Boys are on the wrong side of the gender gap in schools, reports USA Today.
In classrooms nationwide, girls are pulling ahead of boys academically. Recent federal testing data show that what starts out as a modest gap in elementary-level reading scores turns into a yawning divide by high school. In 12th grade, 44% of girls rate as proficient readers on federal tests, compared with 28% of boys. And while boys still score slightly higher on federal math and science exams, their advantage is slipping.
The story blames the heavy reliance on verbal skills, even in math, for boys’ slipping status. It’s also clear that boys are far more likely to be dosed with Ritalin when they act up, but I don’t think today’s teaching requires more docility than in the past. Most teachers are female, but that’s always been true. Perhaps the classroom chaos caused by today’s teaching methods — all those multiple intelligences going strong — is too much for easily distracted boys to handle.
The U.S. Department of Education concedes that no serious research is available comparing different instructional methods that might help boys. In fact, many education researchers are hostile toward research aimed at exploring gender differences in learning.
After all, boys are junior patriarchs, right?
Via Sarcastic Southerner, a former teacher.
Update: Here’s a look at the gender gap on college campuses, where it’s increasingly easy for a guy to get a date. Even at MIT, women are catching up; 41 percent of undergrads are now female.
My experience in the math curriculum battles was that curriculum developers were actively seeking ways to teach that were explicitly girl friendly and not directed at boys. On the Mathematically Correct site there is a transcript from a radio show in which Jack Price, then President of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) suggested that girls learn math differently from boys. He claimed that boys learn deductively whereas girls need a more inductive/intuitive approach. Both my wife and daughter flipped when they heard that girls are bad a classical deductive logic and instead need inductive methods (”Oh great, women’s intuition!”)
I suspect that what they are reporting is success. For the past 20 or so years, the effort has been made to close the gender gap in math and science. The education community has therefore oriented teaching methods more toward girls. Since the prevailing wisdom was that boys have all of the advantages in the working world, the educational effort was toward preparing girls for the future. At the same time, the boys became neglected. By default, if the girls were to improve relative to the boys, the boys had to remain the same or decline. An easy decision given the philosophical orientation of educators. At the same time, we have the rise in the importance of diversity in the schools. Diversity is measure by the percentage of selected racial groups within the student population. Unfortunately, those racial groups have shown poor performance within the schools. It has been discussed in many places that the reason for this poor performance is that education has less cultural value within these groups. Television, movies and the music industry have actively supported the concept of diversity. We are constantly bombarded with the celebration of diverse cultural values. Boys whose needs are not getting much attention in school have begun to identify with the images presented by the different media.
I think that we are getting what we asked for. There is not much we can do about it now since we are on the leading edge of change. The full impact will not be visible for another 20 or so years.
What gender gap in math and science? As far as I know, although girls were less likely to take certain math and science classes, those who did had average scores.
j.c.
You are correct. I was unclear.
For more on this topic, I recommend “The War Against Boys” by Christina Hoff Sommers.
PERHAPS WE SHOULD BLINDFOLD INSTRUCTORS SO THEY DON’T KNOW WHETHER THEIR STUDENTS ARE MALE OR FEMALE.
Of course, the possibility exists that, as a group, women are better suited for post-secondary education than men.
Of course, this isn’t ideal in a society where most of the stereotypical qualities of men are no longer of great value outside a few areas. For that matter, one could reasonably argue that women are, in general, better suited for life in today’s society.
I can’t cite, but a number of colleges accept boys with lower GPAs and class rankings (I believe also SATs, but won’t swear to it) than girls, because if they did otherwise, the 55/45(ish) ratio would go to more than 60/40.
What’s interesting in this reversal of the ‘gender gap’ are two articles above it that may shed some light
One profeses that autism is merely an extreme ‘male’ thought process. The second is a bit about english students failing 1950 style O levels–and why.
Teaching today relies heavily on analyses, intuitions, and empathy, eschewing cold hard fact for a wispy, vague goal of ‘teaching’ everyone how to be ‘learners’.
In the 50’s, the goal was to give a basic set of skills and information to students, enough so they could perform all the basic tasks that would be required of them in society.
Boys thrived at this because it was a system with a set goal, a point at which you’d done your task and were scored on how well you’d performed.
Today that’s gone in many cases, even the sciences are being eaten away–and mathematics has far too much emphasis on trying than on results. Now hard work and precision can ‘lose’ to flashy ephemera. Tasks are often goalless or ‘ongoing’, competition for the students is often limited to odd contortions–’learning’, ‘using’, ‘improving’–that leave one wondering exactly where one stands.
Perhaps the ‘reversal’ can be better attributed to teaching methods that teach ‘learning’ rather than teaching any given subject
My dissertation work included getting high school GPA, college GPA, and ACT scores for a group of about 200 fairly randomly chosen mid-level state university students. (just over half male, around 16% black, around 8% Hispanic, etc.)
Anyway, both HS GPA and ACT predicted college GPA for women (regardless of race). Neither HS GPA nor ACT predicted college for men except at the top and bottom ends (5%, roughly 2.8 standard deviations).
Especially, HS GPA didn’t predict college GPA for black males, but ACT scores did (remember, small sample here — about 14 black males).
The Hispanic sample was too small to divide usefully male/female (dearth of females), but basically only ACT predicted for the (mostly male) sample. This may well be a surrogate for facility in English.
Also, even after holding everything else as constant as I could, males were way over-represented in the hard sciences and females in education and humanities.
Overall, it appears that some males “turn it on” in college and increase their GPA, or else they loafed through HS and did real work in college. The lowest ACT score I had was obviously a test-taking syndrome problem. The young man in question got a 10, had a college GPA of around 3.4, got into J-school, got a PhD in journalism from a respected university, and now teaches in a largish state univ.
Anyway, it may be that K-12 just doesn’t appeal to males in some way that college does. Or maybe the ones who don’t care in HS don’t go to college (or last long if they do) and don’t show up in data like mine. I strongly suspect difference in at least learning strategies between males and females.
How sad that the change in female enrollment at MIT happened in an era of affimative action. There’s no simple way to know if female enrollment is up because anti-female bias is down, pro-female bias is up, or if true female performance is up.
I’ve reflected before that some very brave, very selective university should drop all pretense of affirmative action and shout from the highest mountain that it will simply choose the very best and brightest students who apply, come what may. Whether you enroll or not, you’d know that your acceptance was a pure reflection of your qualifications, and was not influenced by factors beyound your control (like race and gender).
Before everyone begins to jump on the “boys are being neglected” bandwagon, consider the possibility that other factors could also contribute to boys’ academic performance. Off the top of my head, I would nominate computer games. In order to perform in school, most students must apply themselves to their studies, and that demands time. Computer games are very effective time-wasters, and for many boys, bright kids as well, they seem addictive.
Re MIT: My daughter (and original but now awol co-blogger) Jessie has spent two summers at MIT. Summer before last she was with a bunch of very bright high school students at MIT’s Research Science Institute. Before she was accepted to that we had noticed that MIT had another very appealing looking summer program for “minorities” (subsequently modified under pressure from the Center for Equal Opportunity), and we enquired about that because women were then only around 35% or so of MIT students, surely a minority. No dice, said MIT. Women could apply to that program only if they were a member of another minority at MIT. This past summer Jessie was at MIT as a REU student - Research Experience for Undergraduaes, a program funded by the National Science Foundation. At least half the students in her program this summer were women, and a check of the NSF web site confirms that special efforts are made to recruit minorities. She’ll no doubt also be applying to grad school there this fall, and our impression, which we hope is correct, is that women are given no special preference in grad admissions.
Two tone said:
“I’ve reflected before that some very brave, very selective university should drop all pretense of affirmative action and shout from the highest mountain that it will simply choose the very best and brightest students who apply, come what may. Whether you enroll or not, you’d know that your acceptance was a pure reflection of your qualifications, and was not influenced by factors beyound your control (like race and gender).”
There used to be a school like that — it was Caltech (maybe still is). I don’t know what the situation is like these days, but in the 70s and 80s affirmative action was at best minimal. Moreover, the lack of nurturing subjects like architecture or design meant that it did no one any favors to get in with low SAT scores. (Look it up: the Lowest Caltech test scores were usually comparable to Harvard’s median) Courses were bitterly hard and nearly 40% of the entering class of 220 didn’t graduate. [This despite the fact that for decades, the median Math II Achievement scores were 800 out of 800]
However, Caltech was/is punished in the rankings of USA Today for being so strict with grades and failing to graduate everyone. And even when using SAT scores, USA Today went from using average SAT scores to “mid-point” scores — thus making it harder to see which schools have smart kids but a fat “tail” of weaker students.
So unfortunately a half century of rigor still goes mostly unrecognized while the Ivies give away A’s like candy on Haloween.