[extropy-chat] Harvard president criticized over comments

[Kevin Freels]

I just read a new story Sunday from my local paper that contradicts these
ideas. It stated that girls were kicking the arses of boys in all areas of
acedemics right now including math and science. It also stated that a higher
percentage of girls are getting high school diplomas and college degrees.
Here is the text of the article. I usually wouldn;t post the entire text of
an article, but I can't find the link. I saved a copy of the article because
I thought it was interesting. Here it is:
____________________________________________________________

Girls are making the grades
Educators looking at why girls outperform boys in school

By STACI HUPP The Indianapolis Star
January 16, 2005

INDIANAPOLIS - What once was a playground taunt has turned out to be true:
Girls are better than boys.

Girls have eclipsed boys on state and national tests. They are more likely
to stay in school and to graduate, and they demand less special attention
than boys, data show. That marks a dramatic turn from the time when schools
were urged to nurture girls' brains instead of their baking skills. School
officials and experts now fear the effort to pull girls up to an equal
footing had an unintended consequence.

"Boys are lagging, and in my view we are seeing the tip of a very serious
national problem," said Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor at the
University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

A U.S. Department of Education study noted the academic edge that boys once
held has vanished. For the past two years in Indiana, girls in third, sixth
and eighth grades have edged out boys on statewide exams in every category
except third-grade math. In that subject, girls and boys have been in a dead
heat.

Nationally, girls already have eclipsed boys in reading and English, but
their lead appears to be growing.

They also have caught up to boys in math and science classes and are more
likely to earn a college diploma within six years, the federal Education
Department's study found.

The big question with the performance gap is why.

Early studies showed that girls mature faster than boys, develop verbal
skills earlier and are conditioned to behave better than boys.

Today, some researchers link a gender gap in the classroom to a lack of male
role models. The number of men who pick teaching careers is at a 40-year low
nationally at a time when more children grow up without fathers. And some
scientists believe decades of feminist-driven attention on girls has paid
off.

Colleges offer girls-only scholarships and summer programs for high school
students, and after-school programs nurture younger girls like Blaze Stahl,
of Indianapolis.

Blaze, 9, foundered when she started school. She ignored assignments and
goofed off, in part because she found the schoolwork too easy. Blaze's
mother signed her up for Girls Inc., a nonprofit after-school and summer
program. Now, the Indianapolis Public School 56 third-grader has skipped
ahead to fourth- and fifth-grade classes.

"I feel more comfortable being myself at Girls Inc. because there are so
many bullies at school," Blaze said. "I'm not afraid to act crazy at Girls
Inc."

Ben Ledbetter, principal at Greater Clark County's New Washington
Middle-High School, grew up in an era when boys and girls studied biology in
separate classrooms.

Now, he has taken a page from his past to improve the odds for boys by
separating them from girls in key classes. The split includes reading and
math classes, which are at the heart of state achievement tests.

"We had some concern that girls were completing assignments much more
rapidly and much more thoroughly" than boys, Ledbetter said.

The school district's third-grade girls topped the boys by 5 percentage
points on this year's Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational
Progress-Plus.

In sixth grade, the girls' lead grew to 14 percentage points, a disparity
that carried over into the eighth-grade level. In math, girls edged out boys
by 2 percentage points in each grade.

"It seems that our girls are really blossoming and most of the boys are,
too, but that still seems to be an area where we have the most struggles,"
said Tonja Brading, an English teacher at New Washington. "It was like, 'Why
do we have this little core group of boys who are underachieving?"'

In the fall, girls and boys in Grades 6, 7 and 8 were separated in key
classes such as English, math and science. The children mixed during lunch,
study halls and afternoon classes.

The teachers don't need data to tell them the single-sex classes have made a
difference.

Boys who traditionally would have turned away from literary heroines in
Brading's class now are more likely to read novels like "Rules of the Road,"
whose author and main character are female.

"The boys will talk about a line in a poem that they wouldn't necessarily
have talked about had girls been in the room," Brading said. "We really
think this is working."


________________________________________________________________________