Are Schools Stacked Against Boys?

1. Are Schools Stacked Against Boys? Janelle Klapperich ESA 4

2. Leonard Sax, M.D. Ph.D, psychologist

3. Peg Tyre, senior writer at Newsweek

4. Why do boys and girls behave differently?

5. . . .Giving dolls to boys will cause boys to become more nurturing, . . . giving girls Erector sets will improve girls’ spatial relations skills. . .

6. No scientific evidence exists to support the claim that gender-neutral child-rearing has any measurable benefit, regardless of which parameter you measure.

7. Where Are We Today?

8. For every 100 girls • enrolled in kindergarten, there are 116 boys.

9. For every 100 girls • enrolled in high school, there are 100 boys.

10. For every 100 girls • enrolled in public gifted and talented program there are 94 boys.

11. For every 100 girls • who graduated from high school, there are 94 boys.

12. For every 100 girls • suspended from public school, there are 250 boys.

13. For every 100 girls • expelled from public school, there are 335 boys.

14. For every 100 girls • diagnosed with a special education disability, there are 217 boys.

15. For every 100 girls • diagnosed with a learning disability, there are 276 boys.

16. For every 100 women • enrolled in college, there are 77 men.

17. For every 100 women • who earn an associate’s degree, there are 67 men.

18. For every 100 women • who earn a master’s degree, there are 62 men.

19. Other issues

20. Boys are more likely to get in trouble for drugs.

21. Boys are more likely to be struggling in school than their fathers were.

22. The average eleventh-grade American boy writes at the same level as the average 8th-grade girl.

23. The number of male college graduates is dropping. Prediction: by 2011, 60/40.

24. The dropout rate is nearly 30 percent, with the majority being boys.

25. What about the girls?

26. Educational History • Only the wealthy males educated • About 250 years ago, it became more common to educate upper and middle-class women, but they were taught different content than men • 1970’s women’s right movement • Title IX • Pendulum has swung the other way

27. Concerns about Girls

28. Teenage girls are four times more likely to drink than their mothers.

29. Teenage girls are fifteen times more likely to use drugs than their mothers were.

30. Alcohol abuse is more of a problem for teenage girls than for teenage boys.

31. Partner talk. . . What from the previous slides surprises you the most? the least?

32. What’s the Difference?

33. There are no differences in what girls and boys can learn. But there are big differences in the best ways to teach them.

34. Girls and boys enter the classroom with differentneeds, different abilities and different goals.

35. Why?

36. The brain develops differently.

37. A man who suffers a stroke affecting the left side of the brain is much more likely to lose language functions than a man who suffers a stroke on the right side of the brain. Brain Research

38. Brain Research • This is not true of women. While functions in a man’s brains are more compartmentalized, a woman’s brain is more globally distributed. Women use both hemispheres of their brain for language; men don’t.

39. The brain is wired differently.

40. Which of these statements is true? • Girls hear better than boys. • Boys hear better than girls • Boys and girls hear the same.

41. Girls hear better.

42. Partner talk. . .What could this mean in a classroom?

43. Partner talk. . .What do you think the research says about differences in sight between boys and girls?

44. Girls are prewired to be interested in faces.

45. Boys are prewired to be interested in moving objects.

47. Anatomy of the Eye Retina is the part of the eye that converts light into neurological signals; it is divided into layers. Part of the layers are M cells (magnocellular) and P cells (parvocellular). M cell rods are the motion detectors P cell cones compile information about texture and color.

48. Anatomy of an Eye • Male retina is substantially thicker than the female retina. • Why? Because it contains more of the thicker M cells, while the female retina has predominantly the small, thinner P cells. • What is the function of M cells?

49. Anatomy of an Eye • Girls prefer colors like red, orange, green, and beige (warm colors) because those are the colors P cells are prewired to be most sensitive to.

50. Anatomy of an Eye • Boys prefer to simulate motion pictures. They prefer cool colors such as black, gray, silver and blue because that’s the way M cells arewired.