WE ALWAYS RUN THE EXPERIMENT

Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin (USA Today, 8/28/2003)

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.

Most startling is that little is being done to correct the imbalances. All of the major players — schools, education colleges and researchers — largely ignore the gender gap. Instead of pursuing sound solutions, many educators merely advocate prescribing more attention-focusing Ritalin for the boys, who receive the drug at four to eight times the rate of girls, according to different estimates. "Too often the first reaction to an attention problem is 'Let's medicate,' " says Rockville, Md., child psychologist Neil Hoffman. "Some schools are quick to recommend solutions before they've fully evaluated the problem." [...]

One fact explains why educators are ignoring boys' needs: You can't address a problem that you don't admit exists. 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.

Last April, when Kenneth Dragseth, superintendent of schools in Edina, Minn., presented a paper describing his district's gender gap at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting in Chicago, he says the reception ranged from chilly to hostile. Female education researchers in the audience questioned whether helping boys would mean hurting girls.

Their attitude follows years of lobbying by groups such as the American Association of University Women, which alerted educators to the fact that girls were being shortchanged academically in the fields of math and science. The extra attention helped focus schools on girls' difficulties, but it has made it too easy for educators to overlook the problems of boys. Among them:

--Boys and girls learn differently. The best research on boy-girl learning differences is produced more by accident than by design. The lack of data in this field can hurt girls as much as boys. For instance, as part of an ongoing 20-year dyslexia study focusing on Connecticut schools, Yale neuroscientist and pediatrician Sally Shaywitz discovered that schools were identifying four times as many dyslexic boys as girls. Yet when her team entered schools to screen children, it diagnosed just as many dyslexic girls as boys. Shaywitz found that the mostly female teaching staff was quicker to identify rambunctious boys than quiet girls.

Ritalin is in many ways the first great "success" of the age of bioengineering. Parents, teachers, schools, doctors, etc. have found a way to make boys more docile and easier to control. These are, of course, the people we'd expect to have the boys' best interests at heart, if anyone does, but they don't: they are self-interested. If there's a drug that will quiet the kids down then give it to them and the secondary effects be damned. Welcome to our future.

MORE (via Mike Daley):
Do the math: Girls tops on campuses (Kay Lazar, August 31, 2003, Boston Herald)

"I don't mind being superior, education-wise, to someone I'm dating,'' said Leann Gould, 23, a first-year law student at Northeastern, where women command a 64 percent majority of the law school's freshmen class.

"But I am concerned about finding a man who would accept this,'' she added.

For Northeastern sophomore Liz Schwartz, 19, a nation of less-educated men is not such a bad thing.

"There would be more opportunities for (women) if the guys weren't as qualified,'' she said.

Statewide, female students command a 57.5 percent majority among private and public colleges, according to the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Even in schools that have traditionally attracted more men - males comprised 66 percent of MIT's undergrads a decade ago - women are gaining ground. Today, women make up 41 percent of MIT's undergrads, and they outnumber men in 15 of the school's 22 undergraduate majors.

Some schools with large female majorities are aggressively working to level the gender imbalance. BU, for instance, says it is "giving more weight'' in admissions to SAT scores - where men traditionally score higher - and redesigning its brochures from ones that show mostly women to images that are more mixed.

The point being that the SAT tests ability while the conferring of degrees expresses "qualification". Reducing emphasis on the former in order to achieve the latter was really a rather straightforward exercise in social engineering when you get right down to it. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 31, 2003 8:25 PM