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News

New study finds that female teachers give male students lower marks

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From the liberal UK Independent.

Excerpt:

A key reason why boys lag behind in the classroom is revealed for the first time today – female teachers.

Ground-breaking research shows that boys lower their sights if they think their work is going to be marked by a woman because they believe their results will be worse.

It also shows their suspicions are correct – female teachers did, on average, award lower marks to boys than unidentified external examiners. Male teachers, by contrast, awarded them higher marks than external examiners.

The findings, published by the Centre for Economic Performance today, could have immense repercussions for boys because of the dearth of male teachers in the profession. Only 15 per cent of primary school staff are men.

The findings were yesterday described as “fascinating” by one of the country’s leading academic researchers, Professor Alan Smithers, of the Centre for Education and Employment at the University of Buckingham.

He said the research, carried out among 1,200 children in 29 schools across the country, had shown a possible reason for the glaring gap in performance between girls and boys right through schooling.

I wonder if feminism and misandry (antagonism towards men) has anything to do with the results of this study?

Where are the male teachers?

Another contributing  factor causing men to underperform in school is that there are almost no male teachers and also that boys don’t learn well in co-ed classrooms – they get distracted by girls. The curriculum is not suitable for boys, who learn better with different materials that focus more on things that boys like, like wars, guns and adventures. Boys learn better with male teachers and all-male classrooms because they need male role models in order to succeed.

Consider this article on male/female teachers.

Excerpt:

The organization MenTeach, a Minnesota organization dedicated to increasing the number of males working with young children, posted a survey on its Web site showing that males constitute less than 20 percent of America’s 2.9 million elementary and middle school teachers. The 2008 survey, based on source data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed even more drastic differences among different grade levels:

  • 44 percent of America’s 1.2 million secondary school teachers.
  • 18.8 percent of America’s 2.9 million elementary and middle school teachers.
  • 2.4 percent of America’s 685,000 pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teachers.

No wonder women are earning 60% of college undergraduate degrees and men are struggling to find jobs.  Most women want men to be strong husbands and fathers, so they’ll need to make sure that men have jobs. In order for men to have jobs, they’ll want to oppose feminists who discriminate against men in the education system.

The War Against Boys

An excellent book on this topic is Christina Hoff Sommers’ “The War Against Boys“. You can read a summary of her argument here.

Excerpt: (links removed)

By the late 1990s the myth of the downtrodden girl was showing some signs of unraveling, and concern over boys was growing. In 1997 the Public Education Network (PEN) announced at its annual conference the results of a new teacher-student survey titled The American Teacher 1997: Examining Gender Issues in Public Schools. The survey was funded by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and conducted by Louis Harris and Associates.

During a three-month period in 1997 various questions about gender equity were asked of 1,306 students and 1,035 teachers in grades seven through twelve. The MetLife study had no doctrinal ax to grind. What it found contradicted most of the findings of the AAUW, the Sadkers, and the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women: “Contrary to the commonly held view that boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers’ expectations, everyday experiences at school and interactions in the classroom.”

Some other conclusions from the MetLife study: Girls are more likely than boys to see themselves as college-bound and more likely to want a good education. Furthermore, more boys (31 percent) than girls (19 percent) feel that teachers do not listen to what they have to say.

At the PEN conference, Nancy Leffert, a child psychologist then at the Search Institute, in Minneapolis, reported the results of a survey that she and colleagues had recently completed of more than 99,000 children in grades six through twelve. The children were asked about what the researchers call “developmental assets.” The Search Institute has identified forty critical assets—”building blocks for healthy development.” Half of these are external, such as a supportive family and adult role models, and half are internal, such as motivation to achieve, a sense of purpose in life, and interpersonal confidence. Leffert explained, somewhat apologetically, that girls were ahead of boys with respect to thirty-seven out of forty assets. By almost every significant measure of well-being girls had the better of boys: they felt closer to their families; they had higher aspirations, stronger connections to school, and even superior assertiveness skills. Leffert concluded her talk by saying that in the past she had referred to girls as fragile or vulnerable, but that the survey “tells me that girls have very powerful assets.”

The Horatio Alger Association, a fifty-year-old organization devoted to promoting and affirming individual initiative and “the American dream,” releases annual back-to-school surveys. Its survey for 1998 contrasted two groups of students: the “highly successful” (approximately 18 percent of American students) and the “disillusioned” (approximately 15 percent). The successful students work hard, choose challenging classes, make schoolwork a top priority, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, and feel that teachers and administrators care about them and listen to them. According to the association, the successful group in the 1998 survey is 63 percent female and 37 percent male. The disillusioned students are pessimistic about their future, get low grades, and have little contact with teachers. The disillusioned group could accurately be characterized as demoralized. According to the Alger Association, “Nearly seven out of ten are male.”

That was all written in 2000 – the problem is much worse now.

Sommers’ book is must reading for any parent of a boy. It would also be a good book for pastors to read, so that they have an accurate understanding of the problems facing men, and can mentor them so that they can succeed.

News

For women under 30, most births occur outside of marriage

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This article is from the liberal New York Times. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

 It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

[…]The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.

Actually, conservatives do argue that shrinking pay checks have discouraged marriage – shrinking paychecks caused by higher taxes, which are supported by single women and their overwhelming propensity to vote Democrat.

More:

The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike in past eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a United States senator from New York, reported in 1965 that a quarter of black children were born outside marriage — and warned of a “tangle of pathology” — he set off a bitter debate.

By the mid-1990s, such figures looked quaint: a third of Americans were born outside marriage. Congress, largely blaming welfare, imposed tough restrictions. Now the figure is 41 percent — and 53 percent for children born to women under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

[…]Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home economics: men are worth less than they used to be. Among men with some college but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.

“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. 

Indeed. Ever since feminism produced such cultural advancements as coed classrooms, sex education and no-fault divorce, men have been so surrounded by freely available sex. Thanks to feminism, men don’t have to lift a finger to prove to women that they are capable of performing their traditional roles before sex is offered to them. When women decided to agree with feminists that men are identical to women, they refused to set expectations on men to act like men. When women decide that it’s not men’s jobs to perform their traditional male roles in a marriage, then they choose other men based on other criteria, e.g. – broad shoulders, a deep voice, athletic ability, nice shoes – and other concerns that have nothing whatsoever to do with marital success. Feminism is not good for men – it turns them into boys, who don’t have to prove themselves ready for marriage before they get sex. When men have sex handed to them on a silver platter, they stop caring about doing well in school, getting jobs and sacrificing to honor their commitments.

More:

Others noted that if they married, their official household income would rise, which could cost them government benefits like food stamps and child care. W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said other government policies, like no-fault divorce, signaled that “marriage is not as fundamental to society” as it once was.

Even as many Americans withdraw from marriage, researchers say, they expect more from it: emotional fulfillment as opposed merely to practical support. “Family life is no longer about playing the social role of father or husband or wife, it’s more about individual satisfaction and self-development,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

[…]Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”

Times have changed. Before, men and women looked to each other for support – that’s why they married. Now the government gives single mothers support, so that they don’t need protectors and providers. Legions of social workers, public schools and day care are provided to teach children morality and religion – while women go to work to pay taxes for their salaries. Single mothers like this arrangement because government checks and government programs are much less demanding than husbands and fathers. It makes more sense to single women to choose exciting men to have sex with – men who are spontaneous, handsome, fun and dangerous – and then toss them aside if they try to hold her accountable to behave morally, or ask her to do anything that she doesn’t make her feel happy.

Finally, you might think that the church is aggressive about telling women how wrong it is for them to have premarital sex, but you’d be wrong. Pastors are terrified of offending women in their churches by talking about moral obligations and success factors for marriage. Women don’t want to believe that there are guidelines from morality and from social science research that could override their emotions and intuitions. They want to be happy, and whatever they decide while trying to be happy must be right. Pastors would never dream of telling women in their churches that there was anything from with the view of relationships they get from Bridget Jones’ Diary, Pretty Woman, Kate and Leopold, Eat, Pray, Love, etc.

Men: never ever marry a woman who cannot denounce feminism, socialism, premarital sex, abortion, divorce, adultery, and especially single motherhood – in the strongest terms. That is a pre-condition for marriage. And don’t accept her opinion on these questions. Expect her to convince you using evidence from research – books and research papers. Don’t marry someone who knows nothing about marriage. Don’t make a woman a parent when she knows nothing about parenting. Your future children are depending on your judgment. Fatherlessness puts children at risk for higher rates of poverty, neglect and abuse, and a host of behavioral problems.

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Commentary

UK government aims to combat fatherlessness with shared parenting law

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Canadian Barbara Kay writes about a positive development across the pond. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Two weeks ago the U.K. government announced its intention to amend the 1989 Children’s Act. Changes will include a “presumption of shared parenting” to ensure that children’s relationships with both parents continues after separation. Under the current adversarial system, as in Canada, legal custody battles almost invariably end with mothers gaining sole custody.

The decision was based more in pragmatism than compassion. Mounting sociological evidence confirms the terrible social costs of fatherlessness: triple the rates of truancy, teen pregnancies and drug abuse, to name a few.

Also proposed is a £10-million mediation fund. One spokesman enunciated what has become obvious to rational observers: “The courts are rarely the best place for resolving private disputes about the care of children.” In truth, no one but career stakeholders favours the status quo.

Let’s hope the U.K. example will hasten the inevitable arrival of equal shared parenting (ESP) as the default presumption, in the absence of abuse, in Canada. This is, after all, an idea whose time came decades ago. The 1978 Family Law reform Act interpreted the “best interests of the child” to mean: “where feasible, a child should have maximum access to both parents”; the “animosity of the parents should not interfere with this interest”; and the “needs of both parents should be considered.”

The in-depth 1998 Senate-House of Commons Joint Committee Report For the Sake of the Children also recommended ESP as a default presumption. But the report fell into a black political hole. Guided by feminism-inspired “social context” courses they take at the National Judicial Institute, unaccountable family-court judges with no expertise in children’s best emotional and psychological interests privilege mothers’ rights in hugely disproportionate numbers.

Indeed, fathers’ money is welcome, but the fathers themselves aren’t considered necessary to their children’s well-being at all, nor their children necessary to theirs. In 2003 justice minister Martin Cauchon stated, “Divorced fathers have no rights, only responsibilities.” He might well have added, “Divorced mothers have no responsibilities, only rights.” For fathers who fail to pay child support, even when they can’t pay, may spend more time in jail than a cocaine dealer and have their faces plastered on the Internet as “deadbeat dads”; but how many Canadian mothers have spent a night in jail for arbitrarily denying a father court-appointed time with his children?

Ideologues argue that fathers only demand equal parenting rights as a “patriarchal backlash” or to reduce their child support burdens or to punish their ex-mates. Some individual men are doubtless guilty of bad faith, just as some individual women seek sole custody for its material benefits or to punish their ex-mates.

Here’s an excellent lecture by Jennifer Roback Morse about the divorce issue.

If you don’t understand how divorce laws hurt fathers and their children, please read this excellent paper by Stephen Baskerville, published in Touchstone magazine, and this excellent paper from Touchstone magazine by Robbie Low, which explains how fathers are vital to passing on religion from parents to children. Every Christian should know as much about marriage as they know about abortion. Every Christian should have as much opposition to divorce as they have for abortion.  And every Christian should put as much effort into preparing to be convincing on the marriage issue as they are on the abortion issue. This matters.