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Spruce's avatar

The conversation about crime post followed closely by Friday's one hit home as I recently had a similar A/B discussion with an educator who thought that we shouldn't have any such thing as a curriculum in school, kids should learn what's interesting and relevant to them, and be able to opt out of material that triggers them.

But of course, there should be a list of important topics that we have to teach absolutely everyone like queer rights and black rights and anti-colonialism, and of course a white kid opting out of learning about slavery because they don't see how it's relevant to them or claim it's triggering shouldn't be allowed.

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Education Realist's avatar

Oh, Freddie. I'm disappointed you speak well of that hack. The past two years have produced such utter garbage of advocacy pretending to be research--most notoriously, Emily Hanford--but Richard Reeves is even better at selling stories than Hanford is.

I'm not going to write a lot on this, because I should write my own review, but in short:

1. Boys are doing fine on test scores. They aren't doing fine on grades. Reeves talks about how emphasis on grades were changed because girls were doing poorly on tests, and boys just couldn't adjust to the new world that was tailored for girls who couldn't adjust. I mean, my god, you don't see the problem there?

2. The gap is overwhelmingly caused by black and Hispanic boys. We're going to hold back all boys because black and Hispanic boys do badly? Wait til the white and Asian parents hear about this. And Reeves' dishonesty in barely mentioning the race issue is dishonest, but lord knows the reviewers failing to mention it are just as bad.

3. Everyone should laugh at any moron who argues that valedictorians or law school review or any status based on grades is mostly girls. Does anyone remember the Boston Globe story of a couple years ago in which they profiled all the valedictorians and how they did, which was really badly? Boston being Boston, most of the valedictorians were black girls, except for the Hispanic girls who were in ELL only schools, and the few wealthy schools where the valedictorian was probably Asian (and probably not a girl).

This is such a fucking stupid argument, and the only reason it does well is because no one wants to point out this simple flaw: Who's doing better in life, valedictorian girls of any race but probably black or Hispanic with 4.2 GPAs from AP classes whose tests they didn't take or failed and 600 SAT scores, or boys of any race, color, or creed with a 3.2 GPA, four AP tests passed with a 4 or 5 and a 1300 SAT?

4. To the extent that girls and boys of equal achievement in test scores are choosing to or not to go to college, part of this is explained by the fact that most pink collar jobs go through college, and most blue collar jobs do not. Secretaries have largely worthless business admin BAs. Manicurists have cosmetology AAs. Boys become plumbers or join the military.

So the handclasping about girls with college degrees not having marriageable men is--again, excepting blacks--bullshit. Secretaries are marrying staff sergeants. Manicurists are marrying plumbers.

The book is a farce and a lie and the reason no one in the respectable press points this out is because no one wants to talk about points 1 and 2. Emphasizing grades over test scores might have started to be about girls, but it became about race. The entire industry of college admissions was inverted and perverted because of these two points.

As for his solutions: holding back students should obviously be done by achievement, not gender. In fact, holding students back by gender would *instantly* be thrown out by the courts. So why are you, Freddie, and everyone else talking about the idea's merit?

Why not point out that an easier way to do this is to just hold kids back based on their readiness? Answer: because holding kids back on readiness would result in *looking* like kids were being held back by race. They *wouldn't* be, of course. It would be a legitimate mechanism that would catch any white or Asian kids who weren't ready. But it would result in a huge chunk of black and Hispanic kids being held back.

So here's the insanity: respectable people are saying with apparently seriousness that forcing boys to start a year earlier is a good idea, while never mentioning that we could use test scores and only hold back the kids who need it, because the first proposal involves a total fiction that boys aren't doing well and allows people to pretend it's a gender issue. The second proposal involves reality, which everyone wants to ignore and hopes it goes away.

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