The FAQ

[lumberjack_jeff]

6. Education

[font color="blue" size=4 face=courier]Teacher demographics[/font]
http://www.ncei.com/POT05PRESSREL3.htm

The public school teaching force in the United States is getting more female and older. Eight out of 10 public school teachers (82 percent) are female. This is up from 74 percent in 1996, 71 percent in 1990 and 69 percent in 1986. Eighty-four percent of teachers who have five or fewer years’ experience teaching in 2005 are women. This is up from 79 percent in 1996. While 28 percent of teachers with 30 or more years experience are male, only 16 percent of those with five or fewer years of experience teaching are male.

[font color="blue" size=4 face=courier]Children's attitudes[/font]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/sep/01/girls-boys-schools-gender-gap

Girls think they are cleverer, more successful and harder working than boys from as young as four, a study has found.

Boys come round to this view by the age of seven or eight and assume that girls will outperform them at school and behave better in lessons, research from the University of Kent shows.
<snip>
Girls' performance at school may be boosted by what they perceive to be their teachers' belief that they will achieve higher results and be more conscientious than boys, the academics claim. Boys may underachieve because they pick up on teachers' assumptions that they will obtain lower results than girls and have less drive.

The findings come just over a week after exam results revealed that the gap between boys and girls at GCSE is widening. This summer, the pass rate for girls was 72.6% at A* to C, compared with 65.4% for boys. Last year, the rate was 70.5% for girls and 63.6% for boys.

[font color="blue" size=4 face=courier]Outcomes[/font]
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_nation_schools_are_failing_boys_nvjstdJ0OEupWcNtrm1wUN
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/21/gender

The Independent Women's Forum, for example, immediately questioned the analysis, but so did some education experts.
Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, didn't question the specific numbers in the report or the idea that both male and female students can succeed at the same time. "Women have made huge progress in education over the last six decades," he said. "The success of women is a great story -- it shows what we can do when we set our minds to task."
But he said that in 1970, when he started his career in higher education policy analysis, there were 1.5 million more men than women in higher education and "I recall vividly that women complained that this was a crisis. Now there are 2.7 million more women than men in higher education and the feminists assert that this is not a crisis. What am I missing here?"
He noted the hugely disproportionate rates of suicide among men who are 25 to 34, and of incarceration, and asked how this could be anything but a crisis.

[font color="blue" size=4 face=courier]Grades and test scores[/font]
Boys test as well as girls on standardized tests, yet get poor grades. Clearly, grades are awarded on other factors than mastery of the subject matter.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/31/60minutes/main527678.shtml
http://heraldnet.com/article/20100530/NEWS01/705309875

Far more boys than girls in Snohomish County either barely scrape by or flunk their high school classes, according to a Herald analysis of grade point averages.

Through last June, just under half of the county's girls — 48.8 percent — had a grade point in the solid A to B range of 3.0 or above. A third of boys — 33.4 percent — could make the same claim.

At the same time, nearly a third of boys had a grade point average of 1.99 or less, the C-minus to F range, compared to fewer than 1 in 5 girls.

The data also shows that high school girls tend to earn higher grades in all core subjects, including math, at all grade levels despite the fact that boys scored slightly higher in that discipline on last year's state WASL exams.

[font color="blue" size=4 face=courier]Possible interventions[/font]
http://www.singlesexschools.org/evidence.html

Researchers at Stetson University in Florida completed a three-year pilot project comparing single-sex classrooms with coed classrooms at Woodward Avenue Elementary School, a nearby neighborhood public school. For example, students in the 4th grade at Woodward were assigned either to single-sex or coed classrooms. All relevant parameters were matched: the class sizes were all the same, the demographics were the same, all teachers had the same training in what works and what doesn't work, etc. On the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test), here were the results:
Percentage of students scoring proficient on the FCAT

boys in coed classes: 37% scored proficient
girls in coed classes: 59% scored proficient
girls in single-sex classes: 75% scored proficient
boys in single-sex classes: 86% scored proficient.
Remember, these students were all learning the same curriculum in the same school. And, this school "mainstreams" students who are learning-disabled, or who have ADHD etc. Many of those boys who scored proficient in the all-boys classes had previously been labeled "ADHD" or "ESE" in coed classes.