"Showdown at Gender Gap'' by Diane Ravitch, Forbes, p 68, April 7, 1997, reports that the Center for Women Policy Studies in Washington, DC, has called for the College Board to eliminate all questions from the college entrance Scholastic Aptitude Math Test on which boys regularly do better than girls. Math scores for boys, even after the tests were dumbed down two years ago, are still averaging 35 points higher than for girls. A majority of students entering and graduating from college are, however, girls.
An example of a "gender-biased'' question that should be eliminated according to CWPS (Forbes gives several examples): "Pat made a total of 48 pottery plates and cups. If she made twice as many plates as cups, how many plates did she make?'' On average, 12% more boys than girls gave the correct answer.
As Ravitch suggests, "Why stop at dumbing down the SAT? Why not eliminate math altogether? Then we can be sure of equal results.''
Perhaps it is the boys who should complain. The Wall Street Journal, p A16, January 30, 1997, quotes Nicholas von Hoffman, in the New York Observer as saying that while "between 1980 and 1995, four-year college tuition rose 256 percent - three times the rate of inflation .... academic standards continued to slip. In terms of equivalencies, a bachelor of arts degree in 1997 may not even be the equal of a graduation certificate from an academic high school in 1947.''
In a course required for university graduation with a BS in chemistry, my son Zachary Robinson is currently being "taught'' that farming is an environmental scourge because it allows too many people to live and pushes out the tribes of hunter-gatherers.
The "Commentary'' page of the journal Nature has come out in support of the Oakland, California tax-financed school program for ebonics. (See Nature386
, p 321, 27 March 1997.) The Nature article by G. K. Pullum prefers "African American English, AAE'' to the term "ebonics.'' Pullum treats us to a language lesson illustrating that the sentences "You ain't goin' to no heaven'' and "Couldn't nobody say what colour he is'' are grammatically perfect in AAE. Nature is published in England, home of Oxford and Cambridge and setting for the musical My Fair Lady (which was derived from Pygmalion by Shaw). Poor Liza apparently had her grammar right. She was just unable to teach it to Professor Higgins.
Whether it is called ebonics or AAE, this new fad effectively promotes racist efforts to put black Americans in positions of ridicule and keep professional agitators permanently in business.
