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Here's 100 Years of Proof That Girls Are Better Students Than Boys. In all subjects, even math and science.
In 2006, Newsweek magazine declared it, loud, on their cover: America's boys were in crisis. Boys were falling behind their female counterparts in school. They were getting worse grades, lagging on standardized tests, and not attending college in the same numbers as girls. "By almost every benchmark," Peg Tyre, the author of the cover story, wrote, "boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind." And so it began-the end of men, but also an ongoing conversation on how to better boys' performance in the classroom. From the article:
This "boy crisis," however, was based on an assumption: that males had previously been on top. Granted, there was evidence to support that idea. For one, educational institutions for most of modern history have been openly sexist, favoring boys. And traditionally, males had outperformed girls in standardized tests and in math and science. But "by the mid-1990s, girls had reduced the gap in math, and more girls than boys were taking high-school-level biology and chemistry," Tyre wrote.
The assumption that boys had been the better students didn't seem right to (married) researchers Daniel and Susan Voyer of the University of New Brunswick in Canada. "I've been collecting grade data for a long time," Daniel Voyer says in a phone interview. "Typically if you find gender differences, they are in favor of girls - it doesn't matter what it is. So it started to kind of puzzle me." And so the pair set out to test, collecting every study they could find on grades and gender since 1914 and crunching the numbers in a mega-meta analysis, the first of its kind.
While the girls' advantage is largest in reading and language studies, it exists for all subjects, even math and science. And though they tested data from across the world, the Voyers found the gender gap was largest in the United States.
What's most striking is that the gender gap held across the decades. If the boy crisis existed, they would have seen boys' performance peak and fall over time. That wasn't the case. "Boys have been lagging for a long time and ... this is a fairly stable phenomenon," the paper concluded.
(Score: 1) by MrNemesis on Friday May 02 2014, @04:11PM
I think that depends on your definition of "fairness". The culture when and where I was growing up (UK in the 80's) and one shared by almost everyone was that it was unfair to all concerned *not* to segregate education, so that people who were good in one subject weren't held back by the people who weren't and the people who weren't good weren't continually put to shame or marginalised by the brightest. There were even additional classes ("curriculum enrichment") for the very best in the subject where you'd be whisked off to another classroom for a whole day and given interesting free-form problems to solve. Conversely, people with learning difficulties were put in "special needs" streams where they'd receive more intensive tutoring.
From the context of your post, it sounds very much like state education in america isn't tiered at all, is this true?
No idea if the UK curriculum still follows the same principles, but personally I'd consider it essential for compulsory education. The terminology used here was "sets" - after the first year of secondary once they had an accurate measure of your performance you'd be put in a "Set" for each particular subject. School for me in the pre-sets days was full of interruptions from people who either had trouble understanding concepts that had been gone over many times before or were deliberately disruptive because they didn't enjoy or see the benefits in learning. Once you got a bunch of like-minded people together in the same class, everyone was able to go along at the same pace.
Surely fairness is giving everyone the same opportunities, but giving those with the will to surge ahead the means to do so?
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 02 2014, @05:02PM
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by BasilBrush on Friday May 02 2014, @05:02PM
The system you describe is called 'streaming" and then as now, some UK schools do it, some don't.
Many primary schools now do it, which was either unknown or at least rare back then. And it's not a good idea. Many kids true potential hasn't surfaced in the primary years, and in any case it's good for kids to learn early on how to mix with anyone and not just their intellectual peers.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday May 02 2014, @11:10PM
US schools do this to some extent. They call it 'tracking' I think. Lots of anger over it. But it's not even that huge of a difference between classes. The thing that gets people upset is it can become difficult to advance if you've been assigned to a lower level.
When I was in school, it stated out with three or four levels of each class, which began around 6th grade. High, Medium, Low, and sometimes Remedial. Same *basic* topic (ie, all years studied US History at the same time) but of course the higher classes would go into more details and cover more ground. In some classes (math, science) the top 10 or so students (wasn't a fixed number, that's just how many we usually had, out of ~300) would be placed in the classes for a higher grade level. Then in highschool you get AP classes as well in the last couple years, which are intended to be near college level. By senior year in some schools you can start taking college courses directly for half the day. Many of our schools also have trade programs where you can spend half the day learning welding, cosmetology, culinary, getting some IT certs, or whatever the local district happens to offer. Such programs don't exist everywhere though.
Personally, I agree with many here that we need more of that. I have some sympathy for those who oppose it as well though. The problem is that usually the teachers alone decide which track a student is placed in. In the earlier years the students themselves aren't even told, though they tend to figure it out. And they can't move to a different level unless recommended by their current teacher. THAT is a HUGE problem.
The root of the issue here is one of equality. Equality of WHAT though? Similar to what you said, there's a phrase that right-wingers tend to throw around that's quite fitting here -- though not in the way they use it. "Equality of opportunity, not of outcome." When THEY use it, it often means something like 'hey, you had just as much chance to be born to millionaires, not my fault you're starving!'. Beware of such false arguments. Education must surely begin "equal outcome", all on one track, but there is definitely a point where the students start to decide what they're going to be doing with their lives, and they certainly SHOULD be empowered to work towards those goals, even if that means some go to college, some go to trade schools, and some may even drop out.
We don't say it's unfair that not everybody gets a computer science degree, do we? Of course not! Not everyone *wants* one! It's only unfair if someone *other than the students themselves* get to make that decision for them. And of course, they should be free to make mistakes -- we need to make sure students can freely move between tracks as long as they're willing to do the work to catch up.