"Title IX covers more than sports"

Article here. Excerpt:

'Neither should one expect some education professor in a university, still using moldy old yellowed lecture notes from the 1970s, to be brave enough to suggest that male students are not being well served in our schools today. I believe there is a healthy fear that they will be perceived as politically incorrect if they skate out on the thin ice that suggests males are being discriminated against in our schools.

The data clearly show that the achievement gap between boys and girls is widening in high schools, and attention should be given to this phenomenon.

In spite of this, anyone reading educational literature will find people still writing papers claiming that girls are being short-changed in our schools, while girls continue to outperform their male classmates.

I am aware of the achievement gap data, but I don’t claim to know why the gap exists and is widening.

More should be done to address this phenomenon and try to determine the “why” of it. Some experiments should be carried out to determine if the trend can be reversed.

Good science calls for careful collection and analysis of data involving large samples over significant time, under a variety of conditions, etc., but good science also allows for experimentation to effect change.

We know that many of our students go through grades K-6 and never have a male teacher. This is not new, but along with the positive changes that Title IX and other equity efforts have brought about, this may be more significant than it was in the past. It is not difficult to believe that boys may think that learning is a “girl thing” just as our girls who had only male math and science teachers in the past may have believed that math and science was a “male thing.”