Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin

USA Today/Yahoo ^ | 8/29/03 | USA Today - Staff

[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.

[RnMomof7]

His Italian mom told him that when someone jumped him and started knocking him around to scramble to get on top and then bleed all over the attacker. She said it was an old Sicilian trick! It worked too. He tried it on one guy and sent him home covered in blood. After that they pretty much left him alone.

Mothers used to know how to raise boys, now they want to make them girls

[rmlew]

How many kids are on the honor roll? If the honor roll is made up of the top 15% of the students and there's 200 kids in the class that's 30 kids. The difference between a 50/50 split and 80/20 is 15 students vs 6. So just 9 honor roll gender defections have to occur, or around 5% of the school's population.

You need to look at the average. Any school can be an abberation. However, the totality should be near 50 50.
In fact, I would argue that there should be more boys than girls in the honor roll or honors classes.
Boys and girls have teh same average IQ. However, boys have a less pronounced center at 100. Boys are more likely to be outside of the standard range of 85-115 than girls. There are more boys with IQ's above 115 than girls, just as there are more retarded boys
In the past and today, boys are more likely than girls to be in special ed. However, the percentage of boys in honors classes is declining far below 50%.
There are three possible explanations for this.
1. Boys born in the last 17 years are less intelligent than they used to be.
2. Boys are subject to performance hindering facts such as drugs and bias.
3. The structure of education has turned against boys.
I agrue 2 and 3.

If there's a general decline I'll say the parents have a beef. But traditionally girls have matured earlier and get better grades. Its just a fact of life.
Girls are more studeous than boys. However, they tend not to test as well. Boys are more boistrous.

[redangus]

That is exactly what they do. Of the 10 recent girl graduates I know 6 were Soc/Psych graduates, and 3 were Ed majors. The other one majored in Telecommunications.

[Tribune7]

All other things being equal, I will hire a person with a GPA of 2.8 before I ever hire someone with a 4.0.

Ditto that.

[WOSG]

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.

The AAUW feminist advocacy group has performed an *abysmal* "service" of creating a biased and uneven playing field in college admissions, in the classroom, by urging and getting funding for many female-only and female-favored programs. And while such groups have hounded out of existince male-only institutions (like VMI), female only institutions, classes and scholarships have continued if not grown. The AAUW approves of this double-standard.

The result of this treating of boys as of less importance than girls is quite predictable. Most college students are now women. Boys are not failing academically, the education system and feminism has failed men.

[Centurion2000]

even us old lecherous fogeys will be attractive. They'll come looking for us.

But remember they these women will have supped at the mother's milk of feminism all their lives.

[WOSG]

That is SO tragic.

Our son is in 1st grade, he skipped kindergarten, seems ready for it, he can already read well, write okay and do basic math.

The idea of medicating a child unnecessarily disgusts me.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste.

[WOSG]

Well, fwiw, some of the worst performing CEOs are *women*.

Ask Marce Fuller (Mirant).
(And that HP CEO should be canned too.)

[cookcounty]

"More recess time would solve that Ritalin issue. Of course you can't play dodge-ball in gym anymore and running around the playground is considered dangerous.

Interesting comment.

Are we the only ones that have noticed that recess for elementary school is far shorter and much more restricted than it used to be? Any one else care to comment?

[annyokie]

I don't know that we are the only ones to notice, but recess is WAAAAAAAY contracted from what I remember as a kid.

Boys need to rough and tumble and scream and run around like Indians, as my dear departed Grandma used to say. I noticed the ratcheting up in Ritalin prescriptions right on the heels of less recess time.

[WOSG]

Right. On the one hand, you have the man-hating feminist-types who have inculcated into the schools the demonization of male 'virtues' of bravery, courage, competitiveness. you can bet some woman or some totally castrated male decided having winners and losers was a 'problem', etc. Then you have an environment that caters to the girls and the feminized styles of learning.

On the other hand, you have the culture preaching careerism for women and downgrading the importance of the male as breadwinner; it further engages in favoritism against the male in not just educational admittances but in govt hiring etc.

Gov Howard Dean was thrilled to say more than half his administration in Vermont was women ... so either he had a shortage of male candidates or he was discriminating against men. I'd surmise the latter. Curious how a man would celebrate discrimination against men.

[WOSG]

"Boys and girls have teh same average IQ. However, boys have a less pronounced center at 100. Boys are more likely to be outside of the standard range of 85-115 than girls. There are more boys with IQ's above 115 than girls, just as there are more retarded boys"

This is correct. Lack of boys in the 'high end' is a clear sign something is inducing a shift from an expected and historical distribution; for boys, the educational system is failing somehow. your 2&3 is right.

[John Will]

Ahh, my fond memories of grade school and High school.
I encounterd this damn femnazation all the time. I was always told to listen to the feelings, I absoutley hated the damn writing and other asanine assigment. I was told , violence is never the answer, avoid confrintation. I was restricted acess from science and math classes to take the English and Art classes. They were using fear to supress my testostrone untill something happend, I found consertivism. The schools ARE that bad.

[Tribune7]

Leaving high school was one of the happiest days of my life.

[Dianna]

I just started my admissions semester in the teaching program at my local university. My computer prof insisted that kids are just different these days! When designing handouts we should make them so that kids can "scan" them. They simply don't/can't/won't read a paper which has actual paragraphs. We should use bullets and 2 (one 1/3 down on the left and another 2/3 down on the right) graphics...making sure that the graphic is properly sized so as to not be overwhelming and distracting.

The woman insisted that we will have many, many children in our classrooms with undiagnosed ADD and sometimes she just wants to shake those kids' parents because adderal is just a LIFESAVER! I think there probably are kids who are more twitchy than the norm. We have had FReepers, who seem to be very involved and loving parents, who say their child requires medication. I believe them. But how much of this is caused by no one ever demanding that the kids learn the discipline necessary to sit down and read full sentences?

[Pro-Bush]

Boys are not failing academically, the education system and feminism has failed men.

BUMP!

[annyokie]

Good luck to you and thank you for choosing such a terrific calling as teaching.

Many children today, and I will speak anecdotely of my cousins children, not mine who have been through "Basic Training" (smile) will NOT wait until an adult is finished speaking before piping up, will NOT sit through a meal without acting like a jack-in-the-box, will NOT go to bed unless mommy or daddy lies there with them until they finally go off to fairy land, and will NOT remain in their own rooms should they awaken to use the facilities or "heard a noise" but must go into mommy and daddy bed for the duration of the night wherein they toss turn and kick and keep everyone else awake.

The "family bed" concept is a recipe for divorce, to my mind. When I was a child, adults had a whole neat "adult" life that included going out for supper without children who knew better than to whine about wanting to tag along.

I always knew we were in for a sitter when my mother showered and put on perfume and pearls and I could smell TV dinners in the oven.

[alphadog]

"Boys are not failing academically, the education system and feminism has failed men."

intentional or not

[Orlando]

Title 9 is cutting off boys/men sports....
The Radical feminists hate-males and anti- GOPs training centers
must be shut-down.....

There Mecca is so-call Women studies located in over 700
+ Universities and jr colleges across america...

If these radical male haters and sexist want to eliminate
all male school sports and ROTC, then it is fair to SHUT-DOWN there Left-wing Radical Hate Centers...
Women Studies...There is no need for it, and it waste
Hundred of Millions of TAX PAYER $$$$$$$....

IT discriminates against males, and promote evil toward others.....shut-it down...This is where N.O.W. and the other witches are located at, and get there $$$$ and supports...

Solution #1....

[stands2reason]

Knee-jerk feminism involves feeeelings, not logic.