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LAUSD OKs Girls-Only STEM School, Plans Boys-Only English Language Arts School
theodp writes: Citing statistics that showed a whopping 46 more boys than girls passed the AP Computer Science Exam in 2011-12, the 640,000+ student Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) on Tuesday approved a waiver to enable the District to operate a single-gender, all-girls STEM School called the Girls Academic Leadership Academy (GALA). Students in GALA will follow a six year sequence of computer courses starting in middle school that will culminate in AP Computer Science Principles. "Fewer females take AP courses in math, science, or computer science, and they are not as successful as males in receiving passing scores of 3, 4 or 5," argued the General Waiver Request (PDF, 700+ pages). "An all girls environment is reasonably necessary for the school to improve the self-confidence of girls in their academic abilities, especially in STEM areas where an achievement gap currently exists. GALA's admissions shall also comply with AB 1266 to ensure male students who identify as female are admitted to the school." The school's CS-related Partners include the UCLA Exploring Computer Science Program, as well as Google-bankrolled Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, and NCWIT. One of the reasons the all-girls STEM school reportedly got the green light is that its backers satisfied federal regulations requiring a "substantially equal school" for excluded male students by submitting a plan for a companion all-boys school that would emphasize English Language Arts, where they often fall short of girls' test scores, rather than GALA's focus on STEM. One suspects the no-fan-of-gender-restricted-public-schools ACLU may call BS on this maneuver.
Yet we are just creating more and more by bullshit like this. Usually it's just for women's benefit, but in this case there's also discrimination against gals too.
Why can't we just end this bullshit and let children grow up to do want they want to do?
How far this madness will go. Is this emancipation 2.0?
Gee I guess this is so girls don't have to face the pressure of competing with boys. We all know that girls need special help.
I just do not know that this is really needed. I know lots of very smart women in STEM that are very bit as talented as any male. The issues of fair pay and frankly pop culture need to be fixed.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Only america could create a society that tells me I should feel bad for finding a career I enjoy in a well paying field.
If you want equality, then stop trying to segregate, and stop man-shaming.
In comp sci can the feminists drop this BS about how everything is men's faults?
(Probably not though. Feminists don't want equality. They want superiority.)
This country has fought long and hard to remove segregation and discrimination and it is not acceptable to slide so far backwards. One of the biggest challenges in our future is our failures in education today. Our current trend is that secondary education is becoming more and more female, and believe me, we don't want to deal with the crime and productivity implications of an abundance of under-educated men in our country. Focusing on educating girls is a bad idea. Rather, the focus should be on educating all children. We don't give kids the credit they deserve. They are perfectly capable of choosing their favorite subjects on their own.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I am awed and stupefied, how the idea of sex-segregation — hitherto denounced as "detrimental to equality" — comes back around as a good one.
What's next? Whites-only school of basketball?
I wish, I was trolling...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Steer kids towards the subject for which they show the -least- aptitude?
Girls would have never coded systemd.
I am all for girls coding if systemd goes away as the dick's code it is.
"Boys will also receive additional vocation training in the ditch-digging, garbage collection, and front-line soldiering arts to help prepare them for their future careers as beasts of burden."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
First of all, American here.
Second of all, isn't this sort of experimenting on children? If by chance something goes wrong and they don't get the education they deserve, won't this be a problem? There's also the issue of boys missing out on an excellent education from that girls-only school.
Where does the fault lie? With teachers, students, or something else?
Will the confidence gained with this school last throughout a co-ed college experience?
Is it simply being in a room full of boys that causes issues? Could the same teacher teach two IDENTICAL CLASSES, one for boys, and one for girls, with nothing being different with the curriculum?
I bet, the school will have gender-neutral restrooms...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When they ace it, end up in one of the ultra competitive CS schools (or work environment) and haven't been exposed to whatever it is that causes female students to not do well right now, all in one shot? It would even out eventually, but the first few batches will be in for a rude awakening.
That's it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_IX
Whenever I read something about girls-only or boys-only, I like to replace the gender designations with race designations: "Citing statistics that showed a whopping 46 more Whites than Blacks passed the AP Computer Science Exam in 2011-12, the 640,000+ student Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) on Tuesday approved a waiver to enable the District to operate a single-race, all-Black STEM School called the Black Academic Leadership Academy (BALA)." ... even more interesting if you switch the races around...
Some things need to be said...
Time to start masculanism movement, because anti-male gender discrimination hit mainstream.
This trend to bring girls to CS is because they have run out of ideas on how to screw with traditional UI and want girls to come up with new UI paradigms.
Soon you will miss things like Gnome 3.
It is generally recognized that girls are generally ahead of boys on language and social studies. This is natural. If creating language schools for boys is a solution, it should have been there years ago.
What I see is that technology and STEM educations in lower grades are boring. Girls are already advanced so much and they do not like those boring stuff.
Personally, I am convinced that software programming skill can be taught effectively in elementary school with proper curriculum. In addition, it is really necessary for anyone to go through universities to become a good coder.
^(oo)^pig~
This.
Feminism in america and central europe is mostly about making women more superior than men. Why can a "equality manager" post only be held by a woman? Feminists should try to solve woman's supression by religion (be it sharia or the church), and end practices like child prostitution or genital cutting. People who call themselves feminists should be ashamed that they dont solve these problems first. What do you think is morr important: forcing a womam into a physics course, or stop her from being crippled because some religion requires her to?
First of all, I would just like to say that I applaud this move on the part of the L.A. school district. In the spirit of these groundbreaking projects, I would like to propose a similar measure here in Alabama that would help advance learning among our students as well. My new initiative would launch a series of White-only and Black-only schools that would better serve to the individual needs of students and help them to feel more comfortable in schools where they can feel free to speak freely and learn in a less hostile environment.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
"An all girls environment is reasonably necessary for the school to improve the self-confidence of girls in their academic abilities"
This is complete BS. Creating such artificial environment will put girls to have wrong understanding of their capabilities, and they will suffer even greater dissapointment when they go out on the competitive labor marker after 5 years of education. The next big BS will be to force 50% of the girls to go into STEM, and other girls to go into... I don't know, construction working?
It seems that such legislations are more of limiting people's freedom of choice, not about a specific gender. This hurts both genders.
One starts to think that the only people who have advantage of such "gender inequality/discrimination" mumbo-jumbo are institutions and companies that try to get more money from the government for absurd projects. Next time vote again for the same morons.
It's just not enough. The government must indoctrinate citizens "into STEM" in any way possible. It's 2015 and all the technology to date is apparently nothing but a shortcoming. Apparently, the best way to teach "gender equality", as well, is to segregate boys and girls. What is gender equality? The belief that two things, which are not identical should be treated equally, completely discarding the concept of individual self. Science is one way to understand the world, but dissolving abstractions is not for everyone. This is the world we live in. Look at what they did with the iPads, they believed all children in Los Angeles would benefit from a little more excess. Their plan failed before it was even able to monstrously fail. When I read this summary, the other thing I think to myself is....There will be nothing that will ever be "equal" or good enough for liberals. There always must be a plan to shape the future even if it forces the will on individuals who have not even reached adolescence, all to stoke the liberal ego. I hate liberal social experiments. They always fucking fail... with costs (financial or social).
It's bad enough women get a leg up on STEM jobs, but now boys are being tricked into a career with bad pay and hardly any employment?
No, they'll just find a way to blame its failure on evil white male heterosexuals, same as always.
that spent $1.3B on 12,000 iPads and couldn't get them to work.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
At the boys school the boys can't wear there skirts any higher than 4 inches above the knee and at the girls school the girls aren't allowed hair that touches there collar.
If you don't understand that 3, 4 or 5 is the right passing score then you should have studied harder *+&
* For the humor impaired, please try and find the joke in there before you mod me down. /. for?
+ For the math impaired - yes there is a joke in there
& For the humor AND math impaired, what the hell are you on
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Feminists should try to solve woman's supression by religion (be it sharia or the church), and end practices like child prostitution or genital cutting. People who call themselves feminists should be ashamed that they dont solve these problems first. What do you think is morr important: forcing a womam into a physics course, or stop her from being crippled because some religion requires her to?
What do you think feminists (or anyone, for that matter) can realistically do about women living in oppressive conditions outside of the West? Are you willing to enlist for the army of occupation we'd need to send to the Middle East and Africa? I'm not. I doubt many feminists are either.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Oh, now suddenly "separate" CAN be "equal" when it comes to schooling? I see an easy and colossal lawsuit in someone's future...
Hormones define personality to a great extent and develop parts of the brain differently. It's not that women can't be great engineers or that men are somehow more intelligent, but a large part of the inequality is due to natural inclinations not a lack of opportunity.
Posting AC to preserve moderations
You see, back in the grand old days of the USSR, all the rage was creating the "New Soviet Man" who would have all the best qualities and truly bring about World Socialism. All differences between race, ethnicity, even gender would be erased. Everyone would be the same fine specimens. We see how well that worked out.
It's amazing that the LA school district can't think of anything new, so has to replicate the failed policies of the Soviets.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
A whole lot of VB generated calendars that highlight the awful week every month.
If race segregation was the best solution to the problem then I would support it, but it's not. For historical reasons the best solution to racial problems in society is mixing. For the most part the history of men and women isn't so divided... Most men and women enjoy mixing, as it happens. There are different problems and different solutions are needed, and as long as that solution doesn't disadvantage one gender or cause more social problems then I support it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Uh huh, good old separate but equal...
Welcome to the 21st Century.
Governor Wallace would be so proud.
Minne-snow-da: Winter is comming...
Sorry social 'scientists', most testing shows that men have greater variance in IQ (or general intelligence 'g') than women, as well as perhaps a very small advantage in average intelligence. As a result there are (for purely genetic reasons) far more genius, as well as far more moron level men than women.
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/are-girls-too-normal-sex-differences-in.html
So of course there will be differences in STEM achievements - they strongly correlate with intelligence and men dominate the upper and lower ends. The same is true of wages. To create a system where no differences exist in wages or achievements between men and women at elite levels is to prove that you have an unfair/non-egalitarian system in place.
There's not a lot of folks who aren't middle aged, middle class, white American males in this comment section, huh?
.
... title 9 works and is OK i think in part because there's a necessary division between male and female sports. Sexual dimorphism and all that. Girls that want to play a sport have no way of competing on a level playing field if they're competing vs. the guys typically, so separate but equal... is a necessary evil.
where it doesn't seem to apply is in the case where there is no innate barrier to entry. Like saying "lets separate men and women's chess"... or men's and women's academics...
they are internalizing and adopting the stance that there is an innate inferiority in girls that would prevent them from competing with the boys in CS unless outright given their own "league" to play in.
men run faster, jump higher and are stronger than women, typically and at the summit...
are we also suggesting that they think harder now?
Perhaps girls aren't as interested in STEM subjects as boys, because their intrinsic culture, the floating "girlness" passed on from mother to daughter and from playmate to playmate, veers towards social interaction and the softer subjects. STEM is inherently a loner's paradise.
Reengineering people is not a good idea. Girls will find their own way into whatever they wish to do. You can't force them to like what you like, no matter how many Starfleet academies you lock them into.
Most men and women enjoy mixing, as it happens.
Speaking as a white student who had to briefly go to a majority black school when he was a kid, I can assure you that this is NOT the case. I've still got recurring pain in my jaw to prove it. Most people will not only self-segregate when given a choice, but are openly hostile to outside races when they're forced to let them in.
Ive come to find in my scientific research that black people have a tremendous underrepresentation in the STEM fields. My proposal im sure youll find unique and enriching, is of course to create a special school. This school, for blacks only of course, would focus on fostering STEM education. Ideally this school, while entirely ignoring existing structural inequality and systemic racism in society predicating everything from wage to employment discrimination, will serve as a beacon for for 21st century STEM future.
However should it become too cost prohibitive, or should quarterly market revenue predictions indicate the inability to fellate shareholders with ever glorious profits increasing in an unsustainably linear fashion, I'll close the school and turn it into an H1B visa advocacy think tank. Should this fail too, I'll renovate the first floor into an Urban Outfitters and the second floor will become a janitorial company entirely unrelated to race, class, or capitalist striafication in america. Failing these remarkable endeavors I have another project my stakeholders have approved which involves grinding human bone to a fine powder, then amalgamating this dust with adhesives manufactured from endangered birds and creating a final product suitable to paint road lines.
Good people go to bed earlier.
We have those already; they're called "charter schools." Here in Atlanta, anyone can attend the charter schools in theory, but in practice the white parents are the ones who sign their kids up, so the charter school ends up 70+% white and the regular public school (that serves the same neighborhood) ends up 80+% black.
(By the way: yes, those are real numbers; I looked them up.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Or, maybe, women and men simply aren't the same?
The anatomy and physiology are demonstrably different. Could those natural differences be having an effect on the interests in life? Feminists would like us to think, all of that is due solely to upbringing, but they offer no evidence — while denouncing detractors as "sexists" themselves.
Though businesses aren't allowed to discriminate, sports-leagues openly do all the time. A "co-ed" volleyball team, for example, must have at least two females out of six players at all times — because having more males is an advantage. A team showing up with only one woman is penalized one way or the other (see rule 11 of this set, for example), a team showing up for a coed game without any women automatically loses.
In chess too, for some reason, there are very few female Grandmasters (GMs). It got so embarrassing, a lesser title of Woman Grandmaster (WGM) was introduced... And there are some — but very few (all of them from countries with "traditional" views on gender-roles, BTW).
Now, I am not going to claim, women are intrinsically "inferior" to men — for a I don't think, the sexes are comparable, nor do they have to compete. We represent the same species. But we are certainly different — and I am not surprised, if the difference is manifested in aptitude for or interest in different carriers and pursuits.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If it's a matter of not having students who are sexually attracted to each other, they have a serious logistical problem:
I'm not positive, but I think you'd need something like this:
I am pretty sure the research on this is clear, you simply get better results when you separate girls and boys. They should offer more options to parents and students would would rather be taught away from the distractions of the opposite sex.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Yes, yes, a white only school where white kids can learn to play basketball seems like a good idea given the low numbers of white professional basketball players.
I am reasonably sure the research on this is clear. Girl's self-confidence is inversely proportional to how much time they spend with other girls.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The girls get a school which emphasizes a broad range of subjects, most of which are geared towards targeting gender inequality by creating a safe learning environment. Even if one of those emphasized subjects doesn't appeal to a particular girl, one of the others may. In other words, it will be labelled as an enrichment program.
The boys get a school which emphasizes a singular subject, most of which are geared towards targeting gender inequality by addressing low test scores. While English will appeal to some boys, it will not appeal to the majority of boys. That is true even if those boys are interested in fields that are traditionally dominated by women. In other words, it will be labelled as a remedial program.
I fail to see how this addresses gender inequality in any meaningful way. If the boys were offered a school geared towards the humanities and the arts, it may be possible to make such an argument. But that's not what's happening here.
Well ok.
But I have a feeling they may soon conveniently forget the "Substantially Equal" part as far as funding and teacher salaries goes, should the male-only school turn out to be substantially unequal as far as enrollment interest goes.
Race segregation had to end in the past to force the races to reconcile. There was too much hate and mistrust for society to function. But it causes problems as well, as people do not enjoy being around people different than they are. It was never abolished because it was better on educational grounds. And it is not necessarily true that returning to it in some ways would aggravate racial tensions.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
And that's a great argument for forcing mixing from the very start, to prevent the build up segregated cultures.
Do they. Do they really.
What do you think feminists (or anyone, for that matter) can realistically do about women living in oppressive conditions outside of the West? Are you willing to enlist for the army of occupation we'd need to send to the Middle East and Africa? I'm not. I doubt many feminists are either.
Education.
The elite of the world still comes to American Universities to learn. Then they go home. They are often intelligent and influential and can have a role in shaping attitudes, policy, and social change.
You very rarely change a culture for the better with an army of soldiers. An army of ideas stands a much better chance.
Plessy v. Ferguson is widely considered a black stain on the history of the court, along with Korematsu and the Dred Scott decision. Plessy was at least overturned in the Brown v. Board of Ed decisions; Korematsu (allowing the internment of Japanese Americans during war with Japan) has technically never been overturned but nobody in their right mind would cite to it. Dred Scott was effectively overturned by the 14th Amendment. (Which is also the only reason your cops need a search warrant, for example, a result NEVER intended by the drafters of the amendment.)
Arg. Let people do what they want to do. Let them do what they are good at. Let them be as good as they can be. Stop trying to make everyone the same. Everyone is different. Everyone has their own gifts.
It would be better to have Boys that are world leaders in Science and Engineering, and Girls that are world leaders in what they statistically tend to be leaders in than to expend all our energy trying to make everyone on par with each other.
Their conclusion.... "An all girls environment is reasonably necessary for the school to improve the self-confidence of girls in their academic abilities" is flawed... while there may be some statistical evidence that students in segregated education perform better academically than those in schools where the genders are together, they are completely mistaking correlation as causation. Demographically, there is a very strong correlation between family income and the school that one attends in the first place, and somehow they completely overlook that this might in any way be a contributing factor to improved academic performance rather than the academic environment itself. I don't argue that the academic environment may contribute to a small extent, but I'd bet its significance comes in at a distant second place compared to the environment in which the child was actually raised. I don't know of any study that shows that sexually segregated education performs statistically any better than conventional public education except to the extent that the people who usually go to those kinds of schools usually have a higher income and can in turn often afford a higher quality of education in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So quality STEM training is "substantially equal" to getting a English lit degree?
That doesn't seem right to me.
I'll have to ask about this the next time I'm buying fast food while on break from my STEM related job.
and by that I mean, circle jerk...
I thought Brown vs. Board of Education got rid of the "Separate But Equal" doctrine in US education. And why isn't the "equivalent" all-boys school also a STEM school? This sounds ripe for litigation. I wish I had standing because I'd love to retire early courtesy of idiotic SJWs.
Can we drop the pretense that "computer science" in high schools is nothing more than programming and turning out code monkeys.
"For historical reasons the best solution to racial problems in society is mixing"
LOL. What "historical reasons" are those? Denying white people the freedom of NON-association? Perhaps you can bring the ARMY in again to FORCE more white people to 'mix', as you laughably put it.
Why are non-whites so desperate to live around whites? What do you think white people have got, which non-whites haven't, which we HAVE to give to them?
I think a bigger problem is that only 70 students TOTAL in the entire unified LA school district passed the CS AP test!
This is nothing but segregation, which is still so common in the USA (though nowadays often self imposed) that even supposedly progressive and enlightened people fail to see how wrong it is.
Many of my supposed feminist friends want to place girls in school ghettos.
You can't force people to be who you want them to be. And people aren't guinea pigs for your fucking social experiments.
The IT business is rough for women, or so says women.
So why would anyone want a woman that came from an all woman school and now has to deal with men.
Seems to me working with others is a teachable item for both men and women, but not when they are isolated.
Also, it's been my observation that ideas like this rarely pan out in any meaningful way.
And I have the sneaking suspicion that the instructors will pass on their prejudice in such a setting.
Why do women that have daughters continue to teach the "female standard" in clothing, behaviour, and expectations?
I have seen nothing so damaging to "gender rights" (A phrase that would never exist in a rational society) as the way the children are raised.
Then you expect to clear that intellectual sediment through protesting? Or isolation?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Most men and women enjoy mixing, as it happens.
Not when we're between 6 and 11 or so we don't! That's the age when girls have cooties!
WARNING!!! If you are a boy in this age range, you must stay away from these creatures during this time period or you could get cooties, too!
Damn, I didn't know people were so uneducated in serious medical matters like these. Stay safe, citizens!
That is all.
assumming a 50% split between genders
58 out of 320,000 boys passed (0.018 % ) verses
12 out of 320,000 girls passed (0.003%) .
That seems like a really low rate regardless of gender.
Adding a 125 more students to a intensive stem core seems like it would not really change the overall numbers that much, maybe 30 to 50 might pass the AP exam.
Most Quilt Shop owners are female. Who cares?
What ever happened to "best man for the job"?
I mean, just look at us. That being said, "we" have only been domesticated for a rather short period of our history on this planet. Prior to our domestication we were living with all the other animals out in the wild, so, yup, we too have sexual dimorphism. This leads to certain attributes/abilities that are stronger/weaker in each sex. I do firmly believe that anyone, regardless of gender/race/origin should be allowed to be happy and pursue in whatever direction they want regardless.
But, I think that the pathway to co-ed STEM is to integrate men/women early on. So that way if a man/women looks at a resume when they are in a hiring capacity, they gloss over gender/race/origin and go straight to qualifications. Those old-school legacy things like boy and girl scouts are, in a way, part of the problem. I also remember school teachers also emphasizing gender based roles, as they too, were also subject to the same. So, we need to take a look at the school system again and find a way to solve the integration issue there.
Yes, STEM does require a LOT of study, alone, without any inteference ( read this as teasing, berating, or 'jokes' played by idjits ).
Women prefer groups. They like the committee style of approval. Might not work with boys...
So what works?
Make STEM subjects taboo! Naughty!
Programming for dildo controllers as examples. Never discuss the example in class...
Programming direct electrical brain stimulation ( anatomy AND neuro-electronics AND programming ! ) as term projects... presumably for control of epilepsy....
but mentioned in the book/course material for pleasure centers...
Designing whole-house controllers for humidity, temperature, music and light for weddings, also in the book for orgies... never discuss it in class...
Designing robotic cleaning maids for orgies, parties and the messes... same...
Kids will learn at an amazing rate to an amazing level, as always...
Brought to you by Department of Redundancy Department, I suppose.
What about boys who feel that their gender identity is female? Are they going by physical gender or self-identified gender?
Heard a lot of commentary recently on this.
Yes, girls (and boys) do better on tests in single gender environments. But not much has been studied on "2 years after leaving school" performance.. that is, you might be locally optimizing, getting a good return in the short run, but worse in the long run.
I think that school is about more than just transfer of information. It should be structured as "real life watered down and safe". School is where you learn that not everyone is nice, not everyone is unbiased, etc., but hopefully in a limited sense, so that when you enter the big wide world, it's not a shock to the psyche.
In some ways, colleges have the same issues: single gender colleges are pretty unusual these days, but the "artificiality" of life in some colleges (or majors) makes the graduates less suited to being a functioning member of society.
What I really hate is this "we're going to create ideal workers" kind of philosophy under some of the programs. yes, we all know that public schooling in America is based on the Prussian system designed to create order and structure and people willing to work hard at assigned tasks. Some of that is good.
In computer science, passing scores are 11, 100, and 101.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
This will be interesting. We will finally have a couple of populations that we can study to see whether gay men are as bitchy to each other as a bunch of women.
In some cases even turning out code monkeys would be a good outcome. I submitted some thoughts on a computer science curriculum for middle school students in a STEM program. I thought introducing some concepts would be nice: binary representations, Base 2 arithmetic, a little taste of formal logic, some basics of building logic gates with transistors (you can even use MineCraft to show this!), a little discrete mathematics, an introduction to formal grammars and state machines, data structures and algorithms; then take it up a notch with high-level overviews of operating systems, compilers, languages, databases, AI, cybernetics, networking, and storage systems. Sort of a tour through basic concepts at both the low and high levels. What has emerged is more of a "how to use Office" with a little bit of "this is the difference between HTML, JavaScript, and Java". Sigh.
LAUSD will be tricked into to doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and it will work and we will all learn something.
Boys schools and Girls schools will outperform mixed schools and heads will explode. Mark the words of the great hevel-varik!
They'll never encounter a girls-only workplace; they need to learn not only how to do the work, but how to deal with the people.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"An all girls environment is reasonably necessary for the school to improve the self-confidence of girls in their academic abilities...where an achievement gap currently exists."
If females cannot thrive in an environment of learning alongside males, how can females possibly thrive in an environment of working cooperatively with males?
The next logical step would then be to conclude that "An all girls environment is reasonably necessary for the workplace to improve the self-confidence of girls in their technical abilities...where an achievement gap currently exists."
"For historical reasons the best solution to racial problems in society is mixing."
What historical reasons are those? What do you mean by "problem"? What data do you have to support the conclusion that "mixing" is the best solution to that "problem"?
I've never seen tangible evidence to indicate that this society's obsession with "diversity" and "multiculturalism" is justified or that implementing public policy to achieve it yields net positive results.
Equal Opportunity Outsourcing
Table-ized A.I.
"An all girls environment is reasonably necessary for the school to improve the self-confidence of girls in their academic abilities"
No it most certainly is fucking not. By depriving either sex of opposite sex interaction you are just disadvantaging them for when it comes time to work in the real world where you won't be gender segregated. Bullshit like this really makes me think these people are idiots.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
And some kids: No pets!
...when Google and Microsoft come under fire for their lack of gender diversity?
http://fortune.com/2014/08/29/how-tech-companies-compare-in-employee-diversity/
....all those cool iPads the district got from Apple that don't work as they were told they would.
I suggest we also set up all female fishing boats, coal mines, underwater welding teams, construction sites, oil-platforms, electrical repair teams, etc.
9/10 workplace deaths are male. The above industries are major culprits -- and heavily male. (And no, strength is *not* required in modern mechanized industry). Where are the social justice warriors on this issue? Shouldn't women be out there clamoring for an equal share of work-related fatalities?
As they say, there are no feminists on sinking ships.
The whole nonsense is a thinly veiled power grab and nothing more.
I play video games with my daughter...but she always finds a way to "play dress up" in the game. Hours of trying on armour and weapons for appearance rather than functionality.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
128 boys took the exam, and 58 passed (45%).
43 girls took the exam, and 12 passed (28%).
Perhaps the author should have noted that nearly 5 times as many boys passed as girls.
They might also have noted that only 171 kids took the exam.
You already have them. The white people left the cities and formed their own little planets, complete with nearly-total white schools. By default, the cities became nearly all black and, since the money and employment ran away, poor.
Can we drop the pretense that "computer science" in high schools is nothing more than programming and turning out code monkeys.
I wish that high schools did turn out programmers and code monkeys. My kid's high school "Computer Science" class is nothing more than how to use fucking PowerPoint and Excel.
Assuming that segregation actually works out to favor an overall academic improvement for the students, isn't this creating an even bigger problem by removing social interaction between kids of the opposite gender? School isn't just purely for academic purposes, kids actually learn other life skills there like how to make friends, or how to interact with people of the opposite sex. Maybe there's a perceived benefit that teen pregnancy goes down (or some other nonsense), but now we've got a bunch of kids more likely to be misandrists or misogynists, because they're only used to interacting with their own gender.
Perhaps we can have some insight from a gender-segregated boarding school or something, and how that's affected your life (or how some of your classmates behave now when compared to others in society)
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
We can look forward to all 1 gender work environments also then since the complaint will be that working with males degrades females performance.
I wake up every morning willing to believe we are all equal and that with the right amount of effort, anyone is able to achieve anything anyone else has done.
But now I hear black children learn differently than white children, girls learn differently than boys, and rich learn differently than the poor. Do we really have to segregate everyone now so they all get a learning environment designed just for them?
circle, circle, slash, dot ...
more excuses to funnel money away from public schools to private charter schools, which have a proven track record of not being any better than, and in many cases being worse than, public schools.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
There are many more women going to college than men, and many more women graduating.
There are many,many STEM fields (Mathematics, Science, Technology) that are flush with an ever increasing number of women and will soon greatly outnumber men.
On the other hand, computer science and some engineering fields (The "E" in STEM) are clearly lacking in female participation. If this lack of diversity is harmful, then create a school that targets one of those areas "Computer Science", "Electrical Engineering", NOT STEM. Targeting "STEM" in general will just drive even more women into the STEM fields which are already completely unbalanced with more women than men (like Biology)... and that makes no sense.
When you are operating under false facts, you tend to develop really bad solutions to non-problems.
Can we drop the pretense that "computer science" in high schools is nothing more than programming and turning out code monkeys.
In my experience, "computer science" in high school wouldn't even qualify anyone for being a code monkey...
If by high school you haven't taught yourself programming, you aren't going to learn it taking a class in high school or community college or even university well enough to code yourself out of a paper bag.
If you finally do learn programming later in life, it will probably later when you actually have a job (or if you are one of those recent folks that are learning to code in a boot-camp).
One easy litmus test I would stand behind is the use of "self-confidence". Only charlatans try to blame bad performance on "self-confidence", and only charlatans try to solve bad performance by increasing "self-confidence". There is no reason to believe that self-confidence will improve anyones academic achievement (http://www.acceptandchange.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/vialle-heaven-ciarrochi-2005-jagu-relat-between-self-esteem-and-acad-achieve.pdf). I knew loads of people in highschool who were very confident that they knew more than enough to get by on and that since they were already far smarter than everyone else they did not need to bother learning anything more. Confidence is the Achilles heal of learning and knowledge. And it is not only stupid to try and increase confidence separately from actual ability, but also reckless and dangerous. Imagine someone telling you, as you attempt to get in a car: "You don't look very confidence, here have a beer it will give you confidence in your driving, allowing you to succeed"
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
So, will LA school district help those same girl STEM students get jobs when companies don't want to hire US Citizens but prefer to hire H1B visa holders?
Oh wait, they're not thinking that far ahead.
What I don't understand is - why is STEM the only gender-imbalanced area of interest? Why not the trades? Obviously women aren't much interested in that either, nor the reasonable paycheck (with perhaps unreasonable hours). I would owe this to prestige. Women already dominate most "professional" jobs, manager positions and have a much larger presence in post-secondary education. Now they feel unfairly left out of the last piece of the highly-educated pie. Clearly gender-role laden jobs are only offensive when they're in the office.
I would certainly like to hear the argument for not encouraging women to join the trades instead. Or men to be nurses (which is the only Historically female-dominated in memory job that comes with high-pay).
Separating children and teenagers into 'boys and girls' keeps reinforcing the idea that these are part of some black and white, unchanging reality.
The fact of the matter is that both the gender and sex binaries are a complete lie. From fluent gender roles to a wide variety of physical characteristics (where'd an intersex/hermaphrodite person like yours truly fit into this system, for example?), making a school 'girls-only' or 'boys-only' merely opens the can of worms of 'what's a girl/boy?'.
Is a transsexual boy or girl a girl or a boy? What about someone who is 'genderqueer'? What about an intersex person (pick one of many dozens of conditions there)?
For these reasons 'gender-segregated' schools feel more like an artifact of an ancient, ignorant society than something which we should admire or strive to imitate.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
Ok boys,
Time to go buy some awesome skirts so you can attend this school. Can you also self-identify as lesbian?
Putting the problems of separate-but-equal and equal outcome vs. equal opportunity aside, this policy would be missing the point of co-ed primary school in general. It always seemed to me that the real benefit of going to school with boys and girls alike wasn't to foster a learning environment that would pander to your individual needs, but rather to serve as a training ground to learn how to interact with people. It's the same reason we frown on home schooling vs. public or private school: Individualized education may make us smarter, but it will destroy our ability to work in teams and collaborate -- and, if anything, that's the most important skill that we can all have.
But if you separate men and women until they get jobs, what then? Both sexes are absolutely fucked when it comes to interacting with each other in a social environment. Good luck with any man respecting a woman's opinion or input, as well as with any woman respecting a man's opinion. Good luck getting men and women to cooperate rather than compete. Imagine 20-somethings with the emotional maturity of kindergarten students, except instead of playing on a playground, they're supposed to be engineering diagnostic electronic modules for airplanes, or something equally important. Anyone who says discrimination is beneficial clearly doesn't remember the degree to which little boys and girls disrespect each other. Better to let gender roles shift slowly than to put men and women into the workplace, unequipped to deal with the situation of working with someone who doesn't have similar genitalia to them.
Honestly if we lived in a neighborhood that was 80-90% people of different color than us, I'd pay a couple thousand a year to put my kids in a school where most of the other kids looked like them. Otherwise you are inviting a world of pain into your children's life. In my experience 12-16 year olds revel in uniquely cruel forms of racism and bullying. If I can could keep my kids out of that situation for 5% of my income, I'd do it every time.
"Separate but equal"... sounds really familiar for some reason...
to the girls and boys why they have been separated?
As MLK said: "The subtle racism of lowered expectations..." replace racism w/sexism
and it will all be done again. To no avail. At least since I was in 7th grade (that's about 30 years ago) there have been special sections, schools, what have you for getting girls into mathematics and technical subjects. Usually they flop big-time. Sometimes they appear to have some success for a year or two and then flop. The sensible person would look at these failures and think that whatever the cause for the difference, it cannot be solved with this sort of segregated schooling. The politically motivated educator just keeps doing the same thing over and over again.
Exactly. Most Iranian nuclear scientists were educated in the US. This is clearly the best solution.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
No such thing. You can't balance a girls school on topic A with a boys school on topic B. I don't care what private schools do with their money, but I do not want tax dollars funding this idiocy.
I am all for inclusiveness. But this is not it. This is farcical.
Try and open a publicly funded All Black School of Business, balance it with an All White School of Jazz, and tell me this makes sense. I'll be over here trying not to simultaneously laugh and cry.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
The neighborhood in that area isn't like that -- the neighborhood itself is probably about a 50%/45%/5% black/white/other mix. If there were only one school that all the kids went to, it would be thoroughly integrated.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'll be keenly watching both the enrollment and graduation statistics for this school.
My hypothesis is that it will have a disproportionately low enrollment.
What do you think feminists (or anyone, for that matter) can realistically do about women living in oppressive conditions outside of the West?
What are you talking about? FGM is done in the west in huge numbers, by immigrants from those countries sending their kids back there to mutilated. No one wants to do much about it because it's "racist".
In the real world men and women need to work together. Just wrong to separate them for education. STEM work is really interactive. Teams of developers and engineers need to work together to make a successful product. I think STEM is wrong and it should really be STEAM. (A=arts). Art plays a larger part in the scheme of things than most people think. Science and Math can be more solitary, but try getting a job.
Except in this case, variation in STEM performance is a cultural phenomenon, not a physical one. Imagine giving girls a place where they can concentrate on learning STEM topics without worry of being psychologically intimidated by the boys. Only once we've had a full generation of women who have taught that they can stand on their own will we be able to free ourselves from the inherent sexism in our society.
Racism and sexism aren't PC, so parents and teachers pay lib service to the new ethos. But subconsciously, it's still really bad. Peers, parents, and media still paint women and minorities as being inferior. Sure, we don't want thought police, but it's people's unrecognized and unadmitted beliefs that cause problems of racism and sexism to linger.
This girls-only STEM school is an attempt at fixing this. Maybe it'll open up its own new problems. But people are burying their heads in the sand about just how racist and sexist we are. It's closeted, so if festers and generates resentment among those who hate being forced to treat everyone equally, and this actually perpetuates the problem. We need to blow it out into the open and address it head-on.
Some of these problems would also be helped by making men take more equal roles in parenting too. Professional men with kids are seen as responsible. Professional women with kids are seen as a flight risk. That's got to change. And the law should come down REALLY hard on men who father children and then skip out. Some companies provide equal paternity leave, and that's a step in the right direction. If I were the CEO of a big company, I'd have the addition of an in-house daycare (free for employees) on my action list.
Stop trying to make it happen. Women don't enjoy computer science. The college me wishes they did. Craming it down their throats won't help.
I love how society gets worked up about FGM but thinks it's okay to mutilate young boys by the millions. And don't give me any shit about how it's not the same thing, because even if I bought the BS put out there by the pro-circumcision crowd, it'd still be the equivalent of elective cosmetic surgery on people too young to give informed consent. Of course, it's not really, you're chopping off functional body parts.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Exactly right.
I will admit that MGM isn't as bad as FGM (plus, there's different degrees of FGM), but trying to say MGM is a good idea because of this is like saying chopping off your forefinger isn't as bad as chopping off your whole hand, so let's chop babies' forefingers off.
However, I will point out that it isn't "society" which thinks it's OK to mutilate young boys, it's American society (and Jewish culture too). The rest of western culture doesn't share America's puritanical sensibilities.
Remember, the entire reason America is so big on circumcision is because Dr. Kellogg in the Victorian Era pushed it as a way to discourage young boys from masturbating.
However, I will point out that it isn't "society" which thinks it's OK to mutilate young boys, it's American society (and Jewish culture too). The rest of western culture doesn't share America's puritanical sensibilities.
The rest of the West doesn't stop it either. It may be unique to the United States (+ South Korea and the Philippines, incidentally) in the non-religious context, but if you want to mutilate your son elsewhere in the West the authorities won't do anything to stop you. There were rumblings about Germany doing something to end the practice, but that's politically tricky to say the least, given their history with a certain frequently prosecuted group that happens to practice circumcision.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Last I heard, the Danes were getting into it with the Jews over this, because they are working to ban the practice.
I'm rooting for the Danes. I don't give a shit what your stupid religion says, mutilating young children's genitals is barbaric.