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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?
Only america could create a society that tells me I should feel bad for finding a career I enjoy in a well paying field.
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"
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 my son wants to go to the special programming school, because that's what he's really in to, will he be allowed to? No. And why not? Because he might disrupt the all-girl environment and damage the self-confidence of the girls in the class. "You can't come because boys are icky." How is that not "man-shaming?"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.