The idea that girls are the victims of sex discrimination in American schools is so preposterous, it is barely worth discussing. But it seems some people are still determined to believe it.
A few weeks ago, the American Association of University Women, a 127-year-old organization that in recent decades has evolved into a feminist advocacy group, released a report declaring that it had debunked the myth of the boy crisis ' the troubling trend of American boys falling far behind girls academically at every level of education. The AAUW announced that the boy crisis was a fabrication of people who are uncomfortable with the progress of girls and women
as columnist Kathleen Parker put it.
No one should take a study by the AAUW at face value, especially because in the 1990s, it did a little fabricating of its own by concocting the myth of a girl crisis. In 1992, the AAUW released a report titled How Schools Shortchange Girls. Its charges of egregious sex discrimination were based on such findings as in textbooks one-seventh of all illustrations of children are of girls girls read six times as many biographies of males as of females
and schools
for the most part
provide inadequate education on sexuality.
The most sobering discoveries that the AAUW could come up with were that differences between girls and boys in math achievement are small and declining .G? The gender gap in science
however
is not decreasing and may
in fact
be increasing.
That hardly sounds like a crisis. But from the media firestorm that followed its publication, you'd think we were living under the Taliban. The media leapt on the story, churning out more than 1,400 news reports on the study.
But scholars who went through the trouble of looking up the facts ' such as census data and reports from the National Center for Education Statistics ' quickly realized that How Schools Shortchange Girls was a crock. By 1991, the year before the AAUW report came out, girls were more proficient in reading and writing. As the AAUW admitted, they lagged slightly behind in math, but there was evidence that the gap was closing. Girls were neck-and-neck with boys in many measures of science proficiency. And although they had slightly lower scores on standardized tests, girls got better grades. In 1992, more girls took Advanced Placement examinations, through which students earn college credit. And girls were more likely to go to college.
Even worse, some researchers discovered that the AAUW had hid most of the research it conducted for the report, throwing out any evidence that didn't fit their pre-determined conclusion that girls were victimized by the education system. One study the AAUW hid revealed that, if girls were indeed being shortchanged
they were totally unaware of it: Numerous surveys revealed that both male and female students believed teachers preferred girls, gave them more attention and praise and thought they were smarter.
But the report had made its impact, and politicians, educators and activists had already declared their dedication to ending sex discrimination in education. In 1994, feminist psychologist Mary Pipher's book Reviving Ophelia, which posited that girls' sense of self was being destroyed by the sexist school system, became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. For the next 10 years, the schools became obsessed with trying to rectify the girl crisis.
This was done at the expense of boys, who were already behind academically before the AAUW's fatuous report came out. And 16 years later, the gender gap has widened.
As former Clark University professor Christina Hoff Sommers put it, the education system is basically run by women for girls
