I'm warping this thread into something else, sorry 'bout that. And I don't want to piss off anyone around here, really. Just genuinely worried about boys in the American educational system. Here's one perspective....
Boys Falling Behind: A Critique of American Education
"During the 1990's, while girls were thriving in American schools like never before, the academic media buzzed with stories about how they were in "crisis"-disenfranchised by a culture whose school system historically favored boys. In 1997, the same year the auspicious declarer of this crisis, Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, received the $250,000 Heinz Award for "transform[ing] the paradigm for what it means to be human," 4,483 American young people between the ages of five and twenty-four killed themselves: 701 females and 3,782 males.
Girls in crisis? "A myth," Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute asserts, perpetuated by pro-female "partisans" whose research is based primarily on anecdotal evidence. Just look at the facts, she says. Boys "dominate dropout lists, failure lists, and learning-disabilities lists."
All right, let's look at the statistics. The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education reports that 34% of boys are in grades below their age, compared with 26% of girls. In 12th grade, only 28% of boys rate as proficient readers on federal tests, with girls pulling in at 44%. In addition, boys are three times more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
A whopping 73% of learning disabled students, in fact, are boys. "Instead of pushing sound solutions," reports USA Today in an October 2003 editorial on these trends, "many educators merely advocate prescribing more attention-focusing Ritalin for the boys, who receive the drug at four to eight times the rate of girls." In a dyslexia study focusing on Connecticut schools, Yale neuroscientist Sally Shaywitz found that the mostly female teaching staff was quick to identify rambunctious boys over quiet girls as potentially learning disabled-an action with serious consequences for all students regardless of gender...."
http://kevincassell.com/PERSON/CONVERSA/boys.htm