@Intparent " I love to see that women have taken full advantage of those options, and our society benefitting from women getting to explore and use their talents fully."
Now, if women can only get paid for it!
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0157-1
I don’t think this is a secret but it certainly is not something Americans like to discuss in the current climate of gender neutrality.
I think children at risk, especially boys without the benefit of a household father, would benefit from this approach.
Was there some period where black and Hispanic boys in the US did super in school, college and society? When was that?
OhioMomof2, was there some post in which I said that? When was that?
What I did say was that it is not the affluent white boys who are failing, it’s the poor ones without the safety net, so when people make reference to privileged boys of their acquaintance who aren’t doing their parts, they’re missing the point. Completely.
Here is a very interesting paper on the subject for anyone who is interested.
@OHMomof2 I not sure the trend will help solve the problem. We have a situation where 70% of fatherless black boys don’t finish high school.
@OHMomof2 I think there was a period when some men could make a good living with blue-collar jobs that didn’t require much schooling. White men were more likely to get those jobs but some black and Hispanic men got them.
@zoosermom, my daughter has gone to NYC public schools too. I remember her getting mad in fourth grade when her teacher said her work wasn’t neat enough. She grumbled but she started turning in neater work. Is that just harder for boys?
Top quote wasn’t you @zoosermom - it was @OnTheBubble . “African American and Hispanic boys, so many things were thrown at them the demographic crumbled.” - that suggests there was a time when it was uncrumbled.
Bottom one was you and this part “paying for the past sins against girls?” suggested to me that something is currently negatively affecting minority boys that wasn’t happening before when they had better outcomes.
I am wondering, seriously, when they did better than now and what changes we might have made to reverse that progress for them, and should they be undone.
@delurk1 - this suggests to me that the issue is not the schooling itself but the relative lack of good opportunities for those who don’t complete school.
To me, this suggests the schooling was less of a factor for the most at-risk boys in prior generations, so it may or may not have worked for them then, but we’ll never know because those boys simply didn’t go to college. Now they have to get some further education. Whatever that might look like.
I’m not sure anything that has been done for girls should be “undone,” but I wonder if the hostility toward boys could be toned down, if we could encourage more male teachers, and if we could consider alternatives that might benefit boys more than girls, like vocational education. I do think that recess can benefit boys and girls and it’s a shame that in many places it is no longer considered important. My son attends a single sex school and it’s ideal for him for many reasons. Men teach differently, model differently, communicate differently, and have different priorities in many cases than women. He has some female teachers and they are wonderful, but his school has significantly more male teachers than most other schools and I think that’s a wonderful thing for boys. YMMV.
I’m another in the camp of people who believe that many boys mature in certain ways later than girls (I don’t think there is any question about this, it’s a biological fact), so I have always believed and will continue to believe that benchmarks of readiness for school are better than chronological age.
Interesting…
I think making things attractive is harder for boys, although I won’t speculate why. My older daughter has always snuck behind my son’s work and prettied it up - including one year that she put glitter on the science project. That was an ugly day in my house! But I think some of it has to do with boys maturing a little later - handwriting often becomes more acceptable at a later age, they sometimes don’t think about color or coordination or just how things look. But it is my opinion (and, again, I don’t expect anyone to share it) that in the younger grades, it’s the content that should matter, and if a kid gets rained on but turns in an otherwise excellent paper, talk to him about ways to protect his work in the future, but don’t turn it away and give a zero. If the handwriting is sloppy, look at the overall picture. Was it a slop-job with no effort involved, or was it a great job with serious effort and excellent results by a kid with bad handwriting? Was no effort involved, or did the kid rush because he was so excited to show the teacher what he had learned? I think in the younger grades those are the things that matter.
There’s a difference in how male and female teachers deal in my kid’s school that I find amusing. I won’t speak for every teacher, but among those mine has had, when the student isn’t doing homework or doesn’t do a good job with something, the female teachers will always immediately ding the report grade harshly and either give Saturday detention OR send home hideous emails to the parents telling how disrespectful and ungrateful the sons are. Whereas the male teachers will usually first take the kid’s phone and call the parents from the class and tell them casually, hey so and so didn’t bring his homework today, just thought you should know. Which slightly embarrasses the kid and alerts the parent. The male teachers don’t take it so seriously the first time and don’t ding the grade. They certainly escalate a pattern, but don’t go nuclear to kill a dandelion.
@zoosermom I am reading the Columbia paper. It’s interesting, thank you for posting it.
For the record, I am the mom of a boy and a girl. I am aware of their differences. In fact, what we’re discussing has played out in our family in several ways…and this in a school system that does have recess and does have an excellent vocational track available. We have very few male teachers in the lower grades, many more in middle and high school. I’m not sure why men prefer the higher grades but I’m pretty sure our school is not unique there.
The bit I bolded above has not been demonstrated to actually exist.
Further, I would note that by nearly any measure there is more variation within boys and within girls than there is variation between those two groups—or, in other words, talking about boys and girls as monolithic groups, and perhaps even more so talking about setting up institutions to help boys and girls in differently targeted ways, is doomed to failure.
Its a bit hard to believe that if a girl and a boy apply to Kenyon with the same stats, and the girl is in the middle of the girl pack, the boy would be at the top of the boy pack. Certainly, there are often more girls than boys with perfect grades, but from what I see the top boys are not that far behind the top girls. Certain schools may have a reputation as “girl” schools and so may not attract as many boys with top stats. So perhaps it was true at Kenyon in 2006, but the implication that girls have to have MUCH better stats than boys in general does not seem true beyond a handful of LACs with high percentage of girl applicants.
One issue is that schools are set up much more in line with female learning styles. As others have said, pretty and creative count and girls, in general, are more often into making things “pretty”. I still recall my oldest previously all As son getting a B in the first marking period in his first math class in middle school, not because his test grades were not close to perfect, but because the chart he had to make of some mathy thing was not neat enough or decorated enough. Boys are more likely to be disciplined in schools, to get into fights, to be put on ADD medication, to be in special ed.
This article form a couple of years ago is interesting:
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/how-to-make-school-better-for-boys/279635/T
Someone said above that parents make excuses for boys, implying that this is unfair. I don’t know that that is fair. Parents may well be encouraging, punishing, tutoring and doing everything they can to get their son to jump through all the hoops without success.
The issue goes beyond whether girls have to be “better” to get into top colleges (and I bet some of those GPA differences come from boys doing less well in the early HS years) and whether our schools are designed to encourage success for both genders. There is a lot of concern about increasing women in STEM fields, but less attention on helping boys do better, partly because men are seen as the most privileged (and in many ways they still are).
As a feminist growing up, I certainly bought into the Carol GIlligan model of girls needing help with self esteem, as I read more and as I became a mother to boys, I began to realize that the issue of gender equality at all stages of life is much more complicated.
You are absolutely right, but when I read things like “men think with their private parts” and all sorts of gems that appear on the consent threads, and I see on this thread a refusal to consider that boys aren’t all privileged, and what appears to me to be glee at their comeuppance, I see that as hostility. You can certainly form your own opinion which I don’t have to share, either.
I would like to have seen that play out! 
Well, I’ve been in my share of battles on various consent threads, and there’s a lot of “not saying she was asking for it, but she shouldn’t have made it seem like she was”, too.
Not trying to rehash any of that here, just pointing out that confirmation bias is always a danger, and I suspect there’s a bit of that going on if one sees hostility to boys (or girls, too!) in our educational systems.
If you had seen it, you never would have been able to unsee it! I still haven’t recovered and it’s almost 6 years later.
@dfbdfb I would be interested in your thoughts on this study, because while I agree hostility is a strong word, I thought the conclusion of the study was that there was a gender bias in grading. In fact, I thought that was at least an acknowledged point at this stage.
http://people.terry.uga.edu/cornwl/research/cmvp.genderdiffs.pdf
I am pretty sure another study was done recently where papers were graded blindly by teachers, and then graded when the identity of the student was evident and there was a marked difference in the scores when the gender was apparent. But I couldn’t find that study. Will have to ask the (teacher) wife. She was on some working group for the state on this a couple years ago.
I found this report, from 2012, that provides national-level data about male/female academic achievement at different stages.
http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/gender-equity-in-education.pdf