NY Times: Gender Gap for the Gifted in City Schools

Submitted by anthony on Tue, 2010-06-01 15:43

Article here. Excerpt:

'When the kindergartners at the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, one of New York City’s schools for gifted students, form neat boy-girl rows for the start of recess, the lines of girls reach well beyond the lines of boys.
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Educators and experts have long known that boys lag behind girls in measures like high school graduation rates and college enrollment, but they are concerned that the disparity is also turning up at the very beginning of the school experience.

Why more girls than boys enter the programs is unclear, though there are some theories. Among the most popular is the idea that young girls are favored by the standardized tests the city uses to determine admission to gifted programs, because they tend to be more verbal and socially mature at ages 4 and 5 when they sit for the hourlong exam.
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Biases and expectations among adults are often in play when determining which children count as gifted, and fewer boys appear to end up in gifted programs nationally. A 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences reported that boys were “overrepresented in programs for learning disabilities, mental retardation and emotional disturbance, and slightly underrepresented in gifted programs,” said Bruce A. Bracken, a professor at the College of William & Mary who wrote one of the two exams that the city uses to test gifted children. He said the implications of the study were “disturbing.”'

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Comments

This is very strange and disturbing. Both the schools and adults are less likely to recognize talented boys. The IQ spectrum predicts more gifted boys, yet there are less boys in the gifted schools. The school's failed selection process is surely indicative of how they teach and foster these students. I worry about the implications of schools for the gifted mentoring students the way they are. While this is not always the case I know that historically many of the most brilliant people were mentored by other talented people. The student was challenged by another intellect. Risk and creativity from the pupil was surely encouraged. My guess is that these schools for the gifted also have a bias towards diligence over intelligence and that they are having a negative impact on the talent pool and on peoples general perception of intellectual talent.

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Submitted by fondueguy on Wed, 2010-06-02 05:05

At the end of the article the principal says how much time she spends training the boys, basically, to be like girls. The author speculates that boys getting into trouble during school may be related to the reasons they aren't being admitted as often.

God... these schools exist to foster the students talent and intelligence. Whatever it takes to get to that goal is what should create the schools secondary values which includes things like competition, communication, group work, individual work, self confidence and risk taking ect... That principal is creating her own value system that does nothing more than promote girls. Her values are way out of wack if she thinks boys don't belong in schools for the talented.

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Submitted by fondueguy on Wed, 2010-06-02 17:00