What colleges are doing falls short of discriminating against women, argues Mona Charen. Hmmm…try telling that to female high school senior denied her favored college while the slacker boy down the street gets in. Overall it’s a good column, except for her questionable reporting on test scores. Boys outscoring girls in verbal abilities? She must be referring to some college admissions tests, where far more poor and minority girls than boys take the test, skewing the gender results. Flawed reporting.

Colleges with male-dominant faculties and female-dominant undergraduate populations are living on borrowed time. Here’s a way to turn that around quickly: appoint female leadership, as reported in Inside Higher Ed.

Got to love this…my book on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Very enterprising of her to score an early copy…hmmm, wonder if I can get Arne Duncan to do the same….and oh yes, please tilt the title more toward the camera…

story below:

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State board approves LR boys charter school

CYNTHIA HOWELL ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

The Arkansas Board of Education on Monday approved a charter school for boys to open next year.
But — in response to Little Rock School District concerns — most students at the school will have to be either low achieving or from low-income families.
That condition came after lawyers for the state Department of Education and the school district disagreed about its legality.
The Little Rock Urban Collegiate Public Charter School for Young Men, designed to serve up to 696 boys in kindergarten through eighth grades is the only new openenrollment charter school to receive state approval for opening in 2010-11.
It will bring to 19 the number of open-enrollment charter schools in the state and it will be the 12th independently run public charter school in Pulaski County.

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How to foster the kind of quality education journalism we saw in the Washington Post yesterday? In a time when traditional journalism is crumbling, that won’t be easy. And yet some interesting alternatives are emerging, I argue in this Chronicle of Higher Education commentary co-written with Richard Colvin from the Hechinger Institute. 

The day after Daniel de Vise turned in a great analysis on colleges granting admissions gender preferences, columnist Petula Dvorak writes a good column about the struggles she faces with her own sons trying to adjust to school.

Washington Post education writer Daniel de Vise does a great job detailing the admissions bias against women. There’s so much to this story that de Vise doesn’t have space to explore. While researching my book I visited American University (60% female) and talked to both university officials and students. AU was facing the typical housing dilemma: students want co-ed housing, but how does that happen with lopsided gender numbers? Either some women get frozen out or the dorms are unevenly stacked, which leads to overcrowded bathrooms for females.

And my online conversations with male students revealed the dating dilemma that surfaces in any 60/40 college — guys who could barely get a date in high school suddenly imagine themselves as players, which makes life miserable for the women.

Best of all is their graphic, showing the admissions rates at nearby colleges and universities. Most interesting, of course, is William & Mary, a public college that in the past has conceded they grant admissions preferences to men. How do they get away with it? In Virginia, the elite W&M can get away with things that James Madison University would never dare try — the state legislators would jump all over them if local female applicants were discriminated against. W&M, on the other hand, benefits from a national reputation prized by the legislators.

(photo courtesy of the Washington Post)

Writing in the Washington Post, professor Dorothy Sue Cobble lays out a new agenda for the new economic realities, where women are becoming the majority in the workforce and more women emerge as chief breadwinners for their families. (One thought: I lack credentials as an economist, but suggesting that the nation’s system of supply and demand somehow be altered to push up salaries in fields dominiated by women seems naive.)

Cobble has a full plate of ideas, but there’s more to be said on this, especially on male/female relationships. Women are likely to be greatly affected by the marriageable mate issue. Like it not, that has to be part of the “New Deal” feminism.

As an editorial writer, I’ve played it myself, many times, and rightly so. When the highly respected federal NAEP scores come out you compare passage rates on those tests to the state tests. Inevitably, state tests show far more student progress than what is revealed on the NAEP. And the biggest gaps are found in states such as Mississippi that embraced the lowest standards. Gotcha!

Below, Diane Ravitch plays out the same scenario in New York with the math tests. Fair enough.

But does that mean critics are right to say that state tests are always inferior? I argue that when it comes to gender imbalances — and racial imbalances — the state tests are better.

The weakness of state tests is that they are generally less rigorous than the federal test and they change over time, making trend comparisons tricky. Don’t even try. The strength of state tests, however, is they are given every year to every student in several grades — unlike NAEP, which is a survey of students given only sporadically. I look to state tests to give me a one-year snapshot of gender gaps, a snapshot that’s more accurate and more current than what NAEP provides.

So what do state tests tell us that NAEP doesn’t? I make no claim of having done a thorough study, but every time I see state test results they generally show that girls are passing boys in math skills and broadening their lead in verbal skills. By contrast, NAEP shows boys have small advantages in math skills and considerable, but generally stable, disadvantages in verbal skills. Who’s right? On this one issue, I argue that state tests are giving us the most accurate snapshot.

The Ravitch column in the New York Post:

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…on where we stand on high school skills.  She doesn’t break it out by gender here, but Sandra would the first to point to severe literacy skills deficits among males.

Thomas the Tank gets his comeuppance.