Property tax rates are actually lower in those districts, but because the property is worth so much more, those districts are able to raise more money with a lower rate. And the lower rates make those districts even more attractive.

Augh! The mil rate!

Sorry. Had a flashback there to working as a local-news reporter. We had to do math twice a year — once at election time, and once when the Grand List came out and we had to figure out the tax rates and the mil rate. If you’ve ever seen a group of reporters trying to split a lunch check, you’ll have an idea of how traumatizing this was for us.

Lower-class men don’t go to college because they. do. not. apply. to. college. Men can earn a decent-enough living with a high school diploma, and in poorer families, they feel the pressure to earn now rather than go to college.

My ex-BIL, a working-class guy from Queens, caught hell from his father, an HVAC guy, for applying to college. He joined the Navy in part to get away from his father’s digs about “lazy school.”

Wealthier, whiter neighborhoods tend to have better schools because property taxes there are higher and so their schools are better funded.

Property tax rates are actually lower in those districts, but because the property is worth so much more, those districts are able to raise more money with a lower rate. And the lower rates make those districts even more attractive.

Darin your argument is smoke and mirrors, dude. The issue here is applicants: who gets chosen and why.

Lower-class men don’t go to college because they. do. not. apply. to. college. Men can earn a decent-enough living with a high school diploma, and in poorer families, they feel the pressure to earn now rather than go to college.

The data show that the gender disparity in college enrollment is clearly linked to economic class. (In other words, if a male comes from a lower economic level, he is less likely to attend college, while at middle- to upper-level incomes, the gender ratio is almost 50/50.)

This shows that the issue is more about the interaction between gender and economics then about gender alone. Of course, you like to see it through the prism of gender alone.

Basically, the market for higher education is becoming saturated, and among lower-income families, the girls are more likely to see the advantages of college than the boys, who don’t see that it’s in their interest and don’t see why they should care. This is what is accounting for the gender gap.

Your arguments sound eerily similar to those used by “angry white males” lamenting how much “better” they have to be to get jobs over less qualified minorities.

Funny how you don’t recognize the hypocrisy. But typical.

Look, I’m not saying that these systems are without fault. I’m not saying that race isn’t taken into account — of course it is. But if we’re going to argue, let’s at least get the facts straight.

Good to know about Michigan. Admittedly my sources were biased–conservative groups who call it “Affirmative Action University.” I had no idea it had been struck down!! Learn something new every day.

Lauren Says:
March 26th, 2006 at 9:39 am
Current public education is geared toward females.

How?

(The following is based on personal experience and somewhat off the cuff, and thus colored accordingly. Given that we’re all individuals with our own life experiences, your mileage may vary. My skill set doesn’t include pedagogy, so this comes from my private set of experiences and opinions, so take what follows for what its worth.)

One arena that gets discussed in my locale regarding differences in learning capabilities for boys versus girls, at least at a young age, is, for lack of a better word, fidgetiness on the part of boys.

Young boys allegedly have a stronger need than girls for large body movement, or so I got told a lot at the public school district where my daughter went from kindergarten through sixth grade. So, at her elementary school, they had (and still have) not only lunch recess, but a couple of extra mini-recess periods of about 10-20 minutes each, for blowing off steam. And the explanation I usually received, from both teachers and volunteer parents, was that it seemed to help the boys focus more in class.

The problem is that this kind of attitude seems to me to be more of an exception than the rule.

My personal experiences, and from watching my daughter’s cohort travel together from Kindergarten through sixth grade, lead to my opinions…

Interpretation versus reaction really, really matters. I think girls and young women are doing better in school these days because, in large part, a majority of people aren’t saying anymore, “Oh, well, that’s how it is,” where women and achievement are concerned. They figured out what to do about it and sometimes stumbled, sometimes strode their way into converting the average female’s core personality traits into advantages that could be translated into achievements.

I think we truly fail at two distinct levels when it comes to men and achievement. The first is that we don’t want to accurately interpret how men are, both because it means we have to deal with the typically more physically aggressive nature of males, and because we can’t separate males as individuals from the worst males in our society.

For reasons I don’t completely understand (having only been blessed with a daughter), we tend to give a lot of young males a pass when it comes to responsibility.

Women are typically looked upon to provide comfort, and men are typically looked upon to provide discipline, in a family.

My personal experience is that many men don’t often understand what “discipline” means. They think it means swatting a butt (or worse) when their kid does wrong, but it also means teaching self-discipline, and where this is most important for males is where anger and violence is concerned. I tend to believe that fathers and related men (uncles, grandfathers, what have you…) are most important for young males in that they teach that, yes, you have a violent nature; yes, it can be very powerful; no, it is not all that makes you you; here is what is acceptable and how you can control it.

It’s not that women can’t be violent, but that, for better or worse, they cannot accept the violence at the core of most men, fear it, or simply aren’t acceptable teachers to young men regarding this core feature of their nature. And, to be frank, nurturing is more pleasant than discipline. I hate having to ban my daughter from stuff she likes to do when she does wrong – it’s much more fun to walk a trail, watch a movie or go out to lunch together on a weekend day and talk father-daughter stuff.

So we let a lot of young men slide. Those that make it well in life either stumble their way into self-discipline of a sort, or have been given a sense of it through people they respect. Some mothers can install that sense of self-discipline, but my personal experience is that, as a single parent with a largely absent ex-wife in the situation, I work very hard to make sure adult female role models that I trust, especially now, as my daughter becomes a teenager, are a regular part of her life. It’s not that I can’t be a good father or a good parent, but for better or worse, there are differences between males and females and our young ones get told it by society, know it, and want to know those differences so they can both fit in and be distinctly what their gender says they are, even if only at a marginal level, supplanted by their individual personality. Even teens that know they are dramatically outside the mainstream hunger for those mentors that can provide what they need – acceptance (of which I consider nurturing a means toward that end) and self-discipline.

The second major problem is that we accept the idea all too readily that “all men are pigs,” and that the men that act the most like this represent all men. The more we accept this idea, the more we let males in general off the hook. The more we don’t expect men to meet certain standards of self-discipline in their lives, the more we give them license to be unable to catch up to women, both in terms of achievements and in terms of responsibility/maturity, and for many to blame women for their problems and act accordingly.

Now, that doesn’t mean we should pretend that males don’t have an aggressive nature. That, I think, is at core where we fail men in this society. It’s too easy to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and instead of teaching the means to redirect it into acceptable ends, we demand that it never be on display.

And thus, we get males that take the usual hard knocks we all, regardless of gender, must suffer – the goals we couldn’t achieve, the disappointments in potential relationships, the possibilities we have to let go by, possibly forever – and thus have rage that they’re not allowed to acknowledge, let alone channel into something useful instead of destructive.

Add to this the nature of men to believe that their masculinity is something that can be taken from them, regardless of their possessing a penis, and you have rage that gets channeled into, typically, physical violence, often against women, which aggravates the fear of it, which recycles the whole process again.

And while social liberals tend to want to ignore a male’s aggressive nature, social conservatives take things a step further and seem to believe that such a nature confirms male superiority over women, which in it’s own way also gives men a free pass, but with even worse consequences for society in general and women in particular.

Do I have answers to all of this? A few, but hardly a full solution. The obvious answers are to commit to discerning what works best to help males achieve and provide them with the support structure they need, and to ensure that they receive a valid sense of self-discipline in their lives –if not through their families, than by other means.

Beyond that, though, I’m open to ideas.

I also want to flag the very dubious grounds being used to reject girls brought up in the article. There’s the preservation of social life on campus (people being able to find “dance partners for the winter formal”) and the fear that men and women applicants will be both put off going to the college if there are too many women. That seems really thin grounds for discrimination, it’s essentially that students exist to serve the university and not the other way around.

Current public education is geared toward females.

How?