Education Reporting: Why I Get Angry Every Time
Invariably when I hear reports about education, I see red. The reports, like medical, or science, or pharmaceutical information, or other statistical data, take information the reporters don't understand and try to explain it without first comprehending what it says.
My personal favorite was the night the newscasters, with absolute indignation, sputtered about the HORRORS of American public schools and how they were FAILING students because (can you BELIEVE it???) "HALF of American students are scoring in the lower fifty percent of achievement." I just blinked. Half of them make up fifty percent? Really? (Several folks I've told this to have quipped, "Wonder which half you guys are in...")
Then there's the "Boys in Crisis" reporting, mostly based on how girls' scores on standardized tests are no longer lagging behind boys' scores:
The Genius Gap: Are Boys the Second Sex?
Girls Catching Up to Boys in Math, Study Finds (The HORROR!)
Are Men the Second Sex Now? by Christina Hoff Summers who is the author of Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and The WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men and who describes Betty Friedan as "a stocky, disheveled, volatile Jewish iconoclast from Peoria, Ill." as if THAT will give her any credibility...
The War on Boys is where Christina Hoff Summers claims:
"This we think we know: American schools favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is the very opposite. By virtually every measure, girls are thriving in school; it is boys who are the second sex.
It's a bad time to be a boy in America. The triumphant victory of the U.S. women's soccer team at the World Cup last summer has come to symbolize the spirit of American girls. The shooting at Columbine High last spring might be said to symbolize the spirit of American boys."
There is the bit of reassurance from the few folks who READ the data over time and report that, no, there is NOT a general "boys being downtrodden" crisis, and point out that the real crisis is based on race and socioeconomic status, not gender, and that boys are not being mistreated by girls "catching up". Even so, I got the "privilege" of sitting in a Looooong meeting one day where we discussed how we're "failing our boys" by doing silly things like calling on girls and making sure the girls participate too. I have some crazy notion that we SHOULDN'T undo the work that was done to stop EXCLUDING girls. I even said so and pointed out that the article we were given pointed out that the scores were NEARLY the same, not that girls had left boys in the dust. And yet the meeting was about Boys In Crisis. So I give you: Sane Articles.
No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says: Academic Success Linked to Income
"A lot of people think it is the boys that need the help," co-author Christianne Corbett said. "The point of the report is to highlight the fact that that is not exclusively true. There is no crisis with boys. If there is a crisis, it is with African American and Hispanic students and low-income students, girls and boys."
The Truth About Boys and Girls This is actually the voice of true reason and uses the data rather than warping it.
But the truth is far different from what these accounts suggest. The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse; it's good news about girls doing better. In fact, with a few exceptions, American boys are scoring higher and achieving more than they ever have before. But girls have just improved their performance on some measures even faster.
The hysteria about boys is partly a matter of perspective. While most of society has finally embraced the idea of equality for women, the idea that women might actually surpass men in some areas (even as they remain behind in others) seems hard for many people to swallow. Thus, boys are routinely characterized as "falling behind" even as they improve in absolute terms.
Ultimately, education, if the United States is committed to free and universal public education for all children, ages 5-18 (or 21 depending on the individual), people will have to accept that this costs money and not only costs money but is a black hole of money. Public works, the ones I gladly pay taxes for (police, fire, education, infrastructure like roads/power lines/telephone lines/sewer lines/water lines, courts, etc., etc., etc.), never, ever, ever make money. There is no product to sell, only things to be paid for. When we have students graduate from high school, we can't auction them off and recoup our investment. And so long as the schools are run on a post-Industrial Revolution model of the most return for the least money and the least work and the fewest workers, the results will be the poorest overall results. Human equations don't work this way. Goods, sometimes, and perhaps even often. Humans, never (and I use absolutes with great care). A monolithic system, set to try and serve the masses in a single way with while spending as little money and attempting to churn out a product (graduated, literate, critical-thinking, globally-ready graduates) will never be generally successful (incidentally or partially successful, certainly). But to run a system for "all" and expect to have "no child left behind" ...not gonna happen.
My personal favorite was the night the newscasters, with absolute indignation, sputtered about the HORRORS of American public schools and how they were FAILING students because (can you BELIEVE it???) "HALF of American students are scoring in the lower fifty percent of achievement." I just blinked. Half of them make up fifty percent? Really? (Several folks I've told this to have quipped, "Wonder which half you guys are in...")
Then there's the "Boys in Crisis" reporting, mostly based on how girls' scores on standardized tests are no longer lagging behind boys' scores:
The Genius Gap: Are Boys the Second Sex?
Girls Catching Up to Boys in Math, Study Finds (The HORROR!)
Are Men the Second Sex Now? by Christina Hoff Summers who is the author of Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women and The WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men and who describes Betty Friedan as "a stocky, disheveled, volatile Jewish iconoclast from Peoria, Ill." as if THAT will give her any credibility...
The War on Boys is where Christina Hoff Summers claims:
"This we think we know: American schools favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is the very opposite. By virtually every measure, girls are thriving in school; it is boys who are the second sex.
It's a bad time to be a boy in America. The triumphant victory of the U.S. women's soccer team at the World Cup last summer has come to symbolize the spirit of American girls. The shooting at Columbine High last spring might be said to symbolize the spirit of American boys."
There is the bit of reassurance from the few folks who READ the data over time and report that, no, there is NOT a general "boys being downtrodden" crisis, and point out that the real crisis is based on race and socioeconomic status, not gender, and that boys are not being mistreated by girls "catching up". Even so, I got the "privilege" of sitting in a Looooong meeting one day where we discussed how we're "failing our boys" by doing silly things like calling on girls and making sure the girls participate too. I have some crazy notion that we SHOULDN'T undo the work that was done to stop EXCLUDING girls. I even said so and pointed out that the article we were given pointed out that the scores were NEARLY the same, not that girls had left boys in the dust. And yet the meeting was about Boys In Crisis. So I give you: Sane Articles.
No Crisis For Boys In Schools, Study Says: Academic Success Linked to Income
"A lot of people think it is the boys that need the help," co-author Christianne Corbett said. "The point of the report is to highlight the fact that that is not exclusively true. There is no crisis with boys. If there is a crisis, it is with African American and Hispanic students and low-income students, girls and boys."
The Truth About Boys and Girls This is actually the voice of true reason and uses the data rather than warping it.
But the truth is far different from what these accounts suggest. The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse; it's good news about girls doing better. In fact, with a few exceptions, American boys are scoring higher and achieving more than they ever have before. But girls have just improved their performance on some measures even faster.
The hysteria about boys is partly a matter of perspective. While most of society has finally embraced the idea of equality for women, the idea that women might actually surpass men in some areas (even as they remain behind in others) seems hard for many people to swallow. Thus, boys are routinely characterized as "falling behind" even as they improve in absolute terms.
Ultimately, education, if the United States is committed to free and universal public education for all children, ages 5-18 (or 21 depending on the individual), people will have to accept that this costs money and not only costs money but is a black hole of money. Public works, the ones I gladly pay taxes for (police, fire, education, infrastructure like roads/power lines/telephone lines/sewer lines/water lines, courts, etc., etc., etc.), never, ever, ever make money. There is no product to sell, only things to be paid for. When we have students graduate from high school, we can't auction them off and recoup our investment. And so long as the schools are run on a post-Industrial Revolution model of the most return for the least money and the least work and the fewest workers, the results will be the poorest overall results. Human equations don't work this way. Goods, sometimes, and perhaps even often. Humans, never (and I use absolutes with great care). A monolithic system, set to try and serve the masses in a single way with while spending as little money and attempting to churn out a product (graduated, literate, critical-thinking, globally-ready graduates) will never be generally successful (incidentally or partially successful, certainly). But to run a system for "all" and expect to have "no child left behind" ...not gonna happen.