From a Park Bench- Day 5: A series of fictional short stories

Why Teens Are Getting Unhappier

The Problem With Boys: An ignored crisis

We continue to ignore the devastating drop in boys' achievement relative to girls. I address the issue and make recommendations in my PsychologyToday.com article today. HERE is the link.

Boys Need Help

As I've written so often in this blog, while endless programs continue to focus on helping girls and women, boys and men are in far greater trouble. 

A number of men have written excellent books on the topic, for example, Michael Gurian's The Minds of Boys and Michael Thompson's Raising Cain but they received only modest attention. 

Finally a woman, Peg Tyre, has written about the problem, and lo and behold, the media is showing her the love. And so her book, indeed a fine one, The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems in School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do sits near the top of the Amazon.com bestseller list.

Here's a good blog post that she's written on the topic.

Horrendously Biased Anti-Boy Study, of course, widely and uncritically reported

Articles in the Washington Post (front page) and New York Times report uncritically, a horribly biased study, which will kill the deserved concern for boys' badly lagging girls in school and being Ritalinized en masse.

The media should have gotten the first clue of its being biased when they noticed who funded it: the American Association of University Women. If a study on smoking was funded by the tobacco industry, would you give it much credibility? At minimum, wouldn't you vet it carefully?

Yet regarding gender issues, the media has a double standard for how it vets and reports pro woman/minority research vs pro male (let alone, pro-white) research findings : It censors the latter and reports the former uncritically and as thought it were fact, to wit, the title of the article, "No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says."

Here are the problems with the AAUW study:

1. It says, deceptively, that both boys and girls scores have increased. Why did the study (or at least the reporting) omit is that girls' scores increased much more? In a world in which ever higher-level skill is required, does it mean there's no crisis for boys if their scores have increased a bit while girls' have increased much more? Why did the media not probe that finding as it surely would have if it were a pro-male finding?

2. The study says there's virtually no gap between boys and girls who enter college. Of course not---the requirements for getting into college are roughly equal for boys and girls. What the study (or the reporting) fails to say is that many more girls than boys go to college. Why did the media not probe that finding as it would have it were a pro-male finding?

2a. The study reports that since 1982, 57% of the college graduates are women. Why do the study's authors go back to 1982? To hide the fact that the gap is larger today. For the class of 2008 the ratio is 60/40 and is projected to increase further. Wouldn't the media have probed that finding if it were pro-male?

3. The study reports the terribly deceptive statistic: "Among all women and men working full time, year-round, median annual earnings for women were 77 percent of men's earnings in 2005." Of course, the study (or the reporting) doesn't mention that a far smaller percentage of women are working full-time. And it doesn't mention that women disproportionately avoid the high-paying fields: engineering, computer science, coal mining, sewer repair, etc. And that even those who work full-time work, on average, far fewer hours than men who work full-time. Or that women in corporations are far less likely to do the things required to be promoted to higher-level jobs, such as move their family to a far-flung place (Montgomery, Alabama anyone?) As reported in the book, Why Men Earn More, FOR THE SAME WORK, women earn the same or more than men. Why does the media give a free pass to such as misleading statistic as "women earn 77 cents on the dollar?" Wouldn't the media vet that claim if the statistic favored men?

4. The study omits the fact that eight times as many boys as girls are put on the methamphetamine-like Ritalin and similar drugs. If it was a pro-male finding, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

5. The study omits that the suicide rate for boys is 400% of girls'. If it were the reverse, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

6. The study omits that boys drop out of high school at a significantly higher rate. If if the reverse were reported, wouldn't the media have made the effort to interview and quote sources that would have presented that? But because the AAUW study advocates for females, the media somehow didn't bother.

Truly, I don't understand why the media would be so relentlessly unfair to boys and men.

The Books to Read on Men's Issues

• Save the Males by syndicated columnist, Kathleen Parker.  No mainstream publisher, let alone Random House, would have published this if it were written by a man. She makes clear how the schools, colleges, media, and laws have been devastating, unfairly, to men, who as a gender, are nowhere near as bad as the media has led you to believe.

The next two, by Drs. Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young, professors at McGill, are very scholarly but authoritative.

• Spreading Misandry

• Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systematic Discrimination Against Men
  

The following two books by Dr. Warren Farrell, who twice served on the board of the National Organization for Women in New York City and now is co-president with me of the National Organization for Men, are more pleasant reading, shorter, and yet solidly researched:

• The Myth of Male Power
  

• Why Men Earn More

• Who Stole Feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers

• The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers

• The Sexual Paradox by Susan Pinker
• Biology at Work by Kingsley Browne
  

• The Woman Racket by Steve Maxon. A small percentage of the book's assertions are dubious, but en toto, it is a worthwhile read: bold yet sensible in its assertions, usually well documented.

A Shocking Response

I happened upon the editor-in-chief of a major publication. She said that her publication was looking for bloggers and invited me to email her the link to this blog. I did.

A day later, she emailed me to say that she found my posts on boys and men to be "a caricature of the men's advocate" and that I needed to "limber up" my reasoning and persuasiveness.

I'd appreciate knowing if the readers of this blog agree.

Time for a Class-Action Suit on Behalf of Smart Boys?

Per a previous post, I believe that intellectually gifted students, especially boys and especially in the elementary school, are our most underserved students. That, of course, is ironic in that gifted kids have the greatest potential for solving societal problems and for the U.S. thriving in the global economy.

For 40 years, despite a vigorous lobbying effort by the National Association for Gifted Children, our legislatures have made clear they don't want to fund bright kids' education. Indeed, nearly all funding for the gifted has been reallocated to the lowest achievers, using such vehicles as Title I and No Child Left Behind.

Civil rights groups achieved many of their goals by skirting the legislature and, instead, filing lawsuits : Brown vs Board of Education (integrated schools,) Larry P (special education), Gratz vs University of Michigan (reverse discrimination.)

Perhaps advocates for bright kids need to take a lesson for the civil rights groups: file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of bright kids, especially boys (who are so underserved in today's girl-friendly, boy-unfriendly schools) demanding merely what the courts and legislators have bestowed upon special education children: sufficient funding to provide an appropriate education.

What do you think?

If a Genie Gave Me One Education Wish

If a genie said, "Marty, I'll give you one wish for improving the schools," I'd wish for an experiment:

Take two large public elementary schools that are as similar as possible.

In School 1, assign students to classes as is currently done: by age-level.

In School 2, place students into classes without regard to age, but instead by both sex and performance on the state's achievement test.

So, in a school large enough to fill six classes, School 2 would have a class for:

• the highest-achieving girls
• the highest-achieving boys
• average-achieving girls
• average-achieving boys
• the lowest-achieving girls
• the lowest-achieving boys
  

Then, over a few year period, see which district's students grow more in achievement, emotional development, social development, etc. Break out results by age, race, gender, and initial achievement level.

What do you think of this idea?

Smart, Active Boys: Our Most Underserved Students

by Marty Nemko
When I was a boy, I just could not sit still in class. I was very bored and active by nature, so I would rock my chair back, whisper and write notes to kids, even wander around the classroom until the teacher yelled, "Martin, sit down!"

That was decades ago. Today, I suspect I would, like so many boys, put on a Ritalin leash. Indeed there are eight boys for every girl on Ritalin.

The blame is placed on the smart, active boy, rarely on the schools, which claim to celebrate diversity of learning styles and needs but stop celebrating when it comes to smart, active boys. Indeed, this decade's signature domestic policy, No Child Left Behind redirects nearly all efforts to educate the lowest achievers.

This, of course, is ironic in that smart kids have the greatest potential to contribute to society: to cure its diseases, close the racial achievement gap, develop cost-effective solar power, etc.

The unfair treatment of smart, active boys comes from four factors:

1. The widespread abandonment of ability-grouped classes. In most of today's elementary schools, gifted and slow are placed in the same class. That creates more equality--especially racial equality--but the result is that all children receive a worse education. Imagine for example, that you spoke good Mandarin but wanted to become expert. Wouldn't you prefer a class with advanced students rather than one that also had beginners? Yet today, we don't give smart kids (or their parents) that choice. We force them into mixed-ability classes, where dispositive metaevaluations reveal they learn less and are bored. And because, on average, boys are more active than girls, they more often can't sit still for six hours a day, five days a week, 180 days a year, year after year. Rather than the harder task of accommodating to smart, active boys' needs, it's "take this (meth-like) pill." and/or be yelled at, and or given bad grades.

2. That elementary school teachers are overwhelmingly female. Today, the percentage is up to 93%, the highest ever recorded. Even if teachers believe they're accommodating to all students' needs, they can't help but tilt their teaching to what appeals to them. Thus, books about male heroism are replaced by those of female relationships and heroines, typically in which an inferior male is shown-up by a wise female. Competition--a prime motivator for boys--is replaced by so-called "cooperative learning," which usually reduces to the bright doing the slow's work, boring the bright kid and precluding him from learning new things.

3. The media's continuing to perpetrate the myth that females are oppressed and males are the oppressor. For example, they continue to spout these disproven assertions:

• women earn 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. In fact, a rich research literature documents that sexism is not at the core of pay differentials, for example, THIS is from the New York Times, THIS is from the Wall Street Journal, THIS is from Compensation Cafe, THIS is from City Journal. Alas, the media chooses to ignore all that research in favor of the broadbrush, "Women earn 77 cents on the dollar."
• women are underrepresented in high-level positions because of sexism. In fact, as documented in recent well-reviewed books such as Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox, women's not being in high-office comes much more from choosing to have a less work-centric lifestyle.
• the schools shortchange girls relative to boys. (the long-debunked Reviving Ophelia canard.)
• men abuse women--in fact, studies show that 30 to 52% of severe domestic violence is perpetrated by women.

Thus, the feeling among educators, policymakers, and the public, is that we need to do more for females than for males, ignoring such statistics that boys are achieving far worse in school than are girls, much more likely to abuse drugs, commit suicide, and drop out of high school, far less likely to graduate from college, much more likely, as young adults, to be sleeping late unemployed on their parents' sofas.

4. Society's bias that says: let's help those with the greatest deficit rather than those with the greatest potential to profit: "Those smart boys will do okay on their own. Let's commit our resources to the lowest achievers." I deeply believe that such a philosophy will reduce our society to the lowest common denominator, ironically resulting in a worse life for us all. Besides, it simply is unfair for the public schools to not provide at least a marginally appropriate education for all kids, and right now, smart boys get the very least appropriate education.

What do you think?