys who performed best often when to all boys prep schools and all boys elite public high schools, and the best performing girls went to all girl prep schools (there were few, if any, all girls elite public high schools that I know of) and all girl parochial schools.
While stereotypes are never more than rough guides to the interests and abilities of most boys and <>most girls, there are most of the time significant differences in interests and learning styles between boys and girls.
Single sex education isn't for everyone, but it should remain a viable, readily available option, both at the secondary and college levels. On the other hand, it's hard to know what to do when you have women or men who really do want the challenge of the formerly all-male or all-women's colleges. VMI represents a fair example of the former: since the government forced VMI to go coed in 1997, there have been a small, but steady, number of young women who really want the VMI experience (the women must meet male PT norms and are pretty much treated the same in the Rat Line), and who succeed. I don't think the presence of women has been good for VMI, but I have to respect and even admire the young women who've earned the right to be Brother Rats of their classes.
Theyre actually not, as studies by Hoff and others have shown. And even her own statistics allude to that; readung SAT scores are way down (when looking normalized to normalized) and math scores are down slightly. In fact, girl scores are pretty flat too, its just that they are so much higher than boys now (we're still talking white middle class)
The biggest stat she avoids is who goes to college nowadays.There are 80 million more people in the US today than 30 ys ago and the no. of boys attending is about the same(Black males in college is actually up)..So how good can things be really?