Friday, July 28, 2006
Helping boys doesn't hurt girls
From the RoundTable blog
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Joe Manthey
Manthey, of Petaluma, Calif., is a former K-12 public school teacher, director of Kid Culture in the Schools and a trustee for The Boys Project.
A recent study by Sara Mead of the think tank Education Sector was the subject of Elizabeth Strother's July 23 Current column, "No more 'girls' jobs' and 'boys' jobs.'"
The flawed report is part of the rising gender-feminist backlash against helping boys academically.
Gender feminists, who believe that women and girls are in thrall to a culturally conditioned system of male dominance, spin the facts in order to claim that boys' lower academic performance relative to their sisters is not a gender issue, but due to "larger educational and social problems," as Mead wrote.
Is their claim actually true?
No. Mead's primary source was the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which relies on sampling data and, thereby, only offers a tiny snapshot of the big picture.
She then incorporated selective observation of this small sample by primarily using fourth-grade and, to a lesser degree, eighth-grade test scores while ignoring those of 12th-graders.
While I concur with Mead that sometimes the word "crisis" gets overused, in the case of what boys face in school today, it is accurate.
Especially worrisome is the cavalier tone of Mead and Strother, who discount the serious problem facing a significant portion of boys in the industrialized world's classrooms.
They reveal their elitism when they argue that there is no real boy crisis in education because it's only minorities who are on the wrong side of the country's socioeconomic gap.
According to equity feminists (those who celebrate women's achievements and who seek, in partnership with men, to assist both sexes) like Jenna Brooke O'Neil, professor of Women Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, "There's a long history in the feminist movement of women of color distancing themselves from the white feminists at the top of the heap, who still are ignorant of and/or insensitive about issues facing nonwhite people, male and female."
In fact, while grade-school boys trail girls academically by a small margin, the Department of Education statistics document that, of graduating high school seniors, 23 percent of white sons of college-educated parents scored "below basic" in reading achievement. For girls from the same families, it is 7 percent.
These same "privileged" families' sons are four times more likely than their sisters to be below basic in writing achievement. This literacy gender gap just gets wider in noneducated and nonwhite families.
According to the Digest of Educational Statistics, boys are more likely to drop out of high school than girls, more likely than their female counterparts to be diagnosed as having ADHD/ADD and be prescribed stimulate medications such as Ritalin -- regardless of race and income.
In all 50 states, girls outscore boys in standardized testing. Two-thirds of Ds and Fs go to boys and 70 percent of learning disabled students are male -- regardless of race and income.
Mead claims that "there is not sufficient evidence -- or the right kind of evidence -- available to draw firm conclusions" in response to the claim that boys suffer academically because teachers, most of whom are female, are not taught in their child development and teacher training programs about the neurobiological differences between males and females and how these differences affect behavior and learning styles.
This denial of scientific evidence is straight from the gender feminist playbook. Mead actually wrote that "it is notoriously difficult to draw causal links between observations about brain structure or activity and human behavior ... correlations between differences in brain structure and observed differences in male and female behavior do not necessarily mean that the former leads to the latter."
Nonsense.
Mead showed her true colors when she claimed, "The idea that women might actually surpass men in some areas seems hard for many people to swallow." Hence, it's time for "reasonable conversation" about gender issues "without unfairly undermining the gains girls have made in recent decades."
In other words, people who want to help boys must somehow want to hurt girls and are threatened by the advancement of women. This ad hominem argument is another one right out of their playbook.
Perhaps she might want to consider the wisdom of the late anthropologist Margaret Mead who wrote, "When one sex suffers, both sexes suffer."
My challenge to academics like Sara Mead and journalists like Strother is to get out of their ivory towers, liberate themselves from their long-term obsession to destroy the patriarchy and actually set foot on an elementary school campus and observe boys in the classroom.
There they would see firsthand boys asking questions like, "Do I have to draw a flower?" "May I please get out of my seat and move around? I'll even pick up trash."
