Do female-dominated schools discriminate against boys? This is from the Washington Examiner.
It says:
Young women are taking more honors classes, getting better grades and have a higher overall GPA than their male peers, according to a report compiling SAT Test data.
The report, released by the College Board, looked at the test scores of college-bound seniors in 2016, and reviewed high school data demographics. Girls, it turns out, are doing much better in high school than boys. In a chart compiled by American Enterprise Scholar Mark Perry, it’s clear that girls are outperforming boys on nearly every level in high school.
[…]Don’t expect to hear calls for helping boys perform better in school. Activists have focused so heavily on girls for years now that boys have gotten the message that they no longer matter. It’s what Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about in her book “The War Against Boys” nearly two decades ago.
What Perry noted in the chart above isn’t new for this year, it’s been a trend since before Hoff Sommers’ book. Yet the focus is still on girls.
[…]More girls than boys are attending college and getting master’s and doctoral degrees.
The article notes that boys perform better on math SATs, which makes you wonder why they have lower GPAs. Most teachers and administrators in traditional schools are women. When those women administrators and teachers attend college, they learn that women have been held back by men and discriminated against. Then they get jobs in the education system teaching boys and girls. Could it be that when a teacher grades a boy, she grades a boy lower than a standardized test would? As a way of “making up” for the supposed discrimination against women?
Has anyone ever studied this to see if there is discrimination against boys in the schools?
The study is here (PDF), and Susan Walsh writes about the study on her blog.
Excerpt:
A new study of nearly 6,000 elementary school children has found that boys are discriminated against beginning in kindergarten. Christopher Cornwell, an economics professor at the University of Georgia, says that ”gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls.”
Despite having higher scores on standardized tests, boys get lower grades than girls. Why? Because teachers are basing grades at least partly on classroom behavior, and the standards are very much geared to female norms.
[…]Here’s what the disparity looks like for kindergarten boys:
Std. Deviation Test Scores Grades Reading -.017 -.27 Math +.02 -.15 Science +.035 -.14 (Note: Values are approx., gauged visually from study graphic.)
Another interesting finding was that boys who adhere to female norms on non-cognitive skills were not penalized. Effectively, the more female behavior was rewarded with a grade “bonus” for males.
The implications of this are obvious. Masculinity, even normal maleness, is being punished in schools from a very young age. Only the most female-acting boys are rewarded with a fair assessment.
What the study shows is that administrators and teachers don’t grade like standardized tests – they have other criteria that discriminate in favor of girls and against boys. And now we are seeing the effects of this attack on boys in college admissions and graduation rates – not to mention affirmative action for women employees in the workplace.
You can find out more about the war against boys in Christina Hoff Sommers’ book “The War Against Boys”. If you send your boy(s) to government-run schools, this is a must-read. Sommers is a Democrat, and a traditional equity feminism but unlike most school administrators and teachers, she does not believe that it is OK to discriminate against boys to keep them down.
