Posted on 07/03/2006 4:52:05 PM PDT by paulat
Where the Boys Aren't
By Christina Hoff Sommers Posted: Monday, July 3, 2006
Education Sector, a new Washington think tank established this year by the Bill & Melinda Gates and other leading foundations, describes itself as an "honest broker of evidence in key education debates." But its first big study, "The Evidence Suggests Otherwise: Truth About Boys and Girls," is deficient in this virtue.
Resident Scholar Christina Hoff Sommers The report, written by policy analyst Sara Mead, denies that American boys are in trouble academically. "The real story," says Ms. Mead, "is not bad news about boys doing worse; it's good news about girls doing better." So why do so many fret about boys doing poorly? Ms. Mead explains: "The idea that women might actually surpass men in some areas seems hard for many people to swallow." She also hopes that the nation can have a reasonable "conversation" about gender issues "without unfairly undermining the gains girls have made in recent decades."
One looks in vain in Ms. Mead's report for any indication that anyone is undermining girls. She seems to think that concern for boys means shortchanging girls. But it does not--because education is not a zero sum game.
From the study's title, one might think that it contains evidence that boys are not languishing academically. It doesn't. In fact Ms. Mead concedes that vast numbers of boys are doing poorly. She acknowledges that more boys than girls drop out; that girls have higher aspirations and take more rigorous academic programs. The number of boys diagnosed with disabilities, she says, "has exploded in the past 30 years." She admits that "high school boys' achievement is declining in most subjects." And, yes, she says, it is true that our colleges are now 57% female.
So how does she back up her claim that "in fact, overall academic achievement for boys is higher than it has ever been"? She argues that in "absolute" terms boys are doing better today than they were 20 or 30 years ago. She adds that, in any case, the problem of male underachievement is largely confined to black, Hispanic and low-income white males. Neither claim withstands scrutiny.
The reading scores of 17-year-old boys overall have gone down in the past decade, hitting an all-time low in 2004. Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska, has done a thorough analysis of the reading skills of white males from college-educated families. Using Department of Education data, she shows that at the end of high school, 23% of the white sons of college educated parents scored "below basic." For girls from the same background, the figure is 7%. "This means," Ms. Kleinfeld writes, "that one in four boys who have college educated parents cannot read a newspaper with understanding."
Education Sector's study concedes that African-American, Hispanic and low-income white males "are in real trouble." But it attributes their plight to larger social problems that have little to do with gender. Ms. Mead does not seem to have noticed that among these demographics, males are far behind their female counterparts. For example, Ms. Kleinfeld found that 34% of Hispanic males with college-educated parents scored "below basic"--compared to 19% of Hispanic females.
Today, for every 100 women who earn a bachelor's degree, just 73 men get one. Not to worry, says Ms. Mead. It is actually good news for young men, because more of them are going to college today than did in the '70s and '80s. By this reasoning, we need not worry about the relatively low wages of women compared to men, since in "absolute terms" women are doing better than in the past. Would the policy analysts at Education Sector welcome the view that when it comes to a wage gap, it’s not bad news about women doing worse; it’s just good news about men doing better?
In one characteristically free-wheeling passage, Mead says that “the current boy crisis hype” plays into “America’s deepest insecurities, ambivalence and fears about changing gender roles.” A more plausible explanation for the growing concern over boys is that teachers, parents, reporters and scholars, both liberal and conservative, have become aware that a steadily increasing proportion of the nation’s boys are poorly equipped to cope with the world that awaits them.
We are strikingly better at educating young women than young men. Boys need our attention. It is difficult to understand why an organization devoted to improving education should regard the current concern for boys as a threat to girls' progress. Education Sector would be more constructively occupied if it looked for ways to help our boys keep pace with the girls.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI.
Connections. It is not what you know, but who you know. After all, that is the way most people have gotten their vocational training historically. They can go into the family biz, skip the War churchill bit, and save a lot.
Business doesn't value brains?
Not everything that matters in life shows up on a paper credential.
I think it comes down to the fact that women are generally far better students than men.
I like to say that people who have an A intellect but only a C study habit are only going to be a B student whereas a C intellect with an A study habit will generally get an A, it doesnt make the person with a lower intellect any smarter but it does make them a better student. Women will generally fall into the second category(not to say there intellects are lower mind you, but rather they study harder on average) whereas men tend to be lax studier's.
I thought he was wrong too, I always thought that women were stronger in verbals than men, in fact my psychiatrist who administered my last IQ test told me that my verbal IQ was very high and he said more women tend to be stronger in the verbal section. Anyways heres a link to SAT averages:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883611.html
Thanks. I see it, but I don't believe it. Not at all.
Here are the male and female SAT scores from 1972 to 2004.
2005 scores are here, in the text:
Male Verbal : 513
Female Verbal: 505
Male Math: 538
Female Math: 504
Thanks. My experiences with the SAT were long before the start date on the statistics.
That just does not compute with what I have experienced in real life in the business world. *so what else is new?*
I hope that you are not being serious.
Sorry, I should always check for responses before posting.
Interesting that the PSAT is now the National Merit test, too. I took two different ones, one for each - College Board and NMSQ. Oh, well. Pretty meaningless to me, now. Also at the time, since all I needed was an ACT score for college.
My best friend scored 1 point higher on the NMSQ than I did. She got a scholarship and I didn't. It was OK - she studied a lot and I didn't.
Not as much as formerly. In Computer Science, both the "hard" and "soft" versions, it's not true at all. The last woman my department hired was an Electronics Engineer, and we're a heavily software oriented bunch. One of the top technical gurus of the division that builds "spooky" stuff is a woman. My department head is a woman engineer, and the VP above her is also a woman, but her PhD is in a "semi soft" area, Industrial Psychology (ergonomics, training, etc). One of the rising technical stars of the Space Sciences Division is female as well. Although I can't recall her name (she does work in another division after all) , you've possibly seen her on the Discovery, History, or National Geographic channels, she's an astrophysicist.
Not just liberal arts, but pre-med, pre-law, and most everything but Physics, Chemistry and most engineering disciplines.
One red headed lady software engineer in our division is married to one of the Hispanic groundskeepers. Seems to work though, and he's a big ugly brute, but a heck of a nice guy, once you get past his "Beast" appearance. :)
Another lady, with an MSEE is married to a telephone repairman, also Hispanic. (She's also somewhat taller than he is, but again, seems to work, and this is in San Antonio, where the such Tejano/Gringo pairings are not uncommon. Both ways I might add, the daughter of an Army Reserve Lt. Col. friend from far south Texas married a Gringo. (And that Gringo got one heck of a catch I might add)
A zero sum game is one in which if someone wins, someone else must lose. Not all situtations fit that mold, and this is one that doesn't. There's no reason both boys and girls can't do well.
How long ago did you take them, I took the PSAT/NMSQT in my junior year, which was '66-'67, at least I think they were one test in that school year. I got a National Merit Scholarship too, sponsored by Goodyear, where my parents worked.
Twas the year before that, actually.
I'm not sure if it was Sommers who said this (paraphrasing) but it has always stuck in my mind:
"If girls are falling behind academically, change the curriculum.
If boys are falling behind academically, change the boys."
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