Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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"
Time to start masculanism movement, because anti-male gender discrimination hit mainstream.
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.
It's pretty clear to me that that's what the people designing this program think, at least!
I mean, holy shit! They're talking about implementing a six-year academic program just to get these girls ready to pass the AP exam, which is only equivalent to an introductory college CS course! How fucking insulting can they be, to imply that those girls need six years to learn what they should be learning in one?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
To your point (sorry!) There is no "fault". Girls tend not to care about STEM subjects. It's that simple. STEM requires endless hours studying alone, about subjects that would bore an anvil to tears. We literally drug our children to hold still and have the stuff poured into them. It isn't for everyone; that's why so many antisocial types gravitate towards it. You either like it, or you don't.
Teachers don't "fail" - students fail. And "failure" is not the right word. You can't force interest into a human child like some personality-altering enema. A teacher can instill the basics of how to be a human being, like history, and arithmetic, and reading. The rest comes from the child and the matrix the child lives in. You can't manufacture Alan Turings, and God help us if you could - the world does NOT need to be composed of semi-autistic math prodigies. We need the other types as well.
Let the DAMNED children become what they want to become. Here's a poser: has any one of these STEM-pushers asked the kids what they think about their "failure" to become good corporate tech fodder?
They are literally banned from studying STEM at that school. On the "beasts of burden" thing: There is no girls-only school for garbage collectors, even though women are woefully underrepresented in that field too. Men are being pushed out of "attractive" jobs, which leaves the burdensome jobs.
Banned from that particular school, but not banned in general. It's like the girl's bathroom, Boys are banned from going in to it, but not from peeing in a separate boy's bathroom.
Your argument about attractive jobs is interesting, since one of the common arguments against girls in STEM is that STEM, and particularly CS, is awful and they are actually far too intelligent to get into a dead end career where they will quickly be replaced by an H1-B. The problem is that it's really an argument against competition in general, because any competition makes it harder for men to get into certain jobs.
Women do a lot of shitty jobs as well, particularly cleaning. Cleaning toilets is not very nice. Strangely there isn't much of an effort to get more men into toilet cleaning either, perhaps because the goal is for more people to have good jobs instead of shitty ones.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
All the janitorial staff in my office are men. Pretty sure men clean toilets, too.
The point of these social experiments seems to get more and more women into the desk and office jobs. That leaves only the grubby, dirty, outside jobs for men. And nobody gives a shit about that.
And no, I'm not crying to hold on to some men's only club. On my floor here my technical team is 4 men and 3 women, and our boss is a woman (as are the 2 superiors of hers to whom I report), and ~48/50 of the non-technical desk workers in the cubes outside my office window are women. Which is fine, I love my job and my workplace. So it's not like I'm "scared of teh girls takin' over!" They already have and I'm perfectly okay with that.
But the "it's so awful, get all the training for girls and ignore boys!" hysteria seems pointless. Girls already dominate the educational system. They will dominate the future workforce. A boy growing up now who didn't have all these special programs will have a tough time competing with the girls who were prepped and trained for this their entire lives, so what else is he going to do? Maybe he'll luck out like my boss's husband. He stays home and takes care of the kids while she works. Lucky bastard.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.