Wednesday, May 12, 2010

A Different, Uncared-about Achievement Gap

When other groups fall this far behind in education, it's evidence of racism or classism or sexism or barbarism or something:

For last year's graduating Class of 2009, women dominated at every level of higher education. Here's the national breakdown: for every 100 men, 142 women graduated with a bachelor's, 159 women completed a master's and 107 women got a doctoral degree. University of Michigan Economics Professor Dr. Mark Perry says similar numbers are in tow this year....


Instapundit suggests, not entirely mockingly, that we might have to extend Title IX beyond athletics

Since we’ve given up on merit and instead focus on group representation nowadays, what’s the argument against such an approach?


I cannot come up with one.

1 comment:

Ellen K said...

At the height of the feminist movement, women's groups pushed for group learning and other techniques that benefited female students in general over male students. Males and females are wired differently and respond to different learning styles. If I make my disruptive boys compete for a bottle of soda in cleaning up paint, my room is spotless. Girls would never fall for that but would insist that everyone share the work equally. There have been countless studies on how girls do better in single sex classes and some schools have experimented with this. But nobody really seems to care that boys are more likely to be considered for special education classes, may have more issues with reading, may have less patience with long classes and need competition in order to achieve. We've put so much into girls programs that boys have been left behind. As a mom of a daughter and two sons, I can tell you that my sons struggled much more with classes and the expectations based on detail oriented nit picky details that have little to do with learning material and everything to do with pandering to the way girls learn.