Interesting Article about Education Gap for Boys

[elbenn]

This is an interesting article in the Atlantic about an education gap between boys and girls. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/how-to-make-school-better-for-boys/279635/

[123LuckyMom]

Interesting! My husband (who's a psychologist) talks about how schools are failing boys all the time. I've always kind of nodded and replied citing wage discrepancies and all the ways in which it is still a man's world. It's interesting to hear from another source that this is a widely acknowledged problem.

[Kindra178]

Thanks for posting. Not a huge fan of the author, although I liked her earlier work. Acknowledging that men and women are different is the first step toward real gender equality, not the nonsense we have today. Schools are also failing boys, especially the younger ones. The Common Core standards will not help this at all.

[elbenn]

Interesting! My husband (who's a psychologist) talks about how schools are failing boys all the time. I've always kind of nodded and replied citing wage discrepancies and all the ways in which it is still a man's world. It's interesting to hear from another source that this is a widely acknowledged problem.

Thomas Sowell is an economist at Harvard who has written articles showing that there isn't actually a wage gap if you are comparing the same work.

[Mopey]

I only just glanced but I noticed something about girls in school and it made me think that maybe girls are more connected and making more effort because of all the years we were instilled with the reach for equality there (remember when the big problem was that boys overshadowed girls, answering, etc?) ...... Hell, I made two friends Freshman year because they recognized me as the ONLY girl who talked in to our PoliSci class all Fall :bag

It's hard to keep on top of all this. With my new nephew in the world I will definitely be reading the whole article later. Thanks OP!

[anonomom]

I read the article, and I'm unimpressed (and unconvinced). Hoff Summers' argument is that since women are now getting the majority of college degrees, our schools must (apparently by definition, because she offers no actual examples) be failing boys. But her recommendation to fix the alleged problem is just to deemphasize academics in favor of the vocational training that she claims boys would prefers. This seems more to me like reinforcing stereotypes and seeking to reinstate a lost status quo than fixing an actual problem.

I am 100% in favor of our schools providing all of their students with the tools that they need to succeed in today's world. I'm just not buying into the dichotomy Hoff Summers is trying to sell (literally -- she's hawking a new edition of her book). I don't think gains for men must come at the expense of women, or vice-versa.

[bisous]

Hmm. I read this one quickly. I do think that sometimes boys have a disadvantage to their learning style. I do think girls are doing really well these days. I think THAT is great. I think boys maybe need to step it up? I'm not sure (from my admittedly super quick read) what exactly the author is advocating except to tell feminists to simmer down in their rhetoric?? I think we should just continue to push both boys and girls to higher achievement. As a mom of boys, I plan on taking their education year by year and making sure that they learn the lessons and skills they need to be successful. My boys are so different, it is hard to lump them together and say "they" need x, y, and z. Maybe I just need to be a more careful reader...

[dogmom]

Thomas Sowell is an economist at Harvard who has written articles showing that there isn't actually a wage gap if you are comparing the same work.

Have you read those articles? They have holes I can drive a truck through.

[larig]

I read the article, and I'm unimpressed (and unconvinced). Hoff Summers' argument is that since women are now getting the majority of college degrees, our schools must (apparently by definition, because she offers no actual examples) be failing boys. But her recommendation to fix the alleged problem is just to deemphasize academics in favor of the vocational training that she claims boys would prefers. This seems more to me like reinforcing stereotypes and seeking to reinstate a lost status quo than fixing an actual problem.

I am 100% in favor of our schools providing all of their students with the tools that they need to succeed in today's world. I'm just not buying into the dichotomy Hoff Summers is trying to sell (literally -- she's hawking a new edition of her book). I don't think gains for men must come at the expense of women, or vice-versa.

Agreed. Completely.

[westwoodmom04]

Hmm. I read this one quickly. I do think that sometimes boys have a disadvantage to their learning style. I do think girls are doing really well these days. I think THAT is great. I think boys maybe need to step it up? I'm not sure (from my admittedly super quick read) what exactly the author is advocating except to tell feminists to simmer down in their rhetoric?? I think we should just continue to push both boys and girls to higher achievement. As a mom of boys, I plan on taking their education year by year and making sure that they learn the lessons and skills they need to be successful. My boys are so different, it is hard to lump them together and say "they" need x, y, and z. Maybe I just need to be a more careful reader...

Couldn't bring myself to read beyond the first three paragraphs of the article without eye rolling, but I one hundred percent agree with your perspective.

[BabbyO]

This article is interesting to me...not just because I have 2 boys, but because I am definitely a hands on learner. Now, I did ok in school because I'm also a rule follower, but school (esp public HS) did not prepare me for what I'm interested in. I think the problem is that our school system doesn't address different styles of learning in a lot of instances - and that is not specifically for boys or girls. But I don't really have a solution...how do you encompass all learning styles?

[dogmom]

The basic problem I have with this whole thought process that has been going on in the past decade or so about how we fail boys and girls do so well is it just doesn't make sense with my life experience. I'm older than about 90% of the people who hand out here and trust me, public schools in the 70's really didn't do well with "non traditional learners". I keep hearing about how much the boys are harmed by this. How they need to walk around and not sit at a desk because that's just not how boys are. Yet when I went to school there was no walking around, and when I graduate High School in the early 80's boys still did much better wage and job wise compared to girls. There have been a fundamental shift in the economics of this country, it does effect lower educated males more than others, but that has nothing to do with the school system. I feel like less is expected out of boys now, not more. I realize I have an easy going boy child, and I might feel differently if I had a more "typically" boy. (And I reject that label.) I also think there are issues with sexual dynamics in school that still exist with girls that they have to overcome. I don't know about you all, but I had more than one friend that did crappy in a year of college that turned out to be because they were sexual assaulted. How about the educational environment for girls getting sexting pictures sent to them?

[elbenn]

Have you read those articles? They have holes I can drive a truck through.

Yep, read them. What holes do you think they have?

[elbenn]

The article discusses how Great Britain, Canada and Australia believe they have an education gap in their countries and are working to address this problem. For those unconvinced by this article--and it's fine if one article doesn't convince you--but I am curious if you think that Great Britain, Canada and Australia are somehow different than the US or do you think they don't actually have a problem?

[Green_Tea]

I read the article, and I'm unimpressed (and unconvinced). Hoff Summers' argument is that since women are now getting the majority of college degrees, our schools must (apparently by definition, because she offers no actual examples) be failing boys. But her recommendation to fix the alleged problem is just to deemphasize academics in favor of the vocational training that she claims boys would prefers. This seems more to me like reinforcing stereotypes and seeking to reinstate a lost status quo than fixing an actual problem.

I am 100% in favor of our schools providing all of their students with the tools that they need to succeed in today's world. I'm just not buying into the dichotomy Hoff Summers is trying to sell (literally -- she's hawking a new edition of her book). I don't think gains for men must come at the expense of women, or vice-versa.

I totally agree.

[anonomom]

The article discusses how Great Britain, Canada and Australia believe they have an education gap in their countries and are working to address this problem. For those unconvinced by this article--and it's fine if one article doesn't convince you--but I am curious if you think that Great Britain, Canada and Australia are somehow different than the US or do you think they don't actually have a problem?

I don't know what's actually going on in other countries, and Hoff Summers doesn't offer specifics. I'd want to know exactly what problem they have and how they are addressing it.

[dogmom]

Yep, read them. What holes do you think they have?

Basically his argument comes down to the following quote from him:
"women are typically not educated as often in such highly paid fields as mathematics, science, and engineering, nor attracted to physically taxing and well paid fields as construction work, lumberjacking, coal mining and the like."

So, his argument is that woman get paid less NOT because there is a wage gap, but because woman do jobs that don't get paid as much. In his mind my profession, nursing, is not as physically taxing" as a construction worker, so of course the construction worker should get paid more. Because, you know, it takes more education to be a construction worker, I guess. So of course it makes sense that my male friends who don't have a college degree, but into IT young should get paid more than my friend with two masters in education. It was her bad luck to go into education. Stupid woman, she should go for those manly, i.e.-well paid fields. It ignores plenty of data of places like offices, like a bank, where a woman will stay in an administration role that gets lower paid, but a man will get promoted to some other administration role with a different name, no different qualifications, and get paid more. It ignores the fact that HR people (both male and female) look more harshly on a female candidate trying to negotiate a higher wage than a male one. (Studies confirm this.) So when one read studies that say women don't ask for pay raises as much as men, maybe we are just smart enough to realize it won't be received as well.

I think his argument is very oversimplified. For every comparison he makes of women go into this field and men go into this field, so women man less I can find studies that show comparative jobs getting paid differently. And that's ignoring the maybe position A gets paid more than position B because it is in a male dominated field. He does not have a great depth of data to back him up. The one thing I have yet to see someone like him explain is why men, even in nursing, get paid on average more than women? It's not a huge gap, (1-2%), but it's a gap. So basically, I have very little respect for his argument and I think the air time it takes up on a certain band width is not worth data behind it.

[squimp]

60% of my colleagues in graduate school were women. Only 2% of the faculty were women. Many, many (most?) of my female colleagues did not find jobs in our field. These are women who received MS and PhDs in my field - they did not go on to get jobs in the field. Or if they did, they didn't get the tenure track positions or permanent jobs like the men in my cohort did. It's getting better (maybe - I would like to see some research on this because my anecdotes are not good), but there is still a huge gap between women getting degrees and the proportion of women faculty in those same departments.

I'm going to agree with the beginning of the article - the patriarchy is alive and well.