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.
An example, please ?
These paid far better than "woman's work", such as clerical, hair stylist, waitress.
What is really telling is the response of men here, the hostility, and the accusation that I am anti-male just for pointing out some of the conditions under which woman operated.
I never said that they should content themselves with that or that girls should get a pass with lower grades. I merely pointed out that tradesman can make a good living and won't have their jobs out-sourced.
You decided to be offended and react in an emotional way, rather than merely reading what I had stated.
Having a college degree has been more essential for a woman to support herself than it has been for a man.
Sorry, but that was and has been a true statement for a long time. When there were manufacturing jobs in this country, and when men could make a good living at it, as well as work as fireman, policeman, and other skilled, but not degreed jobs, woman's work was mainly clerical, not something that was very renumerative.
What world were you living in then ? A good job for a woman was a teacher or a nurse, both of which required a college education. In addition, it was a practice in Southern black families to educate their girls, rather than their boys, if the money was limited, as this was an avenue out from being a housemaid, and all the sexual pressures which that engendered.
That's not the feminism of Betty Friedan or Germaine Greer. (Do you even know those names?)
Yes, I've read them both and considered that Friedan, who has since been outed as both a fellow traveler with communists of the fifties and a lesbian, was responsible for instigating much of the notion that wife and mother were not esteemed callings, which led to much of the downfall of this culture in the last thirty years.
Greer was more focussed on sexual freedom issues and less on politics; she was much more affirmative toward men.
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.
Don't assume that I don't.
The subject of this thread was not higher education; it was the unequal treatment of boys and girls, mainly in elementary school. I indicated that I am sympathetic and in agreement that schools have become unfriendly places for boys.
In addition to that, I have spoken up for the manly world of skilled work, which many have found far more satisfying than white-collar cubicle drudgery. I make no apologies for that and think that many females might find that work more satifying that that in high rise prisons.
From the beginning, you read far more negativity into my responses than were there.
As I said, much of the commentary on this thread has been as much anti-female as anti-male.
Men can choose not to work by going to prison and making the rest of us pay for that.
You're showing your anti-male, socialist colors the more and more you continue this thread.
You wrote:
women can chose not work ... by getting pregnant and living on welfare, other social services (all forcibliy paid for by taxpayers like me),
Just following the same vein as you.
Like I asked before; what are you on?
Her three children and grandchildren will be surprised to hear that.
Far be it from me to defend a pro-aborion socialist, but Friedan has written for years that anti-male, lesbian politics are destroying NOW. Obviously you've never read one word of Friedan's except the errors you googled this morning.
Keep it up. You've got lots to learn.
Your silly, ill-informed, blithe remarks hurt women as much as men.
...fellow traveler with communists...
And for future reference, that's redundant. Stick to using words you know how to use.
I'm done with educating you. Good luck in college. Don't eat too much junk food and get enough sleep. And be sure to pay attention in all those electrical engineering classes.
I hear they're looking for women on the lines in Lubbock.
My high school had multiple levels of AP classes in most subjects. I had burned through all those by the end of my sophomore year in high school, so I would have had to go to a proper uni. Generally speaking, graduating really early is a pretty stupid idea for kids even if they are intellectually capable. I saw it ruin a couple friends of mine, and in one school district I was actually four grades ahead of where I normally would have been at my age so I do have a first-hand idea of the problems. (Thanks to semi-regular moving around the country, I ended up back in a "normal" class level -- different districts have different policies -- though I still ended up being a few grades ahead at the end anyway.) Much better to coast through and have time to spend on other things. I always aced my tests, I just never did any of the homework, so depending on the class and how the teacher broke down your final score, that netted me B's and C's in most classes. Excellent bang for the buck; maximum outcome with minimum effort.
Maybe you hadnt internalized the algorithm "get good grades, go to elite college, succeed in world"?
That algorithm is not efficient of either time or money; I chose a more optimal route of my own devising and have been far more successful than most of those who actually drank the KoolAid and followed your algorithm (including my father, who had an exceptional education). In real life, I've managed to excel at just about everything I've attempted, and I did it younger and faster because I didn't waste precious years on pursuits of dubious return.
I had my own esoteric interests - stuff like wargaming and reading National Review and Ayn Rand as a teenager - but that didnt stop me from turning my brain on in class.
A point you've apparently missed was that it had nothing to do with turning my brain on in class. There was nothing in class for me to turn my brain on for. My grades were strictly the result of not doing a lick of homework, though I always managed to ace the tests. I always knew the stuff, I just didn't do the work nominally required to "learn" the stuff, but a good percentage of your grade comes merely from doing the work at every sub-university school I've gone to.
One more anecdote:
One of the smartest guys I ever met in my life was during my short stint in the Army (I thought joining a high-speed combat unit would be a good experience, and it was, but not for the reasons I thought). He was trailer trash through-and-through, about my age at the time, a high school dropout with a GED and a penchant for dive bars who lived with his divorced mom in a nasty wife-beater trailer park. For all intents and purposes, he was the very stereotype of ignorant poor white trash.
Except that he was one of the most literate, intelligent, and lucid people I'd ever met. He was better read and obviously sharper than the vast majority of people who come out of good universities. Despite his appearances and his environment, he was one of those people that when you talked to him it became immediately apparent that he had a razor sharp mind that had been augmented with an extensive self-education. Would a university education benefited him? Probably, but it would only have been a secondary asset. I have no idea what he is doing today, but he had an entrepreneurial mind. Last I heard from him, he somehow managed to buy a bunch of "cheap" commercial properties up in Portland, Oregon just before that place really took off from all the Californians moving up there (he swore the place would be a gold mine), converted the places and made a mint.
It is worth noting that income distributions in the general population measure average people, and for those people college education helps. If you look at the population of people who have turned in exceptionally successful results, you get an entirely different picture of how important a formal or "elite" education actually is. Highly intelligent self-motivated people gain relatively little benefit from that kind of education in the big scheme of things. I have a college education, but I've never put it down on a resume or CV or anywhere else, as it is among the least important of the things I have done in my life and nobody ever cared.
FURIOUS feminist Betty Friedan has been quick to criticize fallen House Speaker-elect Bob Livingston for his indiscretions, but Friedan has carried some kinky baggage as well.
She said he was ''extremely insulting to the modern American women's movement.'' And earlier in the day at a news conference in support of Bill Clinton, Friedan denounced the President's enemies as ''a bunch of dirty old white men trying to use sexual issues wrongly.'' But the remarks by Friedan, 77, a co-founder of the National Organization for Women, sound hypocritical coming from a woman who once packed graphic pornography in her bag while on a political mission. Back in July of 1984, the Daily News reported on an incident at the San Francisco airport when Friedan arrived for the Democratic National Convention as part of the New York delegation. Friedan's over-stuffed suitcase burst open on the luggage carousel, disgorging what the News described as ''naughty'' contents. A fellow delegate who was present at the time tells PAGE SIX that those naughty items were a cache of ''S&M magazines depicting women in extreme bondage.'' According to the witness, ''Both Friedan and the delegates around her were extremely embarrassed.''
From http://www.salon.com/col/horo/1999/01/nc_18horo2.html
Betty Friedan's secret Communist past
David Horowitz writes about Daniel Horowitz's biography of Betty Friedan
Why has this feminist icon continued to cover up her years as a party activist?
What is it with progressives? Why do they feel the need to lie so relentlessly about who they are? Recently Rigoberta Menchú's autobiography was exposed as a complete hoax. Now it's Betty Friedan's turn to be revealed as a feminist fibber.
In a new book, "Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique", Smith College professor Daniel Horowitz (no relation) establishes beyond doubt that the woman who has always presented herself as a typical suburban housewife until she began work on her groundbreaking book was in fact nothing of the kind. In fact, under her maiden name, Betty Goldstein, she was a political activist and professional propagandist for the Communist left for a quarter of a century before the publication of "The Feminist Mystique" launched the modern women's movement.
Professor Horowitz documents that Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America's Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley's radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer. Her famous description of America's suburban family household as "a comfortable concentration camp" in "The Feminine Mystique" therefore had more to do with her Marxist hatred for America than with any of her actual experience as a housewife or mother. (Her husband, Carl, also a leftist, once complained that his wife "was in the world during the whole marriage," had a full-time maid and "seldom was a wife and a mother").
It is fascinating that Friedan not only felt the need to lie about her real views and life experience then, but still feels the need to lie about them now. Although Horowitz, the author of the new biography, is a sympathetic leftist, Friedan refused to cooperate with him once she realized he was going to tell the truth about her life as Betty Goldstein. After he published an initial article about Friedan's youthful work as a "labor journalist," Friedan maligned him, saying to an American University audience, "Some historian recently wrote some attack on me in which he claimed that I was only pretending to be a suburban housewife, that I was supposed to be an agent."
This was particularly unkind because Friedan's professor-biographer is such a fellow-traveler himself that he bends over backwards throughout the book to sanitize the true dimensions of Friedan's past. Thus he describes one character in the book, Steve Nelson, as "the legendary radical, veteran of the Spanish Civil War and Bay Area party official." In fact, Nelson was an obscure radical but an important apparatchik (later notorious for his espionage activities in the Berkeley Radiation Lab) who was in Spain as a Party commissar to enforce the Stalinist line.
Professor Horowitz also bends over backwards, and at length, to defend Friedan's lying as a response to "McCarthyism." When she makes the ridiculous accusation that he is going to use "innuendoes" to describe her past as a justification for refusing to grant him permission to quote from her unpublished papers, he is all-too understanding. The word "innuendoes," he explains, was often used by people "scarred by McCarthyism."
I repeat: I am not defending a pro-abortion socialist. But Betty Friedan is not a lesbian. (Some of us on this forum actually know the people we're discussing, and thus don't have to rely on dittohead.org and PAGE SIX for info).
Get it?
And Horowitz knows there's nothing "secret" about Friedan's communist past. They were ALL communists.
The fact remains, even though it seems to have gone over your head, quotas, whether for men, women, blacks, whites, or jello molds, are UN-DEMOCRATIC, UN-AMERICAN, UNFAIR, and the antithesis of the meritocracy we claim to be.
As I said, when you have some kids of your own, get back to me.
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