Customer Reviews

How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AAUW Report : A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education

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The previously posted reviews for this book are belligerent and misleading. This book was published as a provocation to educators everywhere to examine the way educational insitutions tolerate and enable various practices that harm young women personally and educationally. It had that effect when it was published and can have that effect for new readers.

Authors and reviewers who retort that "It is BOYS who are suffering, not girls" seem to believe that we cannot wish to serve both boys and girls better at the same time. How well boys are (or are not) doing is irrelevant to the fact that girls face a number of unnecessary hazards in our schools and culture. Among these are an epidemic of sexual harassment in secondary schools, near zero rates of femaile Ph.D.s in engineering and the physical sciences (other than biology), eating disorders, and blatant resistance at high schools and colleges to the Title IX law, just to name a few.

Self-esteem and school performance are often correlated. Teenagers who have high self-esteem are more likely to well in school than those who don't. In fact, academic self esteem is considered a component of general self-esteem (Harter, 1987). It is not clear how these are related; perhaps success in school makes a teenager feel better about him/herself. The data collected in the AAUW study are readily available on disk for any interested researcher. Although this book has a number of flaws, it makes a contribution to knowledge about today's teenagers in the US.

Reference:

Harter, S. (1987). The determinants and mediational role of global self-worth in children. In N. Eisenberg (Ed.) Contemporary topics in developmental psychology (pp. 219 - 242). New York: Wiley.

"How Schools Shortchange Girls" is an excellent source of information for individuals who are interested in gender research. I conduct gender research and have found this study to be very informative in so many aspects. I will continue to use it as one of my main sources for gender research.
It is user friendly as well as an "easy read."

As an educator myself, I can see every flaw in this book for what it is: falsified feminist propaganda. Let's look at a few of them:

Self-esteem: First of all, why is it an educator's job to guarantee self-esteem? That's a job for therapists. Also, self-esteem and school performance are not correlated. Black boys make up 70% of special education students, yet they have the highest self-esteem.

Achievement in different subject areas: While it is true that boys do slightly better than girls in math and science, girls do significantly better than boys in literature and history. This isn't due to any sort of cultural constraints, but rather to neurological differences. Why else are there almost no women participants in the International Mathematical Olympics?

Overall achievement: The idea that boys are out-achieving girls is simply not true. Boys drop out of high school at a higher rate than girls. Girls are much more likely to go to college than boys.

Attention to sexes in the classroom: While it is true that teachers speak more often to boys than to girls, there is a very good reason for this. Boys need more discipline than girls! They're much rowdier, and what we usually say to them are things like "Sit down!", "Shut up!", and "Keep your hands to yourself!"

Sexual harassment: Girls need to be taught how to deal with it. Telling them to run to mommy and daddy in the administration is not the correct solution. They should tell off boys on the spot. Girls who take that confrontational attitude are rarely harassed.

Why did this book come about in the first place? It's simple: because the AAUW's membership was declining in the 90's, and they needed to save themselves, so they came up with a false issue that 'needed attention'. Don't waste your time with this ridiculous book.

The AAUW and the authors of this study placed their personal political beliefs before the academic pursuit of truth in writing and publishing this report. Although the facts clearly established that girls had advantages in education and boys were in need of attention, the authors of this study manufactured evidence to suggest girls were disadvantaged and support a political agenda of increased privileges for girls. In the process the AAUW and authors committed agregious gender discrimination against minor boys. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Save your money. This report has been debunked by many other researchers. The conclusions reached by this "study" appear to have nothing to do with the actual data collected by the researchers. They seem to have been written before the data was even collected. While this report is widely available, the data it is based on is reportedly difficult to acquire, and with reason: it is embarrasing to the AAUW researchers. How do they conclude that girls are short-changed? Because their self-esteem is lower, and thus their school performance. Then higher self-esteem means higer performance, right? What they DON'T tell you in this report is that they found black boys to have the highest self-esteem of all the groups studied. So then why are black boys the group with the poorest performance? This "study" is by NO MEANS a serious academic work.

Do the research on the organization behind this book. The American Association of University Women is essentially a left-wing front for extremist views about men and women. They are a propaganga led,feminist group mascarading as an acedemic and research organization. The saddest part of this book that is based on anecdotal evidence and "studies" largely funded by leftist and tax-payer funded grants into the "female studies departments" in universities.

The evidence is overwhelming in the ways that schools are failing boys. 70% of honor role graduates were female in 2004. 60% of college bound graduates were female. SO if you want to waste your time reading a politically motivated, pack of misrepresentation of facts and biased studies, then definitely get this book!

Boys are the ones who are being short changed in schools today. When they are in elementary school the boys are being turned into little girls. They are not being recognized as boys. Boys and girls are different. The female elementary teachers do not understand boys. Why is it that most special education students are boys? Because women teachers don't understand boys. A part of the problem is that it is hard for men to get hired in elementary schools. Women don't want them around because male teachers are a blow to the female teachers egos. Usually the favorite teachers of the students in the elementary schools are men, the female teachers don't like this. If you are trying to get a job in the elementary schools as a man good luck!
If girls are being short changed, then why is it that 60% of students going to college are female? The boys are the ones being ripped off in the schools!