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.
They receive none of the individual attention given to girls, and instead "labeled" and referred for Ritalin, Adderal, Strattera, even anti-psychotic medication!
And no one stands up for the boys. Time for home schooling!!!
I think that means that the women pursued engineering careers that did not need State Licensing, or changed careers. Few engineers get their state licenses. It's only if they are going to be consultants where they have to sign off on their work, have careers as expert witnesses, or city or state department heads that they bother.
My husband finally let his license lapse because nobody ever was very impressed by it and we own our own company where it is not needed and he got tired of paying the dues. Neither son has even bothered to go for his. That really irritates me because I was always impressed by the license and my husband's ability to sign PE after his name and afix a nice official stamp underneath! And I remember how hard he studied for the two tests. His was a good license too with reciprocity in every state of the union.
Ths is not really a stupid question.
Too many Barbie boutique and ensemble workshops. Boys are hardwired for designing, building and maintaining civilizations. Proper training and preparation takes a lot of time, special peer interaction and natal tool development.
All these things take place far from the ken of girls, who follow a different development path. They have no referent for comprehension, nor boys theirs. So I would expect such a question from the female half. 
I could write a book about how my boys were treated in school vs. how the girls were treated by the teachers. Ultimately it meant that the girls stayed in public school where they were in honors classes and the boys were both sent to a Jesuit College Prep school where they got an even better education than the girls were getting in so-called "honors." Unfortuneately there was no comparable private school for the girls. That's why they had to stay with the public education, but they got the best offered. It worked out great.
LOL. Your comment reminded me of my biology and geology classrooms of many years ago when, to my then-youthful dismay, I found that the very few females who went into these fields of study were, as we say out here in west Texas, as plain as a mud fence. Could there be a stigma attached to girls entering the sciences? A working career in biology seeing young graduates come and go would seem to indicate to me that not much has changed.
Muleteam1
Years ago when my husband was working for an engineering company that built machinery for undersea pipelines (oil), everyone was at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston. It's a very high stress atmosphere there, as all the businessmen jockey to get their products noticed by the major oil companies.
One of my husband's patents had earned "Engineered Product of the Year" from the show organizers, so there was a lot of excitement around our booth and not enough people to talk to everybody. Several engineers and upper management types (all PhDs) from Shell Oil's Netherlands group came over to scope out the featured invention, and the President of our company asked one of the most experienced salesmen to explain the new products to these VIPs.
The salesman looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable and was really sweating the moment. Afterwards he took the President aside and pleaded, "Jerry, don't ever do that to me again -- leave me alone to field questions from those Shell PhDs."
Jerry answered, "Why not, for G--'s sake. You're a Petroleum Engineer from LSU. Who's better qualified to deal with those guys?"
The salesman sputtered, "Petroleum Engineer? Sh-t! That PE means Physical Education! I played linebacker for LSU."
Yeah, especially if you created problem. lmao.
It's also funny how much girls have improved. Yeah right, that's why they had to give points on the SAT. Let's dumb all the kids down, especially the boys, then act upset about it.
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