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<p>* Excerpt from the article: *</p>
<p>Impressive. But the real news is tucked into the deeper, darker corners of the report. Boys are doing miserably, and nobody knows quite why. On measures ranging from writing ability to the likelihood of needing special education, boys are flat-lining - or worse.</p>
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<p>What do you think? Are guys slipping and flatlining?</p>
<p>"It isn't so much that schools have changed in ways that hurt boys. It's that society has changed in ways that help girls"</p>
<p>If the premise is true; there is your answer. </p>
<p>A hundred years ago in this culture, boys were prized as heirs. Today, many mothers openly admit their disappointment if their child isn't a daughter. There are non-profits and government-funded efforts to advocate for young women, and the media champions girls not only as equals but superior to boys in everything from cartoons to sitcoms. Feminism may have advanced the cause of women while unwittingly (or otherwise) compromising prospects for men in our society. Girls are in; boys are out.</p>
<p>Also, the huge increase in the divorce rate since the last half of the 20th century has resulted in many fatherless homes, which statistically has a more deleterious effect on boys than girls. </p>
<p>All that said, my son posted a comfortably high score on the verbal portion of the SAT, so I don't believe all boys are doing miserably. All the NMS semi-finalists in his senior class are boys, as well. Whether the sky is actually falling or not as far as boys go, I don't know. Fifty years ago many capable women served under inept male bosses and that will likely be reversed in the next fifty years -- it's hard to see that as a bad thing.</p>
<p>Tlaktan:</p>
<p>I have not seen it at my S's school where the NMSF seemed to be equally divided among girls and boys.
The article makes some interesting observations, however, which I have heard before.
1. the school culture, especially in high school, favors girls' learning style which involves more seat work and less moving around.
2. the emphasis on writing favors girls--and this will be even more strongly emphasized in the new SAT.
3. The new economy favors brain over brawn and many of the jobs that used to be available to males are disappearing. Manufacturing jobs are shrinking, the service economy is expanding, and schools are trying to adapt to that.</p>
<p>Some of the problems that affect boys' learning in k-12 are developmental and disappear by the time they are in college because they have become more mature. The problem is getting into college in the first place.</p>
<p>Finally, the article made a quick mention to an "affirmative action" for boys by colleges in order to preserve gender ratios. I have not seen evidence of that. Just last year, Harvard boasted that for the first time, as many women were admitted as men.</p>
<p>Interesting - I started working in a junior high this year, and this is what I've observed:
1. Boys by far outnumber girls in disciplinary actions. The problems the boys for which boys are referred generally involve physical aggression, from invading personal space to fighting. Girls are referred for tardies or verbal aggression.
2. There is a big difference in the social maturity of girls v. boys.
3. The students who are GT identified are 50/50 male/female.
4. Most teachers are female, and prefer to use a learning style more appropriate for girls. More boys than girls are kinesthetic learners and require "activity" to learn (moving, fidgeting, etc) - some teachers view this as inappropriate behavior. Generally it's the older teachers who have difficulty with this.
5. By far, the most important factor is the home environment. Do the parents support the goals of education? Do they stress the importance of doing well? Do they set higher standards for daughters but lesser standards for sons (especially if son is involved in athletics)?</p>
<p>if you use the SAT test as a measuring tool boys are holding thier own. The mean score in math for 2004 for boys was 537 and for girls 501. The mean score in verbal for 2004 for boys was 512 and for girls 504. boys have out performed girls every year going back to 1972.</p>
<p>more girls took the SAT 53.5% to 46.4%</p>
<p>soooooo the way to fix the fact that "Boys are doing miserably" in k-12 is to study those boys who perform well and see what the secret is</p>
<p>My very uneducated guess is a high value is placed, supported, and nurtured, on doing well in school from the the home</p>
<p>Boys are still receiving preferential treatment and consideration in math and science nationwide. As the children grow older there are a variety of factors that start impeding girls' proficiency in those areas (when they start out far ahead) , not the least of which is peer pressure. By the time they are in highschool the die is usually cast and the boys pass the girls (on average). Another "truism" is that the fidgety, unruly boy demands and gets far more attention from the teacher than the girl with her hand up. Patiently waiting.</p>
<p>This can be defeated and we have done so with constant vigilance , consistent reinforcement, and high expectations of D's schools, her teachers, and D herself. We use the same boy/girl test scores as a motivation tool.</p>
<p>If you are concerned that your D is falling into one of the many traps there are solutions. This really has been my "cause celebre" throughout my D's career. And it worked (in some ways,read on). Just remember, it all comes back to one thing-kids do well at what THEY value.</p>
<p>Now, I have mentioned before my belief that parenting is ruled by the "Law of Unintended Consequences". As further evidence, I would point out that D doesn't date and regularly tests 100 points lower in Verbal than Math and Science. Oh, well. Scree-uueed that up. Just more for her to tell the shrink.(At my worst, I feel like I'm B.F. Skinner-but with a bigger box.)</p>
<p>Google and you'll find plenty of articles about how there are more women than males applying to colleges now. </p>
<p>Below is one example from the Christian Science Monitor. While the article was written in 2001, the situation continues across the country, and one can find plenty of articles saying so. Harvard is a rare exception (though the situation may be changing now) probably because : it is widely regarded as the country's best college; for centuries it was only for men; even after co-education, up until about 1976, admissions for women were deliberately made more difficult than admissions for men.</p>
<p>"ATHENS, GA. AND MIDDLETOWN, CONN. - Like a lot of high-achievers, Jennifer Johnson thought she knew how college admissions worked. Step 1: Take tough classes, get good grades and test scores in high school. Step 2: Get into a top college. </p>
<p>Ms. Johnson did the first step well. But soon after she applied in 1998 to the University of Georgia at Athens, the flagship campus, Johnson discovered she was wrong about Step 2: it mattered to the school that she was not a man.</p>
<p>If Johnson had been a young "Mr. Johnson," the university would have added .25 to a "Total Student Index" score. ...
The reason was fairly simple: The university had 45 percent men on campus, and just 42 percent of first-time freshman applicants have been male in recent years.</p>
<p>But a district court judge said their method - which the school dropped after the suit was filed - was illegal. "The desire to 'help out' men who are not earning baccalaureate degrees in the same numbers as women ... is far from persuasive," Judge B. Avant Edenfield wrote last year. </p>
<p>Yet around the United States, many colleges and universities are practicing "affirmative action for men," legal experts and others say. The practices may be more subtle than were Georgia's, making it harder to charge that they are illegal...."
<a href="http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/2001/05/22/fp11s1-csm.shtml%5B/url%5D">http://csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/durableRedirect.pl?/durable/2001/05/22/fp11s1-csm.shtml</a></p>
<p>Incidentally, the lack of qualified male college applicants is not just a US phenomenon. Over the summer, I saw an article in one of France's news magazines describing the same situation in that country.</p>
<p>This trend definitely has my attention, especially since I have a little S,7, now going thru the process. During the time my now college freshman daughter was a K-12 kid, I had a close eye on the gender issues that pertained to her education and advocated when necessary. Now that little S is starting elementary school, I'm watchful that he receives a gender appropriate ed. as well. I am paying closer attention to his verbal skills than I did with his older brother, now a college grad. I will try to get little S placed with teachers who are even handed and understand and accommodate boys' learning styles. My radar blipped a bit when the little guy received a a small award in kindergarten for being quiet. I know what the teacher was trying to do, and in the context of her overall teaching, it wasn't a problem, but I couldn't help but note it. Was pleased when the principal upon hearing about the award complimented S, yet let him know that all learning wasn't accomplished by being quiet.</p>
<p>It is well-documented that new mothers engage in more verbal and eye contact with their daughters than with their sons. If it were possible to address this -- which I'm not sure it is -- perhaps you wouldn't have so many 'aggressive, fidgety' boys tainting the classroom experience in middle school.</p>
<p>No doubt you're all also familiar with the research demonstrating that males' neurological development lags behind that of females from birth, and it is only later in adolescence that they catch up, thus the observation that boys 'overtake' girls toward the end of high school.</p>
<p>I think that girls who don't get distracted by guys between grades 6 and 12 will generally be smarter than guys in the longrun. But how many girls can truly do that?</p>
<p>I know plenty of girls who were really smart in gradeschool and then just fizzled in high school because of concentrating too hard on boys and social lives. It's a shame.</p>
<p>This certainly is true in son's school. Also, I have onserved (not a real scientific data), but I have seen quite a few African American or Hispanic and even some South Asian girls are 'marrying down'. I am not sure if this is a national trend or not.</p>
<p>I am fairly sure that I have read that African American women have more frequently married "down" than have women in other races. That's because when funds were limited, black families would send their daughters to college, bypassing the sons, because the parents feared that if the girls had to support themselves by doing domestic work, they would be sexually abused by their employers. </p>
<p>Currently, the academic performance in general of black males is much lower than that of black females.</p>
<p>From The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:
"Whatever the reason, the recent performance of black men in higher education has been a near disaster. In 1997, the latest year for which complete statistics are available, there were 579,791 black men enrolled in higher education in the United States. But black men accounted for only 37.5 percent of all African-American enrollments. </p>
<p>Furthermore, the decline in enrollments of black men compared to black women has accelerated in recent years. Between 1965 and 1984 the male percentage of all African-American enrollments dropped only slightly from 45.9 percent to 44.9 percent. But since 1984 black male enrollments in relation to black women dropped by 7.6 percentage points. In 1997 black men accounted for only 37.3 percent of all African-American enrollments. </p>
<p>If this downward enrollment trend that has persisted over the past 14 years were to continue unabated into the future, by the year 2070 black men would disappear altogether from the halls of higher education. </p>
<p>This is not a problem limited to undergraduate enrollments. Compared to black women, black male enrollment trends are on the decline at all levels of higher education. In 1997 black men accounted for only 43 percent of all African-American enrollments in professional schools. And most striking is the fact that in 1997 black men were only 32.5 percent of all African-American enrollments in graduate school. "
<a href="http://www.electricprint.com/edu4/classes/readings/blackmaleachieve/part1.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.electricprint.com/edu4/classes/readings/blackmaleachieve/part1.htm</a></p>
<p>My daughter attends high school with a brand new principal who is a young black man who actually is an alum of the school. He has great charisma and is adept in working with the teachers and staff and also the parents. There also is black staff, teachers, security guards etc who act as guides to the students. But while this school has a good balance of minority staff, others schools in the district have much fewer, especially minority male teachers. IMO more (black) men are needed in education .</p>
<p>Emraldkity,
More black men are needed in virtually all professional fields. The possible exception seems to be the ministry, which seems to have an abundance of black males.</p>
<p>Your daughter is very lucky. Most high schools, including in overwhelmingly black neighborhoods, have next to no black male professionals on staff.
Essence magagzine wrote the following on the pheonomenon of black women's "marrying down."</p>
<p>"
The first thing Terrie* noticed about Len was his wide, warm smile and the way it lit her up. </p>
<p>Later she learned that he could also throw down in the kitchen and that he would go out of his way to please her. But Terrie, a nurse with a masters degree, is sometimes embarrassed when people find out that Len is a janitor. And though he may be able to shine a floor till it sparkles like a new dime, he sometimes misses the mark when it comes to subjectverb agreement. One reason it took us so long to get married, says Terrie, was because I had to do a lot of inner work around the fact that he hasnt been exposed to many things and hasnt finished college. </p>
<p>Terrie is hardly alone. More fast-track sisters are hooking up with fantastic cable guys or UPS carriers these days. Or maybe youre the CEO who found love with a regular Joe. Great! But how do you really feel about it? Though more sisters are outpacing Black men in income and education, its not easy to surrender the fantasy of settling down with a man who can rock it in the boardroom as well as the bedroom. ..."
<a href="http://www.essence.com/essence/bodyandsoul/relationships/0,16109,637334,00.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.essence.com/essence/bodyandsoul/relationships/0,16109,637334,00.html</a></p>