Letters to the Editor
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can someone clarify...
how using using census data instead of school-district data exaggerates the problem? I missed that.
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Not ironic
I think the idea is that the conservative, "school choice" favoring Manhattan Institute would prefer to portray the current public school system as broken in order to further a parochial/private school voucher type program.
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hi californian: school district vs. census data
I posted about this earlier, but somehow it seems to have been sucked mysteriously into the ether. At any rate, here's what I said in brief: it's not that school district data (which is submitted to the federal government by the states) is inherently "exaggerated;" it's just that the researchers in question are basing their calculations on different data sets. (Here, for more info, is the Manhattan Institute's response to the claim of "exaggeration," which made in an Education Week article that, FYI, requires a paid subscription.) As Harvard economist Claudia Goldin (who does education research of her own) told the Times, "They're using two different types of data, and each has its own problems. The truth lies somewhere in between."
Hope that's helpful!
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Fair point, Kyle.
At least we know that parochial schools are nice to kids with gay parents. ;-)
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/04/19/jesse_has_two_mommies/index.html
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Yeah we have problems also you know?
You know I always fancied myself a relatively 'enlightened' male. I beleive strongly in equality and dismissed as right-wing nonsense the idea that Feminists were anti-men.
And then I started to read the continuing attacks on the idea that boys are not performing as well as women in school. I mean last time the "proof" it was all nonsense was because someone objected to the idea of women teaching boys at the turn of the last century.
And now studies showing that there is a problem with race as well.
Yes there probably is, but does this change all the studies showing that boys are underperforming across most countries?(I am in Australia and we have the samething)
Why are the authors here so opposed to the very idea that men may have problems as well?
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race, gender, and the politics of data
If we agree the data illustrates significant differences between races, then we must agree the data illustrates significant differences between genders (and by gender within ethnic groups). Consistently the data illustrates problems with gender and ethnic educational achievement between and within ethnic groups. Claiming there is a race problem and not a gender problem requires one to accept the data for one group and discredit the data for another group - if this is done it is done because of personal biases.
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gender gap fatigue?
Holy Moley!
Do you think people don't also have "race gap fatigue?"
I think it set in sometime in the mid 1970's. Since that point we've all been cultivating our insensitivity to race issues.
They're much more likely to get a second glance with the still slightly novel idea that boys are falling behind.
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Ask a cop
Most people under the age of 25 arrested for practically everything, are boys and men. Most boys and men, percaptia, arrested are nonwhite. Most schools expel or otherwise penalize students who are arrested and wind up somewhere in the criminal justice system.
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Anything but acknowledge a crisis for boys
Lynn Harris said:
"The study's conclusion states clearly -- before discussing the matter of gender, which it does in terms of race -- that "it is important for policymakers and the public to understand that only about 70 percent of all students and a little more than half of Hispanic and African-American students graduate from high school." So why don't these titles or headlines trumpet the "race gap"? If they did, at the very least, anyone with "gender gap" fatigue might be prompted to actually read nment over the last few decades, whereas despite aggreswhat follows."
Seems as if some people on Broadpage would do anything but but spend serious time thinking about the educational crisis for boys. Why would anyone have "gender gap" fatigue when it comes to talking about education?
First, the race gap is well known, is studied abundantly, as it should be and has been for a long time. Few people challenge that there is a crisis in education among minorities, but as Broadsheet has demonstrated, that there is a crisis in education of boys is under-recognized, under-addressed, and in many cases simply denied by a great number of people (I'll refrain from saying which ones). It's just that there is a new phenomenon on the block which is attracting attention for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which, is that fully 1/2 of all children are male.
Anyhow, the answer to your question is simple (why all this attention recently?), but it requires some mathematical understanding:
(1) A broad-based comparison of students from many different schools takes into consideration many factors which are out of the control of school districts themselves and that are not primarily a direct result of the child's race per se, but secondary factors such as socioeconomic status and educational attainment of families attending schools.
(2) In contrast, comparison between male & female graduation rates generally controls for all of these factors, because brothers and sisters generally come from the same socioeconomic background, live in the same neighborhoods, and attend the same schools.
(3) Therefore, the difference between graduation rates between girls and boys must reflect some difference other than the factors most strongly associated with school dropout (e.g. socioeconomic status, native language, neighborhood, single parent vs. two parent family setting).
(4) One question to ask, even though these boys & girls grow up in basically the same families, with presumably basically the same access to economic resources, with essentially the same parents, and attending the same schools, why is there such a vast difference in their peformance:? And specifically, why have boys failed to make any headway in imporoving educational attainment over the past 20 years? Obviously, this must be something intrinsic to the way boys learn, or it may be something intrinsic to the way they are taught. Most other factors are essentially controlled.
Notwithstanding this fact, two other patterns have arisen in the study of minority primary education that you didn't mention. First, among minority groups, the gap between male and female graduation rates is even greater than it is among whites, and the gap is expanding (e.g. it's a problem that is getting worse, not better). Also, graduation rates for minority females have been making steady progress towards greater levels of attainment. In contreast, despite programs to improve the educational attainment of minorities overall, the educational attainment of minority boys has either stood still, or in some cases, such as the case of african american boys, actually worsened over the past decade or so.
Which means, so far as education of boys is concerned, both minority boys and otherwise, there is wrong that has not garnered much attention or constructive problem-solving.