But alas, according to the Trib:
Girls gained the most ground last year, immediately after the state revamped the Illinois Standards Achievement Test. The state made the tests more colorful, gave pupils extra time to finish, added questions with longer reading passages and replaced state-created test items with those pulled from a national bank of questions.People are now questioning the validity of the new tests, and the test creator even defended that the girl-centered results weren't intentional.
I guess it's all part of the vast feminist conspiracy, finally inching ahead of the curve. Never mind that women outperform and out-graduate men in college, despite the persistent wage gap in men's favor across the country. But I digress.
p.s. Let's not even get into the funding linked testing process in the first place. When's that Presidential election again?
2 comments:
I just feel like saying "Go girls" and with regard to testing, "Whatever". I will have a difficult time being alarmed that girls are out-performing males in school as long I know that men persist in making a higher wage per hour or per year even when up against equivalently trained and equivalently performing females. And I have a son.
In the USA, where we don't really have a social safety net to catch anyone should they fall everyone has to be pretty F-ing competitive and savvy to make it. Throw in global competition for commerce...Yikes.
By the way: I thought you might like this piece by Pulitzer-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff. He's staying at home with his daughter, now.
http://www.mensvogue.com/magazine/articles/2007/11/charlie_leduff?printable=true¤tPage=all
Thanks anon for the article, and I absolutely agree with you re: placing these issues in a larger context. I'd even add to competitive and savvy the issue of race, class, and gender privilege. For that reason, I don't hold much credence to the tests either. There's got to be a better way to allocate money to our youth.
Post a Comment