One of my sons was in the second grade and I knew he was not doing well. At a parent-teachers conference, I asked the teacher repeatedly if he was working at grade level...No answer. Finally she said, "He is doing just fine, FOR a BOY".
After some effort, she was removed. Today my son is a highly respected medical doctor.

My brother-in-law, when he was in the ninth grade, had a teacher who decided, because he found the text book boring and wasn´t reading his lessons, that he couldn´t read. She put in her records that he was an ´impared learner´ and, lo and behold, on his permanent record now appears the term ´learning disabled´. My husband was furious when he found out.

BIL is currently in his mid-twenties and, thanks to some intervention from his big brother, he now knows that he is not reading disabled. (He never was but he took the opinions of the teaching authorities to heart. Imagine.)

This is just one of many reasons our son learns at home.

Christina Hoff Sommers has been writing about the war on boys for years!

I don´t believe it is the prejudice of female teachers causing this. After all, female teachers predominated even in 1-room schoolhouses of the 1800s. But now teachers are ´graded´ on testing scores. Standardized tests only partially measure how much you have learned; what they really measure is how well you have learned to take standardized tests. Young girls tend to be willing to please; if teacher says that learning to fill in the circles with No. 2 pencils is important, then, by golly, they will do a very neat job of filling in those circles! Little boys, on the other hand, are far more interested in learning about the world than in filling out standardized test forms.

It comes down to the age-old issue of which is most important - doing something, or measuring what you have done? Government, schools, for-profits, nonprofits - we seem to be in an age where measuring is more important than doing. To our detriment. Businesses don´t run as well on 90-day earning cycles. Jobs ´saved or created´. Pass your courses but fail the standardized test and you don´t graduate.It is the American way, but not necessarily for the good.

We could save a trillion bucks per year just by cashiering all the school teachers-mostly doctrinaire Marxists all- even without knowing it- and buy every kid an I-Pad and Hooked On Phonics, (or the grade equivalent).

The outcome would be better.

Vouchers

Any parent of boys will tell you that this is the way things are in schools. Boys are discriminated against, not only by teachers, but also by the curriculum. My son came home from school one day and asked me if there were any boys in history because all of the stories were about girls.

He is now 15, and although he´s a straight A student who scored in the top 5% on his placement tests, he still gets treated like an idiot. He actually had a teacher who asked him with a straight face, "Are you smart?" He said he felt like she felt it couldn´t possibly be true that he was. He has zero respect for teachers, and so do all of his friends.

He told me that most of the boys just sit in the back of the class and do nothing because they no longer care and don´t see the point. It´s already been decided that they´re morons, so why try?