Gender Gap in High School

Looking back over the last half century, can we say that any liberal enthusiasm has resulted in a good outcome?

For decades liberals have been saying that girls are shortchanged in school. And they have forced us to implement programs of various kinds to discriminate in favor of girls.

But Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters beg to differ. The problem in education is not girl proficiency but sub-par performance from boys. While

72 percent of female students graduate from high school, only 65 percent of male students earned a diploma.

Well, that’s not too bad, you say. But when you unpack the results by race, as all progressives like to do, the results become alarming.

The difference in graduation rates between females and males was about five-percentage points for white students and only 3 percentage points for Asian students. Among Hispanic and black female students the graduation rates are 58 percent and 59 percent, respectively, compared to 49 percent for Hispanic males and 48 percent for black males. Thus, the gender gap is twice as large for minority students as for white students.

So why is this, liberals? Institutional sexism? Institutional racism? How could this be? Schools in minority areas are run by and for liberals. How could there be racism and sexism there?

There is probably something dark and menacing here. But it probably isn’t racism or sexism. Understandably, liberals really don’t want to look at it too closely. It is beginning to look as thought liberals have been wrong about everything, and especially wrong about education.

Sooner or later we are going to have to admit that the progressive enthusiasm for helping the marginalized has had the opposite effect. People must not be coddled and pushed around. They must learn to make it on their own with minimal help from the helping professions and maximum effort of their own.

But that would be an America with a lot less jobs for liberals. And we can’t have that, can we?

Still, liberals can count one success. They set out to favor girls over boys in the education system, and the result is now in. Girls now do much better than boys in school. But isn’t that discriminatory?

Germans Accuse Brit Tabloids of Bum Deal

War has broken out between the German and the British tabloids. And nobody can tell when it will be over.

The British Sun, famous for its Page 3 beauties, published a photo of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bum—that she had incautiously bared while changing into a bathing suit. According to Roger Boyes in the London Times, in the accompanying article

headlined “I’m big in the Bumdestag” and containing eight puns about bottoms, The Sun gave a backhanded compliment to Frau Merkel’s positive effect on the economy and its “much-improved bottom line”.

Well! The Germans were not about to take that sitting down.

“Very bad form,” said Eduard Lintner, of the Christian Democrats. “There should be no place for such pictures.”

The Germans may be the most advanced country in Europe but they certainly aren’t doing much to counter the stereotype that they don’t have a sense of humor.

This may just be the beginning of the conflict. Coming up soon is the soccer European Cup and the prospect of headlines like “‘Achtung! Surrender’ and ‘Blitz the Fritz‘”

Tension in Baghdad

In Iraq blogger Iraq The Model is getting cranky. He wants to see the politicians quit playing games and get a government on the ground. In his latest report Prime Minister Jafari agreed to step down and then decided no to.

The worrying thing is the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. Writes Omar:

The security situation had been steadily deteriorating since after the elections and the Samarra mosque bombing and Baghdad has become more dangerous a place than it used to be.

Makeshift barricades that block entrances and inner streets are now a common sight all over Baghdad.

The delay in forming a government has everyone worried and accusatory.

Baghdad's residents are managing their daily life with great difficulty and each delay in forming the government makes the situation even tenser and people more worried.

Faster please.

The Case for Rumsfeld

No doubt Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has an aggressive manner. No doubt he has made plenty of mistakes. No doubt he has humiliated dozens of generals. But resign?

We can understand why the MSM is parading the opponents of Secretary Rumsfeld through the chat shows. They will do anything to damage the Bush administration. It is not even
conscious; it is instinctive.

We can understand the frustrations of the generals. If only Rumsfeld had followed their advice. A Wall Street Journal editorial appreciates the many grounds that Generals Swannick, Zinni, and Batiste might have for wishing that they had been led by someone else.

But we the American people have different priorities. We want someone to think the deep thoughts about America’s grand strategy. We want someone to keep on the job in Iraq and deal with the larger geo-strategic issues arising out of global Islamism. And we also also want someone to transform the armed forces of the United States to deal with the challenges of the twenty-first century.

It’s fine to criticize the president and the secretary of defense. But, as perennial hawk Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. writes:

It bears mentioning that few, if any, of those demanding Mr. Rumsfeld's removal offer an alternative.

In particular, it bears mentioning that nobody has proposed an alternative strategy. Even Candidate John Kerry in 2004 merely proposed to the voters that he would execute the president’s strategy in Iraq better than the president.

Since nobody is proposing a radical change in US strategy, what’s the point of changing horses? Rumsfeld will be gone in a couple of years anyway. And then the new president and the new secretary of defense can change anything they want.

Brit Working Class Warms to BNP Fascists

In Britain this week everyone is writing about the horrifying move of working-class Brits to the racist British National Party, or BNP. And there is a fear among the chattering classes that the BNP will make substantial gains in the local elections coming up in May. But they really cannot believe it. Writes Rachel Sylvester in the Daily Telegraph,

I find it hard to believe that a sixth of people in this tolerant, decent and middle-of-the-road country really will... put an X in the far-Right box when they fill in their ballot papers in two weeks' time.

Oh please. It is the middle class that believes in tolerance, decency, and middle-of-the-road. The working class belonged to the Labour Party because it was a fighting party that at least talked about a class war against the Tory toffs.

The problem is that the traditional working class, the non-working class that lives in “social housing” and “on the sick,” i.e., on disability rather than work, has rather gone off Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

Actually, it is probably closer to the truth to say that the Labour Party has gone off them.

It used to be that the Labour Party lived and breathed the working class, but now it is more interested in canvassing support from social workers, teachers, and immigrant Muslims and doing the multicultural thing. Understandably the working class feels betrayed.

On top of that the welfare state has destroyed the authentic culture of the working class. It used to be that working-class men had jobs, got married, and supported their children. They liked a smoke, and they liked a drink. In the welfare state, they don’t need working-class men. Sorry fellahs.

In Germany when the ordinary people got reamed by the lefty politicians in the 1920s they regressed, in their demoralization, to the tribal politics offered to them by Adolf Hitler.

Today in France and in Britain the elite has tired of telling the working class that it is the salt of the earth. They have gone on to other enthusiasms. Whereas they used to demonstrate their progressive faith by throwing other peoples’ money at the working class now they show how advanced they are by encouraging unlimited immigration and making Britain into a tolerant multicultural society.

And they are surprised that their former proteges are upset?

What is happening is that the working class, the folk that the Fabian socialists had organized into the tribal politics of class, is now shifting towards another form of tribalism, the tribalism of being native French and native British and hating the new pampered favorites of the political class. Abandoned by their lefty tribal chieftains they are seeking new clan leadership.

Women and Forgiveness

Since it is Easter, columnist Minette Marrin is thinking about forgiveness. And, she admits, she doesn’t get the point. After reviewing the news of the past week, including the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th 9/11 hijacker, she writes:

I could not understand the meaning of human forgiveness, at least not in extreme cases. Forgiveness may be divine but I don’t think it is human. To me it seems either pointless or meaningless.

There is, indeed, a good reason to wonder about the point of forgiveness in the larger social and political context. Evil is evil and must be fought to the death. But I think that the point of forgiveness manifests itself in the small world of the family, in particular in the face-to-face world of the woman and her personal relationships.

Let us try to imagine why forgiveness might be, not divine, but merely practical, and especially practical in a woman’s life and in her family relationships.

In the first place we have the evidence of Marvin Olasky and his 1990 book The Tragedy of American Compassion. He rehearses the system of rehabilitation used by 19th century charity workers in getting people out of the gutter and on to their feet. The first item in the A-B-C-D-E-F-G system as A for Affiliation. Upon meeting a needy person the charity worker would first try to find out about family members or friends upon whom their victim had a claim of support or affection. In other words, the workers were trying to bring together a family that had broken apart. It is likely that success would require forgiveness between the estranged family members.

Secondly, there is the evidence of the Asia Times columnist Spengler. Only half in jest, he laughs at the idea of women priests. “A priest's most important function is to forgive sins. Women never forgive anything,” or indeed forget anything. While it is true that: “Flesh-and-blood women cannot forgive men because they cannot be sure of them,” the same does not apply to relations between women. Can women really afford not to forgive other women? Forgive helps women repair a damaged network of care.

The other reason is surfaced by James M. Ault, Jr. in his sociological study of a fundamentalist church in Worcester, Massachusetts, Spirit and Flesh. Everyone knows that fundamentalist churches are hopelessly patriarchal. Women are second-class citizens. Well, not quite.

It is true that women did not hold any offices in the fundamentalist church of his study. But Ault found that it was misleading to assume that they had no power. On the contrary, they controlled the church. And they controlled it through their gossip network. The women’s gossip network got to define reality, who had said what to whom, and who had done what to whom. This made the women of the church enormously powerful. But their power often was used destructively, and the church would split every year or two.

How might this destructive power have been mitigated? By forgiveness.

I propose that while the destructive conflict of the men’s feud is mitigated by law, women’s conflict is mitigated by forgiveness.

Is it perhaps significant that the major force in the early Christian church was well-to-do Roman women? It might explain why, in Marrin’s words: “Forgiveness is central to Christianity.”

Seniors Like Medicare Drugs

For months we have been hearing horror stories about the complexities of the new Medicare Part D drug program. Seniors were totally angry and confused and would likely take their revenge in November.

But now that the deadline for signup is approaching, it turns out that seniors are fairly content, writes Donald Lambro in the Washington Times.

[T]he latest Washington Post/ABC News poll found 74 percent of all seniors said they had "an easy time" signing up, compared to only 24 percent who said it was too confusing.



As for all those reports suggesting the discount savings were small to nonexistent, this poll found just the opposite. A sizable 63 percent said they were saving "a lot" or "some," compared to 26 percent who said their drugs were just as expensive.

Of course, for us taxpayers, maybe that isn’t such good news. If all those seniors are so happy, maybe it’s because we are getting shafted.

Even the AARP is happy. Its “poll, released last week, reported 78 percent of seniors who have signed up for the benefits were happy with its results.”

The fact is, of course, that the plan is complicated. When you get ready to sign up you find that there are literally dozens of different programs out there.

Still, it’s good to find out that the gloom and doom merchants were wrong. Again.