A USA Today editorial asks the provacative question: Boys lag behind - Does anyone care?
Maryland educators opened their latest test results recently and discovered their 10th-grade boys lagging far behind girls in literacy skills. The same thing happened in Kentucky, Vermont and Washington. Teachers and parents can tell you that in elementary school, girls are more facile learners. But gender differences are assumed to level out over the years and clear up by high school.That's not happening...It gets worse. Boys are twice as likely to land in special education and far more likely to be held back a grade and drop out. At many public universities and some private colleges, barely 40% of the students are male.
Oddly, educators, researchers and philanthropists agree there's no serious effort to figure out why this is happening and what can be done. Other priorities prevail...
Yes, they certainly do, to the extent that some critics today continue to repeat the tired canard that tests and schools are inherently short-changing girls. Even though who have changed their tune and are no longer claiming this are very reluctant to propose that special attention be given to boys - witness the insistence, in the face of contrary data, that the same teaching methods that help girls excel must also help boys excel.
It's very odd, indeed, that the current data is not being taken seriously especially given that this problem wasn't exactly uncovered yesterday.
And if educators and administrators seem unwilling to deal with the fact that boys are falling behind academically, I wonder how willing they'll be to deal with these types of problems within their schools:
Many Hillsborough County middle and high school students lead double lives - one for their parents and one for their peers.In a districtwide survey, nearly half of high school students and one in five middle school students said they have had sexual intercourse, and a higher percentage of high school boys than girls reported being physically hurt by their "significant others."
Emphasis mine. The survey's past results are here. Kudos goes to the first school district who tackles these problems by admitting that both boys and girls can be abusive, and ensuring that victims of either sex should be unafraid to reach out for help. Then again, if this article is anything to go by, administrators who are unfraid to acknowledge and tackle female violence may find themselves under attack.
Faced with students' declining scores in mathematics, Bozeman High School [MT]is strengthening its math program while the school board considers whether to make an additional year of math study a graduation requirement.
Bozeman High will add a remedial math class, increase teacher training and make attendance at a drop-in math lab a requirement for struggling students, instead of an option, Principal Godfrey Saunders told the board...
At Chief Joseph Middle School, 58 percent of eighth-grade boys who took a standardized test showed proficiency in math, down from 76 percent in the previous testing cycle. Girls held steady, at 77.
Emphasis mine. Good grief, what a drop (though a middle school in Montana might have a small enough population that only a couple of boys could make a huge impact; I can't download the software to check here)
Posted by kswygert at December 13, 2005 07:35 PM