sauce for the goose

Back from my daily trip to eduwonk, where Sara Mead (The Truth About Boys and Girls) is guestblogging.

Mead's "major study" (NYTIMES, 7-3-2007) of boys and girls in schools annoyed me enough to goad me into canceling my subscription to Ed Sector.

Ed Sector is entitled to its take on the data.

But a "take" is all it is, as far as I can see. The more time I spend thinking about data mining, the more broadly skeptical I am of white papers issued by advocacy think tanks.

I like advocacy think tanks; that's not the problem. The problem is: advocacy think tanks are advocacy think tanks. Maybe when I finally take a course in data mining (it's on the list) I'll find out I'm wrong, but for now my perception is that 5 intelligent people who have taken courses in data mining can look at the same set of complicated data and see 5 different things. When those people are employed by advocacy think tanks you're going to get the take you expect.

So.... Ed Sector is entitled to its reading of the data, and they could be right. But logical consistency in argument isn't so tricky, and there's not enough of it here:

Von Drehle gets two really important things right: One is that the variety of indicators brought into this debate is so diverse and messy that they can support an array of competing storylines about boys.... It's worth noting that while gender obviously plays a role in such anxieties, the core anxieties people are expressing about the boy crisis--fears that we're pushing children to grow up too quickly, that the world is increasingly risky and leaves little room for mistakes or youthful experimenting, that we're not preparing boys to compete economically--are less about gender or families than broader social and economic anxieties. But I'm glad to see Von Drehle's optimism because, like him, I don't think we do our boys any favors by casting them as victims.

Number one: if I had my druthers I would never again, ever, read a pundit making what Arnold Kling calls Type M arguments.

Parents object to fuzzy math because they want their kids to sit in rows and memorize math facts the way they did; the public worries about a boy crisis because of "core anxieties" about "broader social and economic anxieties."

Criminey!

I hate that stuff.

I'm living in a school district where, in the middle of a Team Meeting on the subject of my own struggling middle school boy, the middle school principal looks my husband and me straight in the eye and says, "Everyone knows boys do worse than girls in middle school."

A district where, in 9 years of schooling, my son has had exactly two male teachers, both of them in "specials" (art & music) not core subjects, a gender arrangement that is good for girls and bad for boys.

But my core anxiety is less about boys, my own boy in particular, and more about broader social and economic anxieties.

Well, thank God I have Sara Mead to tell me why I do the boneheaded things I do.

Number two: arguably, one of the main rhetorical purposes of The Truth about Boys and Girls was to enforce the Washington consensus. (See! Two can play the Type M game! Although, in my defense, I can support my argument with evidence from Mead's text.)

The Washington consensus holds that there is one "allowable" victim of U.S. public schools and one victim only, and that victim is a black or Hispanic child.

Well and good, but if that's your position it's not kosher to maintain black and Hispanic children as public school victims while simultaneously arguing that we "do our boys no favors by casting them as victims." [our?]

At a minimum the question whether we do "our" black and Hispanic children a favor by casting them as victims needs to be asked and answered.

Why is it good for an entire set of children, by virtue of the intrinsic properties of race or ethnicity, to be defined as victims when it is not good for another set of children to be so defined by virtue of their intrinsic properties?

My answer would be that it's important to define victims as victims. When black and Hispanic kids are victims of U.S. public schools, they should be defined as victims, and their educational deficits should be remediated.

But that principle applies equally to middle class white victims of U.S. public schools.

The schools are the problem.

Not "black schools" and "Hispanic schools."

................................

The gender gaps in achievement as students finish high school are far from trivial. In reading, 17-year-old boys score 31 percent of a standard deviation below 17-year-old girls, a deficit equal to about one grade level. This is nearly half the size of the black-white test-score gap in reading. In science and math, meanwhile, girls of that age score 22 percent and 10 percent of a standard deviation lower, respectively, also a difference worthy of concern.

Thomas Dee

And let us not forget this classic list of "stereotyped images to avoid." (source: Banned Words, Images, and Topics)


ask and ye shall receive

Mead has a terrific link to the LATimes that does exactly what I'm complaining she didn't do in "The Truth."


boy trouble, part 6
gene expression on the boy problem