It just kills me that a system that didn't allow girls for hundreds of years is now accused of being discriminatory because girls are doing well.

Also, re: decorating: I seem to remember that all of the kids who spent all of their time in class drawing were BOYS. No frilly pink paper required.

The community service gripe is especially revolting as is complaining about being in classes with a "sea of girls." Because, since it's high school, I really doubt that it could be *that* gender-segregated. And it's funny that the "system is designed to the disadvantage of males," for whom the system was designed and under which they thrived for hundreds of years. I seem to have missed the drastic restructuring of schools where they began unfairly making kids sit and listen to teachers and follow instructions.

But regarding the decorating a notebook -- why is that being graded anyway? Seems really ridiculous to give points for how attractive your notebook is rather than the content of what is inside it. I could see where that really could favor girls, though, who, in my experience, typically stylize and personalize their notebooks etc. with pretty handwriting and pictures.

So...men are naturally uncivilized brutes that lack the capability to sit down and shut up? Maybe we should make men exempt from following laws, since their natural tendency act like assholes renders them incapable of following laws.

this is when it becomes obvious that many perhaps most feminists are in fact anti-male. if they really believed in equality they would take the plight of today's male youth seriously. instead, they think it is a big joke. because, basically they are happy to see boys doing poorly.

"Grading on homework, which sometimes includes points for decorating a notebook, also favor girls"

I decorate all my notebooks, granted I use skulls, stickers from my favorite punk bands, and slogans that imply the most twisted diviant imagry I can think of. He dosn't have to use pink frilly paper if he dosn't want to.

1. This kid loses a lot of credibility with the claim that the expectation to sit down, listen to the teacher, and follow the rules is sexist. However, if boys are being restricted in ways girls are not (the hall pass example), I could see the need to at least investigate further.

2. The grading of notebook decoration is absolutely ridiculous and has no place at a high-school level, although it is a stretch to call it sexist.

3. The really interesting complaint here is art and drama meriting school credits while sports do not. Personally, with the extreme shortage of funds in public schools, I can’t see any reason why art and drama should remain a part of high-school curriculums. If schools do, however, include art and drama courses, why should they be credited when sports is not? Again, it assumes a lot to say that this is sexist, but it is an interesting question at least.

You do get credit for sports classes, like PE, just like you get credit for going to your art or drama class. You don't get credit for playing in a basketaball game, but you don't get credit for performing in the band concert, either. This guy is just asking for credit for the particular extra-curricular activities his kid enjoys. Whatever. When I first heard about this suit, I thought it sounded interesting, but it's just too ridiculous for words. If there was evidence, say, that curricula were being planned to the specific disadvantage of boys, then it might be interesting. School is about learning, but God knows it's also about doing crap so you'll get good grades. I was the typical dork who did terribly in PE, but it's not like I was going to sue the school for requiring me to do something I don't do well. If girls are going to be expected to buck up and play dodgeball, boys can handle decorating a notebook or two.

Community service is ".... another burden that will just set off resistance from boys," so it should be abandoned?

Because God forbid boys should have to think about anyone but themselves.

I think the notebook-decorating claim (which has gotten a lot of attention) is a reach. It looks to me like packing the pleading, but I will bet even odds that on investigation this claim will be immediately falsified. As will most or all of the crybaby claims in this frivolous lawsuit.

Yellow#5 - I was not very clear in my post. I was assuming that part of course credit involved grades (i.e. an art class effects one's GPA while PE does not). Please correct me if I mis-understood the article.

Maybe it varies from state to state or district to district, but my PE grades went into my GPA along with the rest of my grades.

The scary thing is that there really was an evil feminist plan:

AAUWgirlseducation

The idea that girls were being shortchanged was pretty much school gospel until people finally woke up and figured out they had it backwards.

It really is sad that a generation of boys school performance could have been undermined by well heeled lobyists. Mind you I'm not saying they set out to undermine boys. But when you target one gender for help the result is the same.

The original Globe article is particularly telling because it includes almost no quotes from those who disagree with the student, but quotes his supporters at length.

I think the notebook decorating is getting waayy too much attention. It's one teacher, and I seriously doubt s/he is requiring that the boys use glitter and feathers.

The boy's father, a lawyer, wants male students' grades to be padded "retroactively" for this supposed discrimination. His son has a 2.88 GPA. Sounds like an opportunist to me.

this is when it becomes obvious that many perhaps most feminists are in fact anti-male.

JesusJonesSupestar gets this exactly right. I haven't read one feminist commentary on this topic which takes the issue seriously. It's quite possible on the one hand to mock this particular story but point to the national statistics and express alarm and call for measures to address the imbalance. Please point me to one feminist blogger or journal article that gives this serious treatment.

Here's something to chew on - girls are outperforming boys in HS as measured by GPA. Colleges are now finding that while the SAT scores are stable in predicting success in the college enviroment, that the HS GPA has in the last 4 years dropped from .17 to .12 in the amount of variance explained. Something is going on with how HS grades are being awarded - how else to explain the lower correlations.

What has changed are grading practices. Partial credit for showing work on math exams, even with the wrong answer, rewards student characteristics other than content knowledge. This rewarding of attention to detail is disproportionately helping girls.

The cross disciplinary efforts to increase literacy leads to policies like rewarding/penalizing spelling on MATH tests.

Cooperative study and group grading for projects is another front in the reorientation of school procedures. Sociologists and pyschologists are well versed in male peer group behavior and how boys strive for status by competing with each other for some distinction or another, no matter how slight. This is why you see boys taking such pride in achieving the stupidest milestones - because they can slot themselves into a position of dominance in the grand structure of peer relationships. There is an accelerating trend in schools to deemphasize competition, to the extent that we're seeing honor roll, valedictorian, and other such competitive activities completely eliminated. Not every school certainly, but look at the national trends.

For those who are interested they may want to read this teacher's essay.

The more feminist writings I read on this issue the stronger the case becomes that there is anti-male bias, and that there is no concern for the boys who are innocent victims in all of this.

traq, isn't your argument dependent on the (unproven) idea that any benefit for girls is going to hurt boys? Boys and girls may exhibit differences (for whatever reason), but it's not like they're complete opposites.

Nice post TangoMan. The essay you link to is especially interesting. Hopefully others will check it out as it raises many legitimate concerns while managing to avoid sexist dogma (feminine and masculine).

In truth, school is not very child friendly. This starts in Kindergarten and just continues. It is particularly hard on some boys, but not all girls take it very well either. While they are trying to discover their world, they are told to sit down and shut up.

Good teachers work to find the best ways to help students to be successful, and more hands on is part of this for all students $$$$. If the test scores are staying the same, the learning is happening, which is more important than the grades. What we're talking about then is scholarship money and being admitted to a "good" school.

It is still the case that most teachers are female, even in High School. This isn't the schools fault, and it doesn't necessarily mean that women can't educate boys, but it might not hurt to give more insight and provide role models.

I am one feminist who takes this issue seriously, but I don't think any of these particular complaints sounds anything but silly. The call to "decorate" work is probably just a grade for workmanship. This just means it should be legible. How unreasonable - in college you'll be expected to type everything(or you can pay some female, who is "naturally" better at that sort of thing).

Here are a few trends that I believe are harming young men and boys:

1. Group work, group think, group graded projects. THe most innovative students often dislike competing with loudmouths and fade into the background.

2. Grading notebooks and the like heavily, ie focusing on process instead of results (test).

3. Focus on following rules rather than demonstrating objective knowledge and logical ability.

4. Cutting back on recess, longer class times, etc.

5. Projects that require obedience rather than logic, bureaucratization skills rather than individual thought.

6. efforts to Redesign the standardized tests to favor skills women are better at.

7. the curriculum, by being dumbed down and geared toward the middle ground, has hurt males, as men tend to be more extreme: more of us are at the lower end, but more of us are also at the top end.

8. Taking away the competitive spirit of the classroom. Most men, particularly high achieving men, are geared up to battle and that is what gets one motivated. by eliminating competition and replacing it with namby pamby feel good "everyone is a winner" ethic, men lose interest and motivation. Strong intelligent men are typically disgusted by egalitarianism and lose interest.

9.Boys being subjected to out an out and out anti-male agenda where men are taught to feel guilty in 6th grade that there are fewer women lawyers and doctors in the phone book. As if a 12 year old has anything at all to do with that?

10. Reshaping of history lessons so objective achievement is not the measure of how someone is covered, rather their race or sex most important. (cover some minor female inventor to greater debth than Thomas edison.)

11.Teaching that men throughout history have been the evil sex.

12. Most males realize at a young age that most of their teachers are raving morons, with the lowest sat scores of any profession. Men prefer to learn from people they can look up to, rather than dults who know only how to follow orders form a top heavy educational bureaucracy.

Men are losing interest in education because every area where men prove themselves and attain value has begun to be removed from the school system. Many Men, realizing that this feminized environment fits them about as well as a “snug fit” condom on john holmes, are looking for other areas where masculine values are still prevalent.

Just a few thoughts.

JJS, do you think women look up to morons? Or that men were the only ones who contributed to history? Or that men are the only ones who like competition or are innovative? Or that kids shouldn't learn about the realities of discrimination? Your list makes it sound like the curriculum has been reshaped to the benefit of monkeys or very bright parrots, not women.

Jane,

It is still the case that most teachers are female, even in High School.

Some people point to this as a problem, but I don't think it has to be, not at all. That said though, it might actually be a contributory factor. Let me explain what I mean. If the teacher's primary objective is to engage the students in a learning process and the teacher hews this line, then teacher gender has little bearing.

However, if the female teacher has bought into Carol Gilligan's type of research and is striving to give her female students voice, and places that concern over and above the act of teaching, then unintended consequences follow. We see this very dynamic play out in Gilligan-type programs to change the nature of boys, who are trapped in masculine defined role models that kill the inner beauty of the child, or what not. If the starting presumption is that gender roles are entirely learned, then what follows is that these gender roles can be redefined by changing the process of learning and the content that is taught. The primacy of tweaking gender roles is placed above the task of teaching as effectively as possible. All one need do is look at how boys and girls respond to different types of literature. For literature that predominantly appeals to girls, most boys are not interested. For literature that primarily appeals to boys, most girls aren't as interested as the boys but their interest level is still high enough. So, short of splitting classes on gender and tailoring instruction accordingly, what is done? Clearly, if the objective is to teach the students in the most effective manner, the books that are selected should appeal to the greatest number of students, even though that may mean working against the feminist agenda of redefining gender roles. In far too many cases, the primacy of gender redefinition comes first and the books selected, which certainly appeal to the sensibilities of the teacher, or feminist aware committee, disproportionately turn off young boy readers who just aren't as engaged by the subject material. Allow this effect to grow over the years and we see why the gender gap in reading skills is growing. It's not because the girls are scaling to unforseen heights because the boot of the patriarchy has been lifted from their backs, it's because boy's skills are inadvertently being depressed. And when I read that feminist education scholars say that the problem isn't the curriculm but that boys need to be more like girls in their reading tastes, well that just gets my teeth agrinding.

The environment we see in schools today, is characterized by noticeable changes from the environments many of us experienced, as short as a decade ago. People need to actually look at changing policies and their effects if they want to get a better handle on what's transpiring.

Lastly, I'm in no way implying that the active suppression of boy's performance is some sinister feminist agenda. What I am saying is that what we're seeing today has many causes, role models included, but those found within the school environment are actually unintended consequences of well meaning reforms.

Reshaping of history lessons

Here's a real world example from a high school history class. My niece actually spent two periods studying the role of women during WWII as the men were overseas. The lesson covered the changing fashions of the time as they related to women's new roles in society and the turmoil that followed when the war ended. This compared to one period studying the major engagements in the Pacific Theatre. (They had spent other class periods on the lead up to the war, and then more class periods on the impact of the atomic bombing.) She did mention how the boys were generally more engaged with the minutia of the sweep of the unfolding military action, for instance why certain military decisions favored one line of advance rather than others but were pretty disengaged, or in her words, comatose, during the sessions on women's changing roles.

Her judgement was that the military campaign had more historical significance and should have been treated with indepth, rather than cursory, teaching than the conflicts surrounding women's roles in that era. She felt the relative emphasis between the two topics was misplaced, and that she wanted to know more about the "doings" of the actual war and the political ramifications than they had time for.

Make of that what you will.

Well, yellow. I think teachers and schools only have so much attention and resources. If you start splitting things along gender lines it is quite easy to favor one group at the other's expense.

Education is complicated. Theoretically boys and girls could all get perfect scores. But the problem is that they do seem to learn differently, so it is possible to talk about "girl friendly" and "boy friendly" environments.

I would have never considerred this before, but I would now have to at least think about putting my kids (theoretical as yet) in gender seperate schools. At the very least, I hope I have enough money to put them in private school. Aside from the differing learning styles, I just don't think I can handle the PC curriculum at public schools (like TangoMan's WWII example).

I don't think most feminists are anti-male. I think there are a lot who are; but in terms of percentage, I don't think it is an extraordinarily large number. I think most just want to be treated as equals to the guys.

I agree with Jane that the issue is one to look at seriously, but a lot of those complaints seem silly. I mean, boys do poorly in school because they can't sit, listen and behave? So boys would learn more if we let them be disruptive and do what they want?

A lot the the issues JJS brings up are valid, but not necessarily from a gender point of view. Dumbing down school is not a good thing. Teaching kids that they always win and there is no losing doesn't prepare them for life.

I believe that JJS is wrong in his assertion that we shouldn't bring up how men have oppressed women throughout history. While it is true that a 12 year old had nothing to do with that, ignoring the fact and teaching them the white, male version of the world does nothing to change that for the future. While I think you can go too far in the any direction, I always think it is funny (in a sad way) when conservatives complain about
feminist teachings in class today and the need for balance and an opposing point of view. The dominant white, male (of which I am one) view is the only version of things we have previously taught.

Could it also be that one average, girls are more mature in high school and that is why they perform better than the girls? I will say as someone who hires high school and college kids, 75% to 80% of the staff I promote are female because on average, they are more mature and responsible.

Could we have more female teachers because teaching isn't typically considered a prestigious profession, but something a woman should do?

Just a few thoughts.

JJC had it right on with the exception of the last. I do not think most teachers are morons.

However, boys need role models to look up to, and they need to be mostly male. Why? Because boys are male. Between few male teachers and few in home fathers due to various reasons (many of them NOT disinterest on the fathers part)how are boys supposed to learn to grow up to be men?

I have two sons, and all that JCC writes can be applied, as I said with the exception of the last. I have had morons in the school to deal woth, and they have been all women, but that is because over 80% of all staff is women. Most of the teachers have been well meaning.

"Noooo! They’re everywhere! (As Katha Pollitt said recently, maybe these boys “will just have to learn to learn in a room full of smart females.” The horror.)"

It is funny because women have been complaining for years that this exact reason is what keeps them out of engineering, firefighting, police work, etc. The felt out of place i a sea of men. So we have enacted affirmative action to ensure that those adult women don't have to feel uncomfortable. But when 14 year old boys are having problems, it is their own fault for being intimidated. Isn't that a little hypocritical? And that sea of girls can be just as abusive as the guys.

School have been redesigned with girls in mind, they have been designed to give girls the most safety, comfort, advantages in education. While these were valid concerns at one point, they were done at the expense of boys. We need to move into the middle so that both sexes can get a good education. If that means splitting the sexes for most classes, maybe we need to think about this. If that means incentives for male tachers,and different tests for Regents and SATs then maybe we need to think about this as well. But any system which medicates one sex over the other at such alarming rates is putting their head int he sand if they think it has nothing to do with environment.

I think a reason a lot of feminists don't take the issue of anti-male bias in school seriously is because:
1. At least on the college level, it is always framed in the tired "Who are all these educated women going to marry?" Which is forcing the discussion back into old, biased gender roles.

2. There are more female teachers in classrooms, yes. But administration in schools are more likely to be male.

And I don't know what schools you people went to. But when I was in high school teachers would give star atheletes good grades to "keep them in the game".

I've been reading a lot about this issue lately, and it seems to me that two major things are missing from the discussion:

1) Math scores. Why is this left out of any achievement-gap discussion? My suspicion is that it's because boys still outscore girls in math, and that doesn't fit the storyline that's being presented. I've heard the argument many times over the years that boys do better than girls in math because of innate ability. It's interesting that the innate ability argument doesn't come up when we talk about reading scores. For the record, I don't believe that either group is inherently better at either subject. But if the teaching of math favors boys and the teaching of verbal skills favors girls, why can't we use the techniques that are working in each case to improve girls' performance in math and boys' performance in verbal skills?

2) Class sizes. When I was in high school there were up to 45 people in some of my classes. Tighter discipline was a must for purely logistical reasons: If you have a group of 45 young people, the back row won't be able to hear the teacher if anyone is horsing around. It had nothing to do with gender or ideology. Rather than punishing teachers for a circumstance beyond their control why can't we decide to help them by reducing their class sizes?

"Who are all these educated women going to marry?" Which is forcing the discussion back into old, biased gender roles.

I can see why this is a tiresome question for feminists, but we need to realize that not every female student in college is a feminist, and for most people in their 20s and 30s, marriage is not some quaint notion based on biased gender roles but something that people aspire to - IOW, they're not so much interested in overthrowing the institution or remaking it into something that aligns with feminist philosophy. So yeah, I honestly do see why feminists mock this very question, but they need to realize that it's not just the religious and conservative people who think about it and that it does matter to people who don't share the feminist outlook on marriage.

So what is it that gets people worried about the future? Mate selection and child care are my guesses. Today, women have complete freedom to marry men of their choice and with this freedom we don't see a lot of women aspiring to find men of lesser accomplishment and education to be their life's companion. For some reason educated women are pretty set on sharing their lives with men who can hold up their end of a conversation, and for some reason they tend to believe that there is a correlation between education and the qualities they seek. Imagine that. We've seen many studies come out since the publication of The Bell Curve which support its main thesis that there is assortive mating going on. We don't see too many cases of a male doctor marrying a waitress or a female judge marrying a fireman. When you have 1.5+ women for 1 man in college today, you're setting the foundation to break apart assortive mating yet we don't see the willingness to break that phenomonon today.

Secondly, if the correlation between education and income holds into the future, the wife will face a dilemma when children come into the picture. If she is earning the higher income then a stay at home decision becomes very expensive because the family's largest income will be eliminated. If the husband stays home many women aren't so keen on that role reversal. Keep in mind that I'm not including feminists in that statement for I'm aware that they applaud the elimination of fixed gender roles as though they are not tied to biology in any fashion.

So, I suppose I understand why feminists mock the question the way that they do, but for many women, and men for that matter, the question does have importance to their lives and futures and they're looking forward to the future, projecting present day trends and not liking what they're seeing is in store for their children.

It is funny because women have been complaining for years that this exact reason is what keeps them out of engineering, firefighting, police work, etc. The felt out of place i a sea of men. So we have enacted affirmative action to ensure that those adult women don't have to feel uncomfortable. But when 14 year old boys are having problems, it is their own fault for being intimidated. Isn't that a little hypocritical? And that sea of girls can be just as abusive as the guys.

I don't know the exact numbers, but I would guess that there is a more balanced number of boys and girls in high school than their are in fields such as engineering or firefighting. So the scale of the intimidation is vastly different than one woman might feeling being the single woman in an all-male office or workplace than a 14 year old boy would feel in his high school classroom.

cont'd: I guess I don't see high school as a "sea of girls", and don't think comparing high school to areas which are actually dominated by men is a fair comparison. If girls are achieving more in high school - good for them. However, I don't think that girls are outnumbering boys in high school in the same way men really do outnumber women in fields such as engineering.