Schools and boys

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The Czar of Muscovy hits on the problem of public schools and their reluctance to allow actual measures of teaching performance:

But rather than blame the teacher—the Царица consistently maintains that only about 18%–20% of teachers actually want to be in the mandatory union—the key thing here to remember is that giving students letter grades also assigns grades to the school district. If you eliminate failing grades out of the district, it is so much easier to cover up how bad liberal education is.

My take (as I told the Czar) is that teachers teach the easiest to teach kids (the smartest) when they should be focusing their efforts on the ones who need more instruction.  Via the Captain, we see that this applies to essentially the entire male gender - since little girls are more eager to please than little boys, schools devote more attention, praise, and good grades on girls even when boys outperform on standardized tests:

What public school teachers prefer is an easy day with obedient, compliant students. Unfortunately for boys, they don’t typically fit into the obedient and compliant category. So, rather than try harder, the teacher simply marks them down and leaves it up to the boys or their parents to deal with it (parents, many of whom are single mothers, definitely share some of the responsibility).

In private schools it’s a different story. Sons of the wealthy have higher academic achievement than their female counterparts. This is because teachers at private schools are informed in no uncertain terms that students’ performance in their classes is directly relevant to their continued employment. Miraculously, rich people’s sons are better educated and perform better every step of the way than their daughters.

Add in the fact that there is a whole feminist organization to push A Nation At Risk while ignoring and downplaying the exact same issues effecting little boys, and there's a clear institutional breakage on the Left.  But I'm sure that it will be entirely different when they're running our health care.

Extra credit question: compare and contrast the expected resource allocations for breast cancer and prostate cancer in an public health institution controlled by a feminist philosophy vs. the same institution without that philosophy.  The answer? You're a patriarchal, sexist pig.