Posted on 05/26/2008 5:51:38 PM PDT by neverdem
The American Association of University Women has long downplayed the school problems of boys, arguing instead that the education establishment victimizes girls, in what it calls an “unacknowledged tragedy.” So it is unsurprising that the AAUW’s latest report, “Where the Girls Are,” argues against the “myth” that boys are falling behind girls in school. The Washington Post summarized the report’s findings in a page-one headline: NO CRISIS FOR BOYS IN SCHOOL, STUDY SAYS.
The AAUW has been down this road before. Its 1992 report, “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” was a powerful and effective—though mostly false—lobbying effort for “gender equity.” As education scholar Diane Ravitch commented, the report “ginned up a non-existent crisis” in girls’ education. The report contained almost no new research and was essentially a rehash of old and dubious studies assembled to support its thesis. Yet the mainstream press reported the story with enormous excitement and little skepticism. BIAS AGAINST GIRLS IS FOUND RIFE IN SCHOOL, WITH LASTING DAMAGE, trumpeted the front page of the New York Times, though neither the text of the highly politicized report nor the cherry-picked research behind it justified that characterization.
Then as now, relevant statistics showed boys in more academic trouble than girls. Boys are much more likely to repeat a grade and to be given Ritalin for attention deficit disorder. They are twice as likely to wind up in special education. By 1992, the percentage of college students and graduates who were men had been declining for years, a fact that the AAUW ignored and education reporters mostly failed to notice for much of the ensuing decade. In recent years, research and media attention have swung decisively in favor of paying more attention to the predicaments of boys—a development that apparently rankles the AAUW. This time around, the AAUW does mention in passing that women have earned 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. over the past two decades, and that the average female high school student has a significantly higher grade-point average (3.09) than the average male (2.86).
But the new report also argues that the increasing success of girls has not come at the expense of boys, and that both girls and boys are improving their school performance. The organization that contended fiercely in 1992 that schools were doing great harm to girls now says: “The past few decades have seen remarkable gains for girls and boys in education, and no evidence indicates a crisis for boys in particular.” The report argues that the “crisis of boys” is more properly viewed as a problem among minority children and students from low-income families. Yet as the website Power Line points out, “the study held racial, ethnic, and economic factors constant and still found that boys under-performed in key respects. So whatever is true of minority and low-income students, academic success is also linked to gender, with girls performing significantly better than boys.” Indeed, the report acknowledges as much, noting that more Asian-American and white degree-earners are women than men (the ratios are 54 to 46 percent among Asian-Americans and 56 to 44 among whites). The disparities among Hispanics and blacks are even worse: women account for 59 percent of Hispanic undergraduates and for 64 percent of black ones.
Though “Where the Girls Are” doesn’t add much to the conversation, the report does make one strong point: that concern about the gaps between racial groups is more warranted than concern about gaps between the sexes. African-Americans and Hispanics lag far behind whites and Asian-Americans on every measure of school performance. The AAUW breezed past this point in 1992; it may be raising it now only to deflect attention from the plight of boys. But whatever the AAUW’s motive, the facts speak for themselves.
John Leo edits the Manhattan Institute website Minding the Campus.
womens studies curriculums and their derivatives.
Very few folks are rooting for the men. However, there is a special women's chapter of the ACM in computing, and there are tons of special support programs for the women.
Face it, public schools including colleges are totally vaginazed against men.
My son started college at 16. He’s so disgusted w the whole place that he’s joining the Navy before he gets his degree.
Better to be a scarred knuckled cheif than a wussy frat boy.
It’s true.
But guess what? Employers are discovering the dirty secret: the college degree is vastly over-rated.
In other words, a college degree is not an education, necessarily.
Boys are different, they’re unruly, obtuse, and stubborn. Eventually boys become men. Both fart, forget their table manners, and so on. But when there’s work to do, or trouble threatens, eyes turn to them.
Good for your son.
Hear, hear.
Employers knew that all along. The non-technical degree requirement to even get an interview didn't come about because it implies any kind of job ability, it came about when Jesse and the EEOC began taking any company that didn't hire enough unqualified minorities to court.
Demanding a degree to get in the door for an interview is an EEOC proof way of letting the time and money obligation of college weed out most of those unqualified people - and many qualified ones as well but that's acceptable collateral damage.
btt
I’m a high school English teacher, and I do see a distinct difference between the boys and girls in my classroom. That distinction is bound to tick off someone out there, however.
What I see is that girls love to complain. Even while achieving great things, many girls in my classes are more than willing to give in to hyperbole, create drama where there is little conflict, undermine their own excellence, and take out the stilleto against their fellow female classmates.
The boys are far easier to teach - even those boys who slouch into class unwilling to lift a finger. Boys sometimes get into brawls, but those are quickly resolved and the winners and losers get on with life. Girls, on the other hand, seem to love the melodrama.
Of course, like anything dealing with humanity, there are some exceptions in both sexes. Just thinking about my classes, however, the girls seem to enjoy the sport of being a victim and making others a victim, too.
Which brings me back to this vacant little report. Any high school teacher will tell you that the girls excel academically. The girls respond as if they are suffering. This report reflects that truth on a larger scale, as does an overview of the films, books, music, and theater which attracts a female audience. Boys life adventure and action; girls like stories about relationships, loss, love, and melodrama. What is more melodramatic than the loss girls suffer from the patriarchy, symbolized by the men they love, whom women have to endure throughout their lives?
Maybe some aspiring woman playright will take this report and turn it into theater, like “The Vagina Monologues.” It’ll be a smash success, filling the seats with weeping women mourning their achievements.
Thanks
A mustang officer would be good too.
“Which brings me back to this vacant little report. Any high school teacher will tell you that the girls excel academically.”
That’s because they have to.
After all the earmarked funds, set asides and the feminising of the classroom, they better have something to show for it.
Please dont take this as an insult to you personally.
It was aimed at the school boards and administrators that encourage this to go on.
The girls whine more, cry more, get moody more, and get nailed for useless jibba jabba. The boys get nailed for name calling, body noises, and laughing, the same kinds of stuff my peers and I got nailed for at that age.
Is there a bias? Heck, yeah. See it every day in wimpy, watered-down reading books, in more girls than boys in the activities, all that stuff. Can it be reversed? Yoobetcha, but only when a$$hats like the AAUW and their associated vaginas are silenced. Till then, the war against boys continues....
Aye...
When I graduated college in 1974, I received an invitation to join this organization. I read a little about the group, and it was so rife, even then, with radical feminism, I had no problem refusing.
Jesse's lawsuits? I hadn't considered that, but my recollection is that Jesse's shakedowns didn't start until after colleges were already regarded as gatekeepers.
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