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.
I still think that something I said hit home in a painful way.
HOWEVER, this is a new trend, in that for many years, until manufacturing and other blue collar vocations were transferred out of the country, traditional "women's work", "pinkcollar" jobs were far less renumerative than male jobs. It is the loss of those blue collar jobs as much as an improvement in the wages of non-degreed women, that has resulted in this trend.
It is a serious situation for any non-skilled, non-degreed worker of either sex.
If only this were actually true. All that was required to get a 4.0 GPA was to actually do all the work, something any sufficiently motivated chimp can do. It is not really an indicator of high IQ or intelligence or even a particular desire to learn. So in short, a high GPA pretty much means that you have an average intelligence and are really, really good at always doing what you are told to do -- that really is the only qualities it actually measures. Even in the AP and advanced classes, the bar isn't set high enough to filter for genuinely superior intellectual capacity. None of the classes were actually difficult enough, and I went to one of the very best high schools in the country. I neither need nor want a "pat on the back" for doing work that anyone could do; it is a pretty shallow achievement and I'm not that needy.
In other words, GPA doesn't measure what you are claiming it measures. I am a polymath with very good credentials in a number of fields, ironically not the field of engineering that I actually went to the uni for (which I basically haven't touched since leaving the uni). I was rural white trash with a six sigma IQ (per the State of Washington) who was consuming a broad range of esoteric mathematics and science texts before I was even in high school. In other words, by the time I was in high school, I was studying things that I wouldn't normally have seen outside of graduate level classes at the uni. When one field dried up, I diversified into other fields of interest. Learning new things is one of my few real pleasures in life. Fortunately, after I left school the stuff I actually burned time on was actually judged by its own merits and I did very well indeed.
So yeah, I wasted a lot of time when I should have been doing my homework reading and writing things I doubt my teachers would have been able to understand. And you wonder why I got a 2.4 GPA? A lot of homework takes time, even when it is not intellectually challenging.
It may look like a lack of focus, but it is really just a lack of focus on useless work that other people want me to do for no particularly good reason. I focus just fine when there is a measurable benefit to doing the things I'm doing, but a 4.0 GPA is nigh worthless as a benefit because I never got satisfaction from grades for their own sake. There are plenty of studies that show that most of the really successful people in the world had surprisingly modest GPAs, whereas most of the 4.0 GPA types end up firmly in the middle of the road on average when it comes to success. Not that I care either way.
I'm sure she meant to fill in the blank with "sweetheart."
Congratulations. You are correct. To read your suggestions that my sons should content themselves with trade employment while girls with lower grades and SAT scores head to college is painfully callous and smug.
Having a college degree has been more essential for a woman to support herself than it has been for a man.
When asked, you offered no back-up for that ridiculous statement. What world do you live in?
The problem with today's "feminists" is that they are NOT feminists. They want all the advantages and perks of the job or education without doing the work, simply because they're women. That's not the feminism of Betty Friedan or Germaine Greer. (Do you even know those names?)
I hope you and every other young woman without children on these threads who speak so glibly about young men's futures will one day have your own children.
And I hope you remember this conversation. And I hope things are better for your children -- boys and girls.
The debate elevates once again.
Your last comment was P.C.
Women have more options, beyond college degrees, in this country than men.
What I think she meant was that most traditional female or "pink collar" jobs, such as teaching, nursing, and social work, tend to require a college degree, as opposed to traditionally male construction or other trades. The traditional job options for a young man without a college degree were higher than those of a young woman. Of course, this is less and less true today, but I don't understand why her comment was considered offensive.
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