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.
Agreed.
And it is likely more important for men than women, as men face fewer not more opportunities and prospects than women without such degrees.
I'm not certain that that has been established, that "men face fewer prospects thas women without degrees." We would need to see that women's non-degreed opportunities are more numerous than men's and that these same opportunities are closed off to men (the marriage option for increasing one's econmic standing being the exception, as you pointed out.)
The well-publicized 'advantages' to men in pay virtually disappear when you account for previous experience, actual work performed (how much you work), and difficulty and unpleasantness of the task.
For example: A construction worker working hard 8 hour shifts and facing job risks that give you the highest death rate among job classifications makes more than a secretary doing non-physically demanding work in a more pleasant work environment. The shocker is why this would surprise.
[ None the less, it is/was still a more renumerative job which was close off to women until recently].
But the other shocker is there are only so many 'blue-collar' type jobs and they certainly are not a panacea for men looking at careers, and that trends continue to favor more of the "service" type jobs and less of those "traditional male" jobs in mining, manufacturing etc. that can keep a family without doing college-level work.
NO question about that.
The gap between wages for college and non-college graduates is a yawning gap, and it is dangerous and foolish to suggest anyone capable of getting through college should forego it lightly.
Agreed. My remark, which set off all this brouhaha, was that men could go into trades and make a good income. This was meant to be both serious and a little tongue-in-cheek, which to my regret, was not received that way. It is imperative that, if college is not the route pursued, training to some skill level is. We've both heard the stories of the well off plumber, electricians and contractors. The other skilled vocation that is going begging is for trained mechanics. These guys can clear $100,000 and are in short supply.
EVERYONE needs a skill, whether the analytic skills obtained in college or other training.
ON a thread about the "feminization" of schools and their unfriendly atmosphere for boys, the prejudice against skilled training for men is perplexing. These skills were long associated with "manly" work. They are a good match for some of the young men for whom school, in general, is a trial. This is NOT to say that there is not a problem in schools as they now exist. But you would surely admit that much of the ritalin drugging was advocated, supplied and prescribed by MEN who have played a role in this disgrace. And where were the men on school boards, school administration and in the classtooms ? We need more of their advocacy to counter that of this 'feminist" viewpoint.
The hostility evidenced on this site is disturbing as it goes beyond civil debate. If the cost of becoming educated is to distort one's character to that extent, I don't think it is worth the trade off. As you pointed out in your earlier post, higher education can be the experience of being denigrated for who you are. For one's own mental health, it would be better to flee the asylum than be taken down.
I was just trying to point out some of the options to becoming insane.
We used to play a great game in jr. high phys ed. that I'm sure isn't allowed anymore. It was called "medicine ball." Four guys crouched at each corner of a huge wrestling mat with a big heavy medicine ball placed in the center. When the instuctor blew the whistle we'd crawl as fast as we could to the ball and attempted to wrestle it to our corner. The fights that naturally ensued were epic, and outrageously fun.
Anyone can claim to be who they aren't, to "know personally" famous people, to even claim to read books as you have. Nothing in your posts indicate any knowledge of Betty Friedan or Germaine Greer either.
You are a fraud.
If you do have children, I feel sorry for them, based on your temperment and rudeness alone.
Your type is all too obvious. You pontificate without any knowledge; you instruct with no experience.
You tell young men to become plumbers while you applaud girls getting into college with lower grades. Then you go off on tangents and defend your careless remarks by criticizing others.
Normally I wouldn't pay you the time of day. But your attitude is SO indicative of what young men are up against these days.
Stop whining and get a life of your own instead of telling others what's good for them.
Kindly don't ping me again.
Please provide one instance where I applauded girls for getting into college with lower grades.
Please provide one instance where I advocated discrimination.
I hope you remember this comment next time you need a plumber.
What a load of elitism on this thread.
Your arguement is getting more twisted by the minute. I get the feeling that you want all men to locked up in prison.
Your arguement is getting more twisted by the minute. I get the feeling that you want all men to be locked up in prison.
Bump
Did she mean "mediation" or "medication"?
:>)
What are you on ?
These men's actions, by their own CHOICE has put them in prison.
I asked you first, twice before.
These men's actions, by their own CHOICE has put them in prison.
That is pure BS and YOU KNOW IT. What those who are sent to prison under false accusations. Like being falsely accused of rape or murder, it happens more often than not.
Well, I can't argue with that. I have been an extremely vocal supporter of abolishing the public school systems for some time. If you study their history they have no right to exist, and their actual performance gives me no reason to support their existence. As it is, they only serve to perpetuate the state rather than to optimize the state. And their current treatment of males-as-pathologies is horrendous.
PS: So what is your field of expertise and your career?
I am a mix of engineer, entrepreneur, and executive. My field of true expertise and authority is algorithmic information theory, though I have a uni background in chemistry, chemical engineering, and computational chemistry. My venture interests are in many fields though. I currently am timeslicing between a two year old global networking/telecom venture that has done very well since it was put together (the company uses an exceptionally optimal network/software architecture which I helped design -- nothing else like it in existence, and so effective that it was profitably bootstrapped without external venture capital), a closed hedge fund that exploits some of the IP I've developed, and some unexpectedly profitable real estate ventures that I do because I enjoy it. I'm working on putting together another company that will commercialize the results of an eight year research effort that provably solved a longstanding "hard" theoretical problem of the 20th century (I'll have a really hard time topping this particular achievement). So I do a lot of things, and considering my age, I've done a hell of a lot so far. No matter what I'm doing, I have bigger ideas on the shelf that I am trying to pipeline into execution. Its the kind of thing I live for.
And somehow, I manage to find time for the brilliant lady (now publishing executive), who I've known since I was a young nobody trying to make my way in the world. I have to give her a lot of credit actually; we've known each other since we were both gutter rats and she has been enormously helpful, even though we both made our success independently due to odd circumstances of our background.
So I started with little more than my brain, but I've maximized my limited resources to the hilt, been bold when it counted, and done a lot in a relatively short time. Its the American thing to do. :-)
See? Ask a question, get too much information...
gee, sounds like quite a few of the profs I've run across ... you ever hear of Prof Noam Chomsky?
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