Posted on 08/29/2003 3:09:56 PM PDT by Pro-Bush
Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin
At last June's graduation at Franklin High School just outside of Milwaukee, three of the four students who tied for valedictorian were girls. Among the National Honor Society members, 76% were girls. And girls comprised 85% of the students on Franklin's 4.0 honor roll.
The superintendent of schools for this upper-middle-class suburb, Gerald Freitag, investigated those numbers after the parents of a boy filed a complaint. He found that the skewed performances by gender at Franklin pretty much mirror the imbalances across the state and the nation.
This week, teachers at the middle school feeding into Franklin received training on how to reach out to boys. And high school teachers will continue the gender-sensitivity classes they began last school year.
But reversing the trend will not be easy. In classrooms nationwide, girls are pulling ahead of boys academically. Recent federal testing data show that what starts out as a modest gap in elementary-level reading scores turns into a yawning divide by high school. In 12th grade, 44% of girls rate as proficient readers on federal tests, compared with 28% of boys. And while boys still score slightly higher on federal math and science exams, their advantage is slipping.
Most startling is that little is being done to correct the imbalances. All of the major players schools, education colleges and researchers largely ignore the gender gap. Instead of pursuing sound solutions, many educators merely advocate prescribing more attention-focusing Ritalin (news - web sites) for the boys, who receive the drug at four to eight times the rate of girls, according to different estimates. "Too often the first reaction to an attention problem is 'Let's medicate,' " says Rockville, Md., child psychologist Neil Hoffman. "Some schools are quick to recommend solutions before they've fully evaluated the problem."
Playing to girls' strengths
One reason boys are losing academic ground to girls appears linked to a shift by schools to more word-based learning for which girls' brains are believed to have an advantage. Over the years, even math problems have become more word oriented, according to education researchers. But because schools are doing little to help boys adjust, males risk becoming second-class academic citizens. Already the academic success girls enjoy in high school translates into more college acceptances 56% of the students on campuses are female.
The full impact from this shift is something society has yet to discover. But a drop in earnings for males is one likely result. Workers with only a high school diploma earn $20,000 a year less than those with a bachelor's degree.
One fact explains why educators are ignoring boys' needs: You can't address a problem that you don't admit exists. The U.S. Department of Education (news - web sites) concedes that no serious research is available comparing different instructional methods that might help boys. In fact, many education researchers are hostile toward research aimed at exploring gender differences in learning.
Last April, when Kenneth Dragseth, superintendent of schools in Edina, Minn., presented a paper describing his district's gender gap at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting in Chicago, he says the reception ranged from chilly to hostile. Female education researchers in the audience questioned whether helping boys would mean hurting girls.
Their attitude follows years of lobbying by groups such as the American Association of University Women, which alerted educators to the fact that girls were being shortchanged academically in the fields of math and science. The extra attention helped focus schools on girls' difficulties, but it has made it too easy for educators to overlook the problems of boys. Among them:
Boys and girls learn differently. The best research on boy-girl learning differences is produced more by accident than by design. The lack of data in this field can hurt girls as much as boys. For instance, as part of an ongoing 20-year dyslexia study focusing on Connecticut schools, Yale neuroscientist and pediatrician Sally Shaywitz discovered that schools were identifying four times as many dyslexic boys as girls. Yet when her team entered schools to screen children, it diagnosed just as many dyslexic girls as boys. Shaywitz found that the mostly female teaching staff was quicker to identify rambunctious boys than quiet girls.
The results are just one example of what might be learned about the role gender plays in education, especially in elementary school, where 85% of teachers are women.
Future teachers aren't trained to deal with learning differences. Therapist Michael Gurian, author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently!, has visited more than 100 education colleges. But he has not found one that offers courses on male-female brain differences. His discovery explains why many new teachers arrive in classrooms clueless about what teaching techniques might work best for boys' learning styles.
Boys lack advocates. The special efforts made by schools to steer more girls into advanced math and science classes came after powerful advocacy groups embraced the problem. But Gurian and other advocates for boys say they run into resistance from educators who point to males' success in the workforce as proof that advocacy for boys is unnecessary.
In spite of the lack of research, anecdotal evidence shows that far more effective strategies are available for teaching boys than plying them with Ritalin. Patricia Henley runs a boy-friendly charter school in Kansas that hires many male teachers. It also recognizes boys' natural tendency to favor active learning by conducting more class work on the chalkboard and allowing more student movement within the classroom. And the school trains teachers to deal with boys' particular styles. For instance, because boys volunteer answers more slowly than girls do, teachers are told to count to 10 before calling on a student.
Beginning in the early 1990s, groups such as the American Association of University Women performed an important service by alerting the public to an educational failing. Their persistence helped convince educators that schools were ignoring important problems plaguing girls, such as the loss of self-esteem among middle school girls who had been successful students throughout elementary school.
Today's education system fails many boys. They deserve the same kind of attention to address why they are losing ground.
It is a fact, however, at many schools boys don't need as strong an academic record as girls. And Blacks and Hispanics don't need as strong an academic record as girls. Do you conclude this is all because lesbians in control of the admissions offices? Now that's funny!
LOL ... remember "We're fierce, we're feminists, we're in your face .." ? Needs a retort. maybe .... "Men, it's time to grow a pair!"
All the more reason why colleges may not be the best place for boys (or girls, for that matter). I would get my son or daughter out of that place ASAP if that is the case.
And not everyone who thinks boys are getting short-changed is male.
I agree and stated that I sympathized with the situation of boys in schools.
You have no idea of my or anyone's feminist credentials.
I'm not sure what this means.
What I stated was that blaming "feminists" all the time is avoiding the responsibility that men have toward young males and their well being.
I don't know your feminist credentials or whether you are male or female. I stand by my comments either way.
Conservative men should quit griping and get on with changing the system that is detrimental to boys. Please go back and read my remarks. They are supportive of boys in schools, but call for the MEN to do something.
From our well-established, nationally-known high school, DOZENS of girls with 1200 SATs and 3.0 grade averages were admitted to prestigious state universities over DOZENS of boys with 1450 SATs and 4.0 GPAs.
When asked why this was, the response came back "because we need to give the girls a helping hand." This was two years ago.
Nothing you've offered is supported by fact.
I wish it were.
Sorry, but I don't "do" P.C. comments.
There are many traditional men's jobs that pay well enough to support oneself and a family without college, i.e. "bluecollar" work.
"Pinkcollar jobs" are not nearly as renumerative. That's just the truth.
I'm sorry. I thought you read your own posts.
There is such a high percentage of women applying to college that the admission offices have different standards depending on the sex of the applicant.
Ignoring your doubletalk, why don't we simply go back to ADMITTING STUDENTS ON MERIT.
Radical, huh?
Kindly spare me your condescending suggestion that my sons go to a trade school while the girls next door get their law degrees, medical diplomas and MBAs.
Certainly conservative men should stand up and make waves. They're trying with Title IX; the institutional bias is vast and deep.
And they're not being helped by anti-male attitudes like yours. (Insert your protestation here.)
Source, please.
I am an indenpendent business person, and I do appreciate the jury system, but I get called now every year simply because they know I will come. So, on the last application I put down that I have ADD(? ADT - I can't remember, I must have walked out during the commercial.) I certainly do by all the commonly cited symptoms. In particular, I get really bored, particularly in front of TV or in a meeting or classroom. As long as I can remember I have found it helpful to close my eyes to in order to not loose track of what someone boring is saying to me, and people hate that. I can't imagine the judge would like it, but watching most people go about their business makes me think the world has shifted into slow motion.
Not bragging, but I recently read the autobiography of a famous lawyer. In the book, he included a sworn testament from a business partner who watched him write a speech to give to a political convention in the evening of the same day while in the afternoon he handled a law suit in court. He won the case and finished the speech all in the same afternoon. He never took notes in court as he believed that if he couldn't remember something about the case, neither could the jury. No doubt the judge believed he was taking notes. I am not so sure society would be better off by eliminating such people.
Same here, mostly because that describes me. My high school GPA was whopping 2.4 (though my SATs were very high), but I somehow managed to become a leader in my field with several patents and theoretical advances credited to my name. I was willing to work hard, I just wasn't willing to waste my time doing mindless busywork to satisfy the meaningless goal of some chimp-for-teacher, which shows in my grades. School has always been deadly boring for me.
In fact, I am suspicious of people with a 4.0 GPA. It suggests submission to the demands of an "authority" that is best ignored most of the time, a sort of subtle indicator of a possible character flaw. People with perfect GPAs always seem to be people who put an unjustified amount of effort and value in the process itself rather than the end results.
Is your daughter studying to become an electrician? (Spare me the defense of these noble professions.)
Actually it was supposed to be an attempt at humor but I guess it didn't make it there.
I have found a strong anti-female "victimization" stance on FR. The same people who would protest the victimization plea of other groups quite adeptly postures themselves that way as men.
Men are grownups. They should be looking out for these boys. That is my point.
Quit whining and do something about it.
Get over your snobbery.
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