That is the question that Professor Mark Perry asks after looking at this data (via Newsalert):
In a “Data Snapshot” published last June, the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education “highlights several differences in educational outcomes between males and females from prekindergarten,” including these:
1. 57% of students in postsecondary education are women.
2. Girls enrolled in gifted and talented education programs outnumber boys enrolled, e.g., 8.1% of girls participated in gifted and talented education programs in 2009 compared to 7.4% of boys.
3. By a large margin, girls are much less likely than boys to be held back one year. In 2009-2010 across all grade levels, 61% of the students held back for academic reasons were boys and only 39% were girls.
4. A greater percentage of girls in 7th or 8th grade (20%) are taking Algebra I compared to boys (18%), and girls of every race/ethnicity are passing Algebra I at a higher rate than their male peers.
Many books and articles are written about why boys “fail” but our school system is failing them and no one cares.
I suppose that is one step in “the right direction” for the leftists in charge of our education system. Re-write the line to read “when white men are underrepresented” and you will have reached their goal.
Oh, yes, and re-write the last line to read, “full gender/racial equality.” Also one of the overarching goals of the left.
“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” –George Orwell, “Animal Farm”
I’m tired of hearing about how girls don’t do as well as boys in the hard science STEM courses, which leads to the “obvious” conclusion that the courses are discriminatory in the way they are taught. There is no attention — none — to the fact that boys don’t do as well in the liberal arts, such as art & literature.
The statistics will be separated out when it is convenient, but combined for the same reason in other circumstances.
“In fact, upon entering school, girls perform equal to or better than boys on nearly every measure of achievement, but by the time they graduate high school or college, they have fallen behind.” (Sadker, 1994)
“In Myra and David Sadker’s research, they noted four types of teacher responses to students: teacher praises, providing positive feedback for a response; teacher remediates, encouraging a student to correct or expand their answer; teacher criticizes, explicitly stating that the answer is incorrect; teacher accepts, acknowledging that a student has responded. The Sadkers found that boys were far more likely to receive praise or remediation from a teacher than were girls. The girls were most likely to receive an acknowledgement response from their teacher. (Sadker, 1994) These findings are confirmed by a 1990 study by Good and Brophy that “…noted that teachers give boys greater opportunity to expand ideas and be animated than they do girls and that they reinforce boys more for general responses than they do for girls.” (Marshall, 1997)
“Beyond teacher responses, special services in education appear to be applied more liberally to boys than to girls. Research shows that boys are referred for testing for gifted programs twice as often as girls, which may be because, “…
I suppose the solution might be, too exchange Canandian teachers with U.S. teachers and get the boys caught back up to speed.