If only John Lennon had played football

The last two months have seen a barrage of phony news articles and nonsense opinions about the boys-education crisis.

While the stories are supposedly about 2.0 million smart boys who are missing from college each year, none of the reporters interviewed a single impacted boy!  This is like doing a story about hispanics and only interviewing white people.

* Shelly Copley in the Oregonian failed to interview a single boy and raised the inaccurrate idea that keeping boys down helps girls get better pay in the workplace. Her editor told me the story was "fair and balanced."

* Sara Mead at Education Sector denied there was a problem at all, then received so much email from mothers she as much retracted her "research," titled "The Truth about boys and girls." She couldn't answer two simple questions from me.

* John Tierney in the New York Times declared boys unmotivated and lagging behind girls in academic performance (both assertions wrong, unsupported by the data).

* Jacqueline King of the American Council on Education tried to cover-up the whole issue by saying race and income levels are a factor (they are not, the problem is just as acute in Norway and New Zealand, countries with few minorities and almost no income gap).

* And Bill Gates, John Lennon and other college drop outs would enjoy another proposed solution: more football teams! as a way of recruiting and retaining boys in college. 

Sadly lacking was any new evidence.  Sadly prevalent was a widely based gender bias and misinformation about the issue.

Comments

[Harold Jarche]

We need more solid science, like this:
http://eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/more-boys-girls-different-brains-and.html