There's so much representativeness bias and recency bias here. The following can all be true at once, and in fact I think, with low-to-moderate confidence, probably are all true:
1. most deep-blue-urban-area schools (public and private) are "over-woke," i.e. pushing misandry, simplistic villain narratives, etc to an extent that harms a lot of kids and the broader culture and detracts from traditional educational effectiveness
2. most schools nationwide overall are still "under-woke," i.e. not giving kids a full enough picture of the social impact and severity of racism and misogyny to understand why things are the way they are now
3. most institutional attempts to change (2), however well intentioned, just end up making (1) worse, and conversely attempts to rein in (1) mostly exacerbate (2) instead.
(1) is naturally going to seem like a much bigger problem than it is, and (2) smaller than it is, because
-- (1) affects the chattering classes. It's both the easy and the lucrative thing to report about in the NY Times etc.
-- Relatedly, the community affected by (1) feels like a nation and a culture unto itself, and more so recently as our society grows more polarized and segregated. If all your friends have kids attending over-woke schools it's hard not to feel like it's "everywhere".
-- (1) is new and (2) is not, and we are wired to care more about the new shiny than about the grinding chronic problem.
And (3) happens for some of the same reasons. The people motivated to change (2) aren't really a part of the community affected by (2), and they are bad at persuading the people who are affected. So they use the persuasive leverage they have in order to at least feel they have Accomplished Something, which then goes to exacerbate (1). And similarly the other way around.
Wrt overall US educational effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, my modestly-informed impression is that this is a problem that spans the developing world, so it's not clear there is a proven less-broken model to turn to. We should still try and fix the problem, but it'll need more experimentation and take longer than if we could just do what Country X does instead.
I agree with your analysis. It's well-thought-out and well-stated. Thank you. If it's not over-wokeness or under-wokeness that's fucking over boys in education, what do you think the main contributing factors are?
I wish I knew. My leading, but low confidence, hypothesis is that it's a disparate impact of the same increase in risk aversion and stringent behavioral norm demand that has been a larger social trend for 40-50 years now: the same trend that e.g. makes it harder to raise kids free range. Anti-woke people sometimes blame this increase on the "feminization of society" and they may even sort of have a point, but it's probably got broader drivers than that.
To flesh this out a bit, think of "compliance" as a hybrid of conscientiousness and agreeableness: the capacity and inclination to listen to what the authority figure tells you to do, understand what it entails, and do it with a smile. It's related to conformism, but not the same, more top-down than peer-driven. I think our culture has raised expected compliance standards for kids in the last half-century. Partly this is out of fear of the trouble noncompliance might lead to, partly out of a well-intentioned desire to make kids' lives more pleasant and more fair through enforcing stronger standards, like less tolerance of bullying and more requirement for social-emotional competence.
And the educational system is a big part of that shift, so less-compliant kids fare comparatively worse than they used to in school. Mass education has always valued compliance more than the broader society, but arguably it's gotten worse. This is where one resorts to hand-waving and anecdotes, I don't know any good metrics for tracking compliance-valuation over time.
Now if this is real, it's going to disproportionately impact boys because on average boys are less compliant for hard-to-affect reasons (whether you think those reasons are cultural or biological or both mostly doesn't matter here). And it's going to disproportionately impact low-income boys because parental investments, available mostly to the higher-income, can mitigate both boys' lower compliance and the consequences of that lower compliance. So to fix it you would need to either make those investments more broadly available or (my preference) make them less necessary by having more realistic standards for kids' behavior. Redshirting would help some like Reeves says, because compliance typically increases with age for all groups, but it's a band-aid.
This is all probably terribly biased by my own anecdotal experiences comparing my own childhood to my son's, e.g. his getting kicked out of a Montessori preschool at age 3 for failure to follow behavior norms that I didn't think it was reasonable to expect any 3-year-old to follow.
There's so much representativeness bias and recency bias here. The following can all be true at once, and in fact I think, with low-to-moderate confidence, probably are all true:
1. most deep-blue-urban-area schools (public and private) are "over-woke," i.e. pushing misandry, simplistic villain narratives, etc to an extent that harms a lot of kids and the broader culture and detracts from traditional educational effectiveness
2. most schools nationwide overall are still "under-woke," i.e. not giving kids a full enough picture of the social impact and severity of racism and misogyny to understand why things are the way they are now
3. most institutional attempts to change (2), however well intentioned, just end up making (1) worse, and conversely attempts to rein in (1) mostly exacerbate (2) instead.
(1) is naturally going to seem like a much bigger problem than it is, and (2) smaller than it is, because
-- (1) affects the chattering classes. It's both the easy and the lucrative thing to report about in the NY Times etc.
-- Relatedly, the community affected by (1) feels like a nation and a culture unto itself, and more so recently as our society grows more polarized and segregated. If all your friends have kids attending over-woke schools it's hard not to feel like it's "everywhere".
-- (1) is new and (2) is not, and we are wired to care more about the new shiny than about the grinding chronic problem.
And (3) happens for some of the same reasons. The people motivated to change (2) aren't really a part of the community affected by (2), and they are bad at persuading the people who are affected. So they use the persuasive leverage they have in order to at least feel they have Accomplished Something, which then goes to exacerbate (1). And similarly the other way around.
Wrt overall US educational effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, my modestly-informed impression is that this is a problem that spans the developing world, so it's not clear there is a proven less-broken model to turn to. We should still try and fix the problem, but it'll need more experimentation and take longer than if we could just do what Country X does instead.
I agree with your analysis. It's well-thought-out and well-stated. Thank you. If it's not over-wokeness or under-wokeness that's fucking over boys in education, what do you think the main contributing factors are?
I wish I knew. My leading, but low confidence, hypothesis is that it's a disparate impact of the same increase in risk aversion and stringent behavioral norm demand that has been a larger social trend for 40-50 years now: the same trend that e.g. makes it harder to raise kids free range. Anti-woke people sometimes blame this increase on the "feminization of society" and they may even sort of have a point, but it's probably got broader drivers than that.
To flesh this out a bit, think of "compliance" as a hybrid of conscientiousness and agreeableness: the capacity and inclination to listen to what the authority figure tells you to do, understand what it entails, and do it with a smile. It's related to conformism, but not the same, more top-down than peer-driven. I think our culture has raised expected compliance standards for kids in the last half-century. Partly this is out of fear of the trouble noncompliance might lead to, partly out of a well-intentioned desire to make kids' lives more pleasant and more fair through enforcing stronger standards, like less tolerance of bullying and more requirement for social-emotional competence.
And the educational system is a big part of that shift, so less-compliant kids fare comparatively worse than they used to in school. Mass education has always valued compliance more than the broader society, but arguably it's gotten worse. This is where one resorts to hand-waving and anecdotes, I don't know any good metrics for tracking compliance-valuation over time.
Now if this is real, it's going to disproportionately impact boys because on average boys are less compliant for hard-to-affect reasons (whether you think those reasons are cultural or biological or both mostly doesn't matter here). And it's going to disproportionately impact low-income boys because parental investments, available mostly to the higher-income, can mitigate both boys' lower compliance and the consequences of that lower compliance. So to fix it you would need to either make those investments more broadly available or (my preference) make them less necessary by having more realistic standards for kids' behavior. Redshirting would help some like Reeves says, because compliance typically increases with age for all groups, but it's a band-aid.
This is all probably terribly biased by my own anecdotal experiences comparing my own childhood to my son's, e.g. his getting kicked out of a Montessori preschool at age 3 for failure to follow behavior norms that I didn't think it was reasonable to expect any 3-year-old to follow.