Presented By:
Jamie Carpenter
Greg Hutchings
Bronwyn MacFarlane
Holly Richard
Power Point
Presentation On Gender in Education
Travis Burns
Antoine Hickman
Patricia Kern
Shelly Nowacek
Power Point
Presentation On Special Education
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Jamie Carpenter
Achievement Gap
Illustrated with a variety of benchmarks, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In a Newsweek article entitled “The Trouble with Boys,” it was shown that in elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. At the high school level standardized writing tests, the scores of boys are typically lower than the scores of girls. The number of boys who reported a dislike for school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a study conducted at the University of Michigan . The gender shift is especially evident on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body and today, they are a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy.”
Contemporary shifts in performance demonstrate a reversal of student performance in the
1970's in which girls were not performing at optimal levels. Helping underperforming boys today is reminiscent of the focus upon girls' educational needs when it was girls, not boys, who were lagging. The 1972 federal law Title IX forced schools to provide equal opportunities for girls in the classroom and on the playing field. Billions of dollars were funneled into finding new ways to help girls achieve but the 1992 report issued by the American Association of University Women declared the work of Title IX was not done as girls still fell behind boys in math and science. By the mid-1990s, girls had reduced the gap in math and more girls than boys were taking high-school-level biology and chemistry.
In the reverse point of view, some scholars, notably Sommers (2000), has suggested that misguided feminism was hurting boys. Sommers reported girls were making strong and steady progress in schools in the 1990's but that feminist educators portrayed them as disadvantaged and lavished them with attentive support. Boys, meanwhile, whose rates of achievement had begun to falter, were ignored and problems grew. Other scholars reported that over the last two decades, the education system has become obsessed with a quantifiable and narrowly defined kind of academic success which has created a myopic (and negligent) view which is harmful to boys. With school performance measured in two simple ways: (1) how many students are enrolled in accelerated courses and (2) whether test scores stay high; these pressures undermine the strengths and underscore the limitations of what psychologists call the "boy brain"—“ kinetic, disorganized, maddening and sometimes brilliant behaviors that scientists now believe are not learned but hard-wired” (Tyre, 2006). For example, boys are more impulsive than girls and prefer not to sit for too long. Tyre (2006) reported that in the past, feminists argued that classic "boy" behaviors were a result of socialization, however today some scientists are reporting they may be an expression of male brain chemistry.
One of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or fail in high school rests on a single question: does he have a man in his life to look up to? In every kind of neighborhood, rich or poor, an increasing number of boys—now a startling 40 percent—are being raised without their biological dads. Gurian (2001) suggests grandfathers and uncles can help, but emphasized that an adolescent boy without a father figure was like an explorer without a map, especially for poor boys struggling in school. Gurian (2001) indicated that older males model self-restraint and solid work habits for younger ones, while encouraging or admonishing, an older man reminds a boy in many different ways that school is crucial to their mission in life. Some boys have many opportunities to learn from older men. In neighborhoods where fathers are scarce, high-school dropout rates are high: more than half of African-American boys who start high school don't finish ( Tyre , 2006).