Wednesday, January 25, 2006

The Trouble With Boys in the Classroom

Newsweek reports:
By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy."
It appears that many women are finding out in college that there doesn't seem to be enough men on campus to hang around with.No word yet from the Women's Studies departments on whether the elimination of men on campus is part of some secret, white male, heterosexual plot to indirectly oppress women by not being on campus.