BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
For six years, the American Association of University Women has been opening classroom doors and providing revealing research on the educational life of American girls.
Such studies as Shortchanging Girls and Hostile Hallways have painted a clear picture of gender discrepancies that lead girls to attempt less, achieve less and aspire to less than boys.
This week, with the release of its newest report, Gender Gaps, AAUW revisits classroom gender issues to measure progress. We learn, for example, that girls are taking more math and science than they did six years ago, but still lag on standardized tests. They're more likely to enroll in advanced placement classes than are boys, but far less likely to take high-skills technology training.
But we also learn that, throughout school, boys consistently earn lower classroom grades than girls, are less likely to be chosen for gifted programs, and are more likely to fail a grade or drop out. This is troubling stuff, and new information to some of us. It begs the question, what are we doing to help boys?
Boys have their problems
Males have traditionally enjoyed wider educational and career opportunities than females, and greater rewards. Still, growing up male has its own set of difficulties. Ask anyone raising a son. In their own way, boys have been greatly constrained by gender biases. If girls have traditionally suffered from hearing what they couldn't be, boys suffered over what they had to be.
Strong. Big. Self-possessed. Self-sufficient. Physical. Unemotional. Successful. Athletic. In control.
Schools, like the rest of society, have done little to challenge that thinking. The boy who moves through the system most easily is generally the boy who fits that profile best. The boy who doesn't fit -- who is, for example, smaller, quieter, less athletic, gentler, given to non-traditional pursuits -- may find considerable misery in the classroom.
Research has shown that females continue to be tracked into certain classes, especially the humanities, and discouraged from others. But there is also a "boy track." If boys are encouraged into math and science, they are clearly less welcome in drama, music, dance, social sciences, foreign language, and language arts in general.
All too many families have found this to be true: Boys who find their niche in the arts often find little support -- and sometimes significant harassment -- along the way.
Gender Gaps finds that role bias continues into career choices. Boys and girls still tend to enter careers along traditional gender lines. Girls head for social sciences, health services and education. Boys enter engineering and business. The "male" professions may offer fatter paychecks and higher advancement, but who's to say who is more unhappy -- the girl denied a career in computer science, or the boy denied one in social work?
Both groups suffer
Perhaps most damaging, however, are the gender behavior patterns that continue to be tolerated, and even encouraged, in the classroom. Much attention has been paid to the ways boys seem to benefit from being given harder questions to answer, for example, or getting more attention from teachers. But those "advantages" are based on the assumption that, without extra attention and outside intervention, boys will cause problems, and when they do, they will cause bigger problems than do girls.
But school is a place to develop self-control, and self-direction. Whatever it is that boys "need" must be developed within themselves. A school that teaches girls to be quiet, perfectly behaved and invisible and boys to be loud, raucous and domineering serves neither group well.
Gender Gaps makes these points perfectly clear. In the end we realize that an educational system that shortchanges girls, shortchanges boys as well.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202.
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