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Debunking the "boys' crisis"
Girls’ Gains Have Not Cost Boys, Report Says
By TAMAR LEWIN, The New York Times, May 20, 2008
The American Association of University Women, whose 1992 report on how girls are shortchanged in the classroom caused a national debate over gender equity, has turned its attention to debunking the idea of a “boys’ crisis.”
“Girls’ gains have not come at boys’ expense,” says a new report by the group, to be released on Tuesday in Washington.
Echoing research released two years ago by the American Council on Education and other groups, the report says that while girls have for years graduated from high school and college at a higher rate than boys, the largest disparities in educational achievement are not between boys and girls, but between those of different races, ethnicities and income levels.
In examining a range of standardized test scores, the report finds some intriguing nuggets about the interplay of family income, race, ethnicity and academic performance. For example, it finds that while boys generally outperform girls on both the math and verbal parts of the SAT, the male advantage on the verbal test is consistent only among low-income students, and that among black students, there was no consistent advantage by sex from 1994 to 2004.
And while boys of all races and ethnicities generally outscored girls of the same group on the math section, the gap by sex for black students was only about half as large as other groups.
The report points out that a greater proportion of men and women than ever before are graduating from high school and earning college degrees. But, it says, “perhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace.”
Linda Hallman, who became executive director of the university women’s group in January, when the work was well under way, said the report was an effort to refocus attention on what she said were the real problems of education for poor and minority children, and away from a distracting debate about a so-called boys’ crisis. Ms. Hallman said the group’s members were concerned about arguments by conservative commentators that boys had become disadvantaged and were being discriminated against in schools intended to favor girls.
“Many people remain uncomfortable with the educational and professional advances of girls and women, especially when they threaten to outdistance their male peers,” the report says , citing Christina Hoff Sommers’s 2000 book, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.”
Ms. Hallman said, “To have this distracter out there, about the boys’ crisis, took away from our mission, from pushing forward for what we were trying to achieve, which is to be a leader in dealing with the education crisis that affects girls and boys without many resources.”
The report may provide new fodder in the battle over whether boys and girls need different methods of teaching.
“There’s still a lot of debate about whether there’s something we should be doing differently in teaching boys and girls,” said Sara Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington, who has written on gender equity. “The people on the feminist-leaning side of the debate see the conversation about a boys’ crisis as a strategy to advance the single-sex education agenda. I’m not sure that’s correct. I don’t think the kind of data we have about boys’ and girls’ achievement tells us anything useful about single-sex education.”
The report finds that, generally, boys and girls of similar backgrounds have similar academic success. And the five states in which boys score highest on the tests known as the nation’s report card are also the highest-scoring states for girls, it says.
By TAMAR LEWIN, The New York Times, May 20, 2008
The American Association of University Women, whose 1992 report on how girls are shortchanged in the classroom caused a national debate over gender equity, has turned its attention to debunking the idea of a “boys’ crisis.”
“Girls’ gains have not come at boys’ expense,” says a new report by the group, to be released on Tuesday in Washington.
Echoing research released two years ago by the American Council on Education and other groups, the report says that while girls have for years graduated from high school and college at a higher rate than boys, the largest disparities in educational achievement are not between boys and girls, but between those of different races, ethnicities and income levels.
In examining a range of standardized test scores, the report finds some intriguing nuggets about the interplay of family income, race, ethnicity and academic performance. For example, it finds that while boys generally outperform girls on both the math and verbal parts of the SAT, the male advantage on the verbal test is consistent only among low-income students, and that among black students, there was no consistent advantage by sex from 1994 to 2004.
And while boys of all races and ethnicities generally outscored girls of the same group on the math section, the gap by sex for black students was only about half as large as other groups.
The report points out that a greater proportion of men and women than ever before are graduating from high school and earning college degrees. But, it says, “perhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace.”
Linda Hallman, who became executive director of the university women’s group in January, when the work was well under way, said the report was an effort to refocus attention on what she said were the real problems of education for poor and minority children, and away from a distracting debate about a so-called boys’ crisis. Ms. Hallman said the group’s members were concerned about arguments by conservative commentators that boys had become disadvantaged and were being discriminated against in schools intended to favor girls.
“Many people remain uncomfortable with the educational and professional advances of girls and women, especially when they threaten to outdistance their male peers,” the report says , citing Christina Hoff Sommers’s 2000 book, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.”
Ms. Hallman said, “To have this distracter out there, about the boys’ crisis, took away from our mission, from pushing forward for what we were trying to achieve, which is to be a leader in dealing with the education crisis that affects girls and boys without many resources.”
The report may provide new fodder in the battle over whether boys and girls need different methods of teaching.
“There’s still a lot of debate about whether there’s something we should be doing differently in teaching boys and girls,” said Sara Mead, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit research group in Washington, who has written on gender equity. “The people on the feminist-leaning side of the debate see the conversation about a boys’ crisis as a strategy to advance the single-sex education agenda. I’m not sure that’s correct. I don’t think the kind of data we have about boys’ and girls’ achievement tells us anything useful about single-sex education.”
The report finds that, generally, boys and girls of similar backgrounds have similar academic success. And the five states in which boys score highest on the tests known as the nation’s report card are also the highest-scoring states for girls, it says.
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“Many people remain uncomfortable with the educational and professional advances of girls and women, especially when they threaten to outdistance their male peers,” the report says , citing Christina Hoff Sommers’s 2000 book, “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.”
Oh, those young (white) men. They really need our help, don't they? They suffer so much.
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I'm not some conservative alarmist who thinks that feminism is some insidious plot to destroy masculinity. But neither do I write off as reactionary every suggestion that the average white male (y'know, only a very few of us get to become part of the Big Bad corporate/government patriarchy) is being marginalized.
Especially since white men who feel marginalized by gender & ethnic politics are much more likely to vote Republican.
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Really now, the young white male who lives next door or down the street probably has a lot more in common with you socially and politically than he does with Dick Cheney and James Dobson, and what's the point of ripping on each other when there are bigger fish to fry?
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And for the record, for what I know of the subject, I'm in agreement with the article you posted. Socioeconomic factors play a bigger influence on educational success than gender. (Yeah, I'm a class warfarist. Go Marx, it's your birthday)
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You seem to view this identity crisis as coming from the media.
The strange thing, though, is that men are largely in control of the media. Most of the people writing, producing, and directing the material that uses these characters are men.
So, I'm curious -- what do you think men need? New media? To educate the media? Or to create new models and disseminate them?
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I think the identity crisis is the result of being a provider for a family no longer being considered a fulfilling, satisfying life. The popular position is that men are "threatened" by their wives bringing home paychecks, which I don't think is really true (at least not with current generations. Perhaps older Boomers), and don't know what to do with themselves because of that. I think, rather, it's that family life just isn't as appealing as it was at the height of the Protestant Work Ethic's social dominance. To channel Chuck Palahniuk, we grew up wanting to be rock stars, and working all day just to come home and watch the kids play till bedtime isn't going to cut it for us anymore. It's quite frankly depressing to feel like we're being denied the lives we could and should be having.
I could try to draw some connection here and say that men like to sit around drinking beer, watching sports, playing video games, and looking at porn because they're secretly depressed they aren't rock stars. While there may be some truth to that, I think that as a generalization it'd be a very weak case. Really, I think that some sitcom writer just decided to parody their own father or uncle, and the character of the "loutish man with said behaviors" became a popular one that was repeated until it became a societal mindset; men think that's what's expected of them, and women expect men to behave like that and to feel exasperated with them for it.
Fortunately, I think it's a temporary thing, as such behavior is becoming increasingly normative for both genders. I know a lot of girls who enjoy crashing on the couch with their boyfriends while playing video games and eating snack foods.
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