Yes those are scare quotes, and this time around they’re appropriate.
A study released yesterday by Washington think tank Education Sector shows that the media frenzy over the educational ‘boy crisis’ (god, I love these scare quotes!) is pretty much for naught.
...over the past three decades, boys' test scores are mostly up, more boys are going to college and more are getting bachelor's degrees. Although low-income boys, like low-income girls, are lagging behind middle-class students, boys are scoring significant gains in elementary and middle school and are much better prepared for college, the report says. It concludes that much of the pessimism about young males seems to derive from inadequate research, sloppy analysis and discomfort with the fact that although the average boy is doing better, the average girl has gotten ahead of him."The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse," the report says, "it's good news about girls doing better. (Emphasis added)
I’m not one to say I told you so. But yeah, I did.
The report points out that the real educational concerns are over race and class issues for both boys and girls.
What I love about the article is that not only debunks the ‘boy crisis’ myth, but it also suggests that this whole thing is just a backlash to all the gains that women have made. Duh.
The "boy crisis," the report says, has been used by conservative authors who accuse "misguided feminists" of lavishing resources on female students at the expense of males and by liberal authors who say schools are "forcing all children into a teacher-led pedagogical box that is particularly ill-suited to boys' interests and learning styles...Yet there is not sufficient evidence -- or the right kind of evidence -- available to draw firm conclusions," the report says. "As a result, there is a sort of free market for theories about why boys are underperforming girls in school, with parents, educators, media, and the public choosing to give credence to the explanations that are the best marketed and that most appeal to their pre-existing preferences."
Yeah, like “the feminists did it!� Silly conservatives.
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I love that this was in the Washington Post. I also saw a headline for it in the Feminist Newswire.
At least there is FINALLY some main stream voices saying that the boy crisis is a bunch of hooey - and really just fear of women rearing its ugly head. Getting over that and getting into the real issues of race and class being held over students' heads is a step forward.
Maybe (and I admit I'm an idealist) it's not too far off before we finally make some real progress in our education system towards equality - where the emphasis is knowledge and not social status.
The boys crisis is Phase I of an Intelligent Design-style manufactured intellectual framework which its proponents hope will eventually provide an excuse to throw Title IX out the window by mandating gender-segregated schools, with the idea that we might one day achieve the glorious status quo of Saudi Arabia, where men and women have segregated university libraries, the latter roughly half the size of the former. After all, uneducated women are more likely to do what they're told.
I know of a young single mother nearby whose son is forced to attend a boys-only school because it's the only public school available. This will more than likely be one of the major feminist issues of the next 20 years, unless the Supreme Court intervenes early, reaffirms its precedents in Brown v. Board of Education and the VMI case, and bans gender segregation on the grounds that, to quote Brown, separate is inherently unequal.
Cheers,
TH
But Newsweek said boys were idiots. I read the article and I know it couldn't have been wrong(how would you have liked to have been the boy on the cover of that issue?). Newsweek is mainstream media and I always believe the mainstream media. This just sounds like feminist propaganda. :)
There was a time when I thought I was above saying "See? See? I told you so!" As with so many youthful, idealistic notions, I turned out to be mistaken.
The article emphasizes the real trouble that poor boys and non-white boys are having in school--difficulties that have nothing to do with gender and everything to do with class and race. I knew it.
Boy crisis or no boy crisis, there's nothing wrong with looking at why girls are doing much better than boys rather than about the same.
The top half of my class in grade school and junior high consisted mostly of girls and bottom mostly of boys.
One pre-pubescent day, we argued whether girls were better than boys, and someone pointed this out. No one argued about sex differences again.
Schools need to be more decentralized, flexible, and independent to allow room for different kinds of minds to grow. If you ask me, this preliminary boy crisis is long overdue. (I'm 23)