The War Against Boys (26 page)

In April 2012, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent out a “Blueprint” for reforming the Perkins Act when it is reauthorized in 2013. “This is not a time to tinker with [Career and Technical Education],” said the secretary, “it is time to transform it.”
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One proposed transformation is equity for women and girls. “This commitment,” explains the Duncan Blueprint, “stems from the fact that the everyday educational experience of women . . . violate[s] the belief in equity at the heart of the American
promise.”
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To fulfill the commitment, the Perkins Act will “ensure equity in access, participation and
outcomes
” by providing “wrap around supports” (my emphasis).
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Such vagueness will be more than enough for the girl-power lobby to set up shop at the heart of Perkins Act grant making and enforcement.

The National Women's Law Center is already prepared to wrap around. It has developed state-by state litigation guides—
Tools of the Trade: Using the Law to Address Sex Segregation in High School Career and Technical Education.
The toolkit informs readers that the “data show a stark pattern of under-representation of girls in non-traditional CTE course in every region of the country.”
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To wit:

• In Massachusetts, “120 girls are enrolled in electrician courses, compared to 1,717 boys”; and “1,605 girls are enrolled in cosmetology courses, compared to 36 boys.”
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• In Maryland, “189 girls are enrolled in automotive courses, compared to 2,425 boys.”
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Interested parties are advised: “Contact the National Women's Law Center if you want to take action to address the under-representation of female students in CTE in your school or state.”
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Note the use of
under-representation
as a synonym for
discrimination
. The new Perkins Act will further empower the women's lobby to threaten schools like Aviation and Blackstone Valley with lawsuits.

Why pursue this course? Instead of spending millions of dollars in a dubious effort to change aspiring cosmetologists into welders, education officials should concentrate on helping young people, male and female, enter careers that interest them. “What we do not need,” said Alison Fraser from Blackstone Valley Tech, “is having the state say, you have to force these round pegs into square holes.”
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The Perkins Act is not the only reason pressure is increasing on Alison Fraser and her colleagues to change their students' preferences. On the fortieth anniversary of the Title IX equity law in June 2012, the White House
announced that the Department of Education would be adopting a new and more rigorous application of Title IX to high school and college technology, engineering, and science programs. According to the White House press release, “The Department of Education will announce the revision of its Title IX Technical Assistance presentation, made available nationwide to state and local education agencies across the country, to include information on how institutions receiving federal financial assistance are also required to ensure equal access to educational programs and resources in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.” President Obama explained the rationale in a
Newsweek
op-ed:

Let's not forget, Title IX isn't just about sports. From addressing inequality in math and science education to preventing sexual assault on campus to fairly funding athletic programs, Title IX ensures equality for our young people in every aspect of their education. It's a springboard for success: it's thanks in part to legislation like Title IX that more women graduate from college prepared to work in a much broader range of fields, including engineering and technology. I've said that women will shape the destiny of this country, and I mean it.

It is admirable for President Obama to encourage young women to shape our country's destiny—but that is already happening. It is our underachieving young men that destiny is leaving behind, and they are being discouraged rather than encouraged by our political elites.

Introducing divisive gender politics into schools like Aviation High and Blackstone Valley Tech is the last thing we should be doing. While it is true that fewer young women than men enter fields like engineering, aviation, and automobile repair, young women are soaring in areas such as biology, psychology, and veterinary medicine.
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In 2010, women held 64 percent of seats in graduate programs in the social sciences, 75 percent in public administration, 78 percent in veterinary medicine, and 80 percent in health sciences.
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Will the federal government demand Title IX investigations in those female-dominated programs? Will our high schools and colleges be
taken to task for doing a far better job educating girls than boys? Not likely. There is no National Coalition for Boys in Education, no lobby promoting changes in the Perkins Act or Title IX to help them. And, unlike in England and Australia, no political leader has spoken out publicly on their behalf.

Between the Perkins Act reauthorization and the new application of Title IX to technology and engineering programs, schools will be forced to adopt gender quotas in those few programs that seem to be working for at-risk boys. Women's groups vehemently deny that quotas are in the offing. “Title IX does not require quotas,” says the NCWGE. “It simply requires that schools allocate participation opportunities nondiscriminatorily.”
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But over the years, this diffuse requirement has been interpreted by judges, Department of Education officials, college administrators, and women's groups to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” What does that mean? Consider what happened in sports.

If a college's student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportions of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of funding, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men's teams. Vocation and technical schools won't get rid of their “male teams” in welding, engineering, or automotive repair, but they are likely to cut them back and practice reverse discrimination in favor of girls. More resources will be deployed to change the preferences of young women to suit the ideology of groups like the AAUW and the National Women's Law Center. School leaders have no matching incentive to develop programs that could attract great numbers of disengaged young men. On the contrary, they are well advised to avoid them. Such programs will put them at risk of a federal investigation and loss of funds.

The Montreal professor, Sumitra Rajagopalan, is surely right. Boys, more than girls, are natural tinkerers, builders, and systematizers. There are a few colleges that have no trouble attracting males—schools whose names include “tech.” If you build them, males will come: Georgia Tech (69 percent male), Rochester Institute of Technology (67 percent); South Dakota School
of Mines and Technology (74 percent), and Embry Riddle Aeronautical (85 percent). The Department of Education and the president should be doing all they can to help young men become the builders, engineers, and techies so many of them want to be. Instead, they are creating powerful obstacles to thwart them.

Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State, is an advocate for those who, like herself, are afflicted with a type of autism known as Asperger's syndrome. She once told an interviewer:

Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn't the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn't even have a recording device to record this conversation on.
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But we know that autistic traits are far more common in males than females. Scientists such as Cambridge University's Simon Baron-Cohen believe autism offers insight into the typical male mind.
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It helps explain the universal male fixation on gadgets, technology, and engineering. Why war against this reality? Why try to change tinkerers into yakkity yaks, or vice versa? To thrive as a society, we need both. By neglecting the needs and interests of boys, we not only sacrifice their life prospects, but our society's technological future.

A 2010
New York Times
report carries more bad news for boys. A significant gender gap favoring girls has arisen inside New York City's gifted and talented programs. According to the article, “Around the city, the current crop of gifted kindergarteners . . . is 56 percent girls, and in the 2008–2009 year, 55 percent were girls.”
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In some of the most elite programs, almost three-fifths of the prodigies are girls. Could it be that girls are simply smarter than boys?

In fact, males and females appear to be equally intelligent on average. But on
standardized intelligence tests, more males than females get off-the-chart scores in
both
directions. The greater variance of males on intelligence tests is one of the best-established findings in psychometric literature. Males predominate among the mentally deficient and the abnormally brilliant. The difference in variation isn't huge, but it is large and consistent enough that a fair selection process for a gifted-and-talented program will generally produce more boys than girls.

To give just one example of the difference in IQ distribution, here is what a group of Scottish psychologists found in 2002 when they analyzed the results of IQ tests given to nearly all eleven-year-olds in Scotland in 1932.

Figure 12: IQ Scores in Scotland, 1932, Gender Percent by IQ Score

Sample size: 79,376 11-year-olds

Source: Scottish Mental Survey, 1932.

This study, one of the most comprehensive in the literature, shows that for the highest IQ score of 140, boys outnumbered girls 277 to 203 (or 57.7 percent boys versus 42.3 percent girls), and for the lowest IQ boys also outnumber girls, by 188 to 133 (or 58.6 percent boys versus 41.4 percent girls).
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Little appears to have changed in the cognitive profile of men and women since prewar Scotland. Those with IQs above 140 or below 70 are
still very much the exception. They can be male or female, but males have a statistically significant edge at both extremes. How did things get turned around with New York City's kindergarteners? Here is how the
Times
describes playtime for a group of five-year-old braniacs:

Four of the boys went to the corner to build an intricate highway structure and a factory from wooden blocks, while two others built trucks. One girl helped them, by creating signs on Post-its to stick on the buildings. Another kindergarten girl, Tamar Greenberg, stood to announce to the class her own activity, a Hebrew lesson. “We're moving to the green table because it's too distracting with the computers” in the back, she told the other children. On a roster, she neatly recorded the names of the three children who joined her for the lesson: Skyler, Isabelle and Bayla. “No boys were interested,” Tamar said.
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Highly gifted boys and girls are just like other children in one respect: in both groups, the girls are more mature, more verbal, and more capable of sitting still. Until a few years ago, admissions directors for New York City's gifted programs took account of these differences and through a series of tests, interviews, and observations managed to recruit roughly equal numbers of budding engineers and linguists.

But the old practice of taking equal numbers of boys and girls was phased out a few years ago when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administration sought to make the application process more fair, open, and uniform. Reforms were needed because, for many years, admission procedures were haphazard and varied from school to school. Parents who knew how to work the system had a huge advantage. Many average children with assertive parents found their way into the city's elite programs—and many bright but socially disadvantaged children never had a chance. The Bloomberg administration imposed a uniform and transparent admission process so that all applicants (about fifteen thousand four- and five-year-olds) now take the same two standardized tests. Only children who score in the 90th percentile or above can enter the programs. This approach leaves little room for parental lobbying.

The reformers believed this open and consistent procedure would yield a more ethnically diverse group of students. So far it has not. It
has
yielded more girls than boys. As the
Times
reports, the test is “more verbal than other tests” and it plays to girls' strengths. Boys are especially disadvantaged by the necessity to sit quietly for one hour and focus exclusively on the test.
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Pre-kindergarten boys with mental abilities three or four standard deviations above the mean have astonishing talents. But as Terry Neu, an expert on gifted boys, told me, sitting still for an extended period of time is not one of them. The capacity to remain seated for a long test does not reliably measure brilliance, but requiring pre-K children to do it is a sure way of securing more places for girls than boys in a gifted program.
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