Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin

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."

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.

"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."

My own personal experience: in 1981, not getting into Ivy League Schools with a 1430 SATs, scads of 5s on AP tests and 800 on several college boards, extr-curricular stuff and straight As ... while girls with lower SATs and academic records from the same school; also, saw some minority and athletic 'accepts' to Harvard, brown, etc.
In 1989, not getting any help on scholarship aid at a time when the research grant supporting my PhD studies was pulled; yet in my search finding many many 'women and minority only' scholarships. In the end, I took a part-time programming job to support myself.
Seeing a friend around that time search for a math teaching job, with difficulty, finally he did accept a University post at a lesser institution as a Prof in Math; had he been a woman, he would have easily been accepted at a much more prestigious institution, as at the same time women getting advanced degrees were also searching and getting relatively better jobs yet with weaker 'vita'. Why, because there is a perception that there is a 'shortage of women' - which they might as well describe as an 'excess of men' - and thus lesser qualified women get better positions (another example: a female friend got a quite good position even though she had finished her PhD studies nor gottern her degree.)

It is certainly the case that feminized thinking is pervasive and deep and the bias extends from grade school teaching, through college admission, to employment at the University, ie, getting a professorship.
And this bias is hardly denied - it is considered "a good thing".

Ah, spoken like a bunch of 2.4 GPAers. :-)

Let me parry with a defense of the high GPA academic acheivers. Just because school was boring for you, doesnt mean that it *should* be boring for all or that for those who found it worthwhile to excel in school are somehow less able in some way. That is prejudice.

I managed to excel in high school and then went on to advanced degrees and much success in life careerwise and financially. I found high school easy and mostly fun, because I am naturally curious and loved stuff like history as I love politics now; it was 'natural' to just do well, although there were late nights writing papers in some cases. it was only when I started running into
some folks later who claimed to be smart yet had lousy grades that it even occured to me that any smart person would both to avoid excelling, and not 'get the most out of education'.

I find the bias against academic excellence to be based on anti-intellectual bias, the same kind of bias that High Schoolers would engage in by calling the A students "geeks" and nerds etc. A mix of class delineation, pride in sloth and other social stature metrics, and a desire to not give too much credit to those doing something you dont want to do; or maybe that one makes claims that one *could* do something in a 'sour grapes' manner as a way of avoiding questions of capability and intent. The 4.0 academic high achiever person excels at thinking, ie has high IQ, likes competition, and likes a pat-on-the-back for doing work; they've internalized high expectations; and they are intellectually curious, ie they want to learn. This last point is IMHO the most important feature for anyone to have in the modern world.

These positive attributes are correlated imho with academic success, they are turned negative into ...
"submission to the demands of an "authority" that is best ignored most of the time ..."
While I had my share of wacky teachers, but some of them were most excellent and worthwhile. No teachers I recall after 3rd grade were in any sense 'authorities' demanding submission. were you in a military academy? Of course, if you didnt know the material, you got bad grades, but if the point is to validate 'rebellion' by getting bad grades, it's a pretty clueless form of it. Rather, I saw my education as a service; adults are telling me stuff, some of it I rejected (my liberal teacher who had fun debating some conservative kids), others taught me much more (eg a brilliant chemistry teacher). The more I learned from them in High School on the taxpayer's dime, the less I had to pay to learn in College. I never confused a teacher with some substitute parental 'authority' figure. I need feel at the time, that I needed good grades to succeed later in life; and I still agree with that assessment. learning about how to succeed and overcome obstacles in school is an easier teacher than "real" life, I assure you.

"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." This too is projecting far too much, as both process (action, behavior, habit) *and* results are needed. IMHO it is actually the opposite: The kids who care only for the grade ("is this on the test") are the results-oriented ones. they end up learning, then forgetting after the finals. but it does train them to play 'the game', whatever it is. Those are the folks who manage to get ahead by somehow manipulating the system to their advantage. The kids who care about the process are the ones who are there to just learn. And bless their hearts, because somebody is going to actually have to *know* the stuff when they grow up, so we can advance science and technology.

I've worked with a "sub-GPA" genius types, and I have found that there is no advantage conferred from the mindset that "dcided" not to get good grades - and one disadvantage, as an employer ... the thing that was most frustrating was the egotistical 'if it doesnt interest me, i dont care' attitude, the kinds which says - "I was willing to work hard, I just wasn't willing to waste my time doing mindless busywork". Well guess what, in any business anywhere, there is *some* work that is unpleasant, less-than-fulfilling or non-fun. But it has to get done. you have to just "Do the Job". And it frustrate(d) me as a manager to have to make work - that we are paid to DO dammit - somehow 'interesting' enough for this guy. What I did learn on positive side was if he WAS motivated, he would do the job well. He also could say: "I somehow managed to become a leader in my field with several patents and theoretical advances credited to my name." in part because he got that motivation to learn/achieve in a particular field and ran with it.

In short - the sub-GPA genius is more likely to be a Prima Donna - he egotistally treats work as something that has to 'interest' him. (My own view is: work is work, as a top-level manager once told our company "You reward for doing a good job is getting to keep it". If your career clouds your life, change it. ) Pick the 4.0 GPA type guy and you know he can (a) do the job w/ high standards, think for himself, *and* (b) DO WHAT YOU ASK HIM, something he learned to do back when he was a kid.

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