Okay, I apologize for the shameless self promotion, but these days when you get published by a small house you pretty much have to act as your own publicist. I just learned yesterday that Amazon has started shipping my book, Why Boys Fail, which AT NO EXTRA COST includes a meaty foreword by DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. And it will arrive before Christmas.
DeNeen Brown writes in the Washington Post today about the marriageable mate dilemma that has faced black women for years. This peg: Helena Andrews’ new book, “Bitch is the New Black.”
What few realize is that the dilemma has already struck well-educated white women who are discovering a shortage of similarly educated white men. Considering the campus gender imbalances, how could this not be happening? Numbers are hard to come by, but the most obvious hard evidence is the soaring rate of college educated white women going to sperm banks to launch their families.
That’s the answer offered up in this commentary in the Chronicle by Florida State professor Michael Ruse about why vet schools are now dominated by women.
So how does the writer explain the fact that the boys’ collapse is a relatively recent phenomenon? Well, he doesn’t try, but his logic would be clear: 25 years ago guys weren’t thinking about sex. Wait, I’m in that group…
Oh, and one more bit of flawed reporting. He claims women are flocking to vet schools because farmers no longer need large animal vets — they just ship them off to the slaughter house when they get sick. Actually, that’s not what I hear. Farmers ship sick cattle to the slaughter house because they can’t find a large animal vet. Turns out all the new female vets want to treat cats in the burbs.
Other than that, it was a splendid commentary.
I saw this flashing across the screen while waiting for a plane yesterday at National Airport.
In co-ed classes boys waste time trying to impress girls and girls waste time trying not to look too smart, we’re told.
…which is why Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top initiative matters so much. My commentary running today in Education Week (which I believe I’m allowed to reproduce below):
The Hole in ‘Race to the Top’
By Richard Whitmire
It seems almost peevish to criticize U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s game-changing Race to the Top plan that dangles $4 billion in new competitive-grant funding before states willing to reform their schools. But in truth, the plan has a hole that eventually will surface. Might as well be peevish now.
First, it should be conceded that Duncan has a great idea, rewarding states willing to undertake reforms such as launching high-quality charter schools (while closing bad ones) and using data to evaluate teacher effectiveness. The excitement over the plan is palpable, with states reversing laws that blocked those reforms. How often does that happen?
Education-minded philanthropies such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which rightly see Race to the Top as the best opportunity yet to reverse America’s declining education fortunes, are siding with the Duncan plan, ratcheting up the excitement to a frenzy level.
At this Chicago High School, single-sex home rooms are tried out as an antidote to boys’ fading academic performances.
School again tests its gender theory
Single-sex homerooms aim to conquer fears, inhibitions
By Tara Malone
Tribune reporter
December 8, 2009
A pack of teenagers jostled into the Niles West High School conference room that, for 10 minutes a day, doubles as a homeroom to more than two dozen boys. Freshmen and sophomores at the Skokie school are divided into single-sex rooms for homeroom, an experiment now in its second year.
Toting backpacks and bundles of adolescent vigor, the freshmen settled down for announcements about the holiday canned food drive and spirit week. They applauded a classmate who, it was announced, would swim with the varsity squad at the next meet.
A well-written article out of Canada’s Globe & Mail posits the issue as international, which it is, and also identifies the key impact: personal relationships between men and women, the marriageable mate dilemma. I can’t recall a single piece of reporting in the U.S. about campus gender gaps that brings it all together.
Thanks to Inside Higher Education for spotting this one:
Who’s in the know: Women surge, men sink in education’s gender gap
Female students are dominating campuses, a shift that will change ‘who does what.’ But leaving men behind has its costs
ELIZABETH CHURCH
From Monday’s Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Dec. 07, 2009 12:00AM EST Last updated on Monday, Dec. 07, 2009 10:06AM EST
EDUCATION REPORTER
In a red-brick building at the University of Guelph, where veterinarians have been schooled for the better part of a century, a demographic shift is taking place that offers a window into the future of human behaviour.
In the past decade, Ontario Veterinary College has seen its student numbers turned on their head: Women account for more than 80 per cent of its students during that time, and now make up more than half of the province’s practising vets.
It’s an extreme example of a story that is playing out on campuses in Canada and around the world - and a trend that could have profound social implications. There are now three female undergraduates for every two male students on Canadian campuses, and more women than men graduated with higher education degrees in 75 of 98 countries examined in a recent UNESCO study.
Crusty Old Academic was nice enough to send me this link to Gender Inequalities in Education, a piece referred to in today’s Chronicle commentary.
This commentary by University of Wisconsin professor Sara Goldrick-Rab properly moves the blame for the imbalances to the K-12 years but then falls short. What’s not happening in those years?
Sara: Buy my book! I’m a veteran K-12 reporter and I have a few ideas about that. Why Boys Fail, with a great foreword by Washington DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, is available for purchase with an official release date of Jan. 13.
(Oh, and by the way, it’s a little insulting when you lovingly document every publication by your fellow academics and yet refer to my commentary as “laments the Wall Street Journal,” as though that were a WSJ editorial. That’s factually inaccurate.)
I can’t pass along the entire piece — the Chronicle is password protested.
The So-Called Boy Mystery
By Sara Goldrick-Rab
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently announced that it would investigate whether some colleges are discriminating against women in an effort to generate a more gender-diverse student population. Reaction was mixed, with some saying it’s about time that the “crisis with boys” in higher education is acknowledged and addressed, and others expressing some disbelief and ridicule that the gender wars have come to this.
But part of the overall response really stuck in my craw — the oft-repeated claim that we “just don’t know” what’s going on with boys. According to many, sources for the gender differential in
