Assisted by his lawyer dad, 17-year-old Doug Anglin, a senior at Milton High School in suburban Boston, has filed a federal civil rights complaint against his school system for, he says, systematically favoring girls and their ways:
Among Anglin’s allegations: Girls face fewer restrictions from teachers, like being able to wander the hallways without passes, and girls are rewarded for abiding by the rules, while boys’ more rebellious ways are punished.
Grading on homework, which sometimes includes points for decorating a notebook, also favor girls, according to Anglin’s complaint, filed last month with the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
”The system is designed to the disadvantage of males,” Anglin said. ”From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say, you’ll do well and get good grades. Men naturally rebel against this.”
(Tracy Jan, “Schoolboy’s bias suit”, Boston Globe, Jan. 26). Although critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers have raised interesting questions about boys’ underperformance in the schools, young Anglin’s lawsuit gets very poor grades from Mike Sierra (Jan. 26):
[The complaint says] boys “naturally rebel.” Could this naturally rebellious behavior have something to do with boys’ special need for supervision in school hallways? Just a thought.
As a way to bolster male achievement (at least on paper), the Anglins recommend that we give out academic credit for playing sports and grade students on a pass/fail basis, measures that are unlikely to improve the education of any student. As far as I can tell, their only legitimate complaint concerns one teacher who gives extra points to students who decorate their writing assignments, a practice that is certainly suspect and academically insubstantial, but hardly worth clogging the courts.
Unrelatedly, here’s a suggested Overlawyered logo (more) devised by the anonymous coordinator of “Blawg Review”, who sets it alongside some very kind words about our linking habits. All very jagged and Barbara Kruger-esque.
5 Comments
Barbara Kruger requires Futura Oblique. Which might not look bad in a logo.
The complaint about schools favoring girls is spot on, generally speaking, but this particular lawsuit is… a poor representative, to put it nicely.
The sad part is that it could have been much more – the president of the student body publicly agrees with them, for goodness sake. Yet they had to go and botch the whole thing.
This (generally) is one of those cases where I am torn – if lawsuits are to be used this way (and they most certainly are, in this day and age, despite my dislike for such usage), at least let the causes sued over be just, as is the case here (or at least, much, MUCH more the case here than any recent “Title IX” crap).
Of course, this (specifically) is a badly done suit, well deserving of treatment at this site.
Girls smell better, too.
The complaint is poorly worded, but spot on.
“girls are rewarded for abiding by the rules, while boys’ more rebellious ways are punished.” for example doesn’t state the full truth, namely that the reverse situation (boys abiding by the rules or girls breaking them) usually does not have the same consequenses (praise for the boys or punishment for the girls).
“Grading on homework, which sometimes includes points for decorating a notebook, also favor girls,”
I’ve never seen that, but then I’ve not been a schoolkid for 20 years and never in the US. Noone was graded on their own notes, only on how well they could pass written and sometimes oral tests.
“The system is designed to the disadvantage of males,”
That’s life, society as a whole is little different these days.
“they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say, you’ll do well and get good grades. Men naturally rebel against this”
Whatever happened to discipline?
I’m all for expecting students to sit down and take note of what their teacher is trying to teach (given that it’s worth teaching and not the PC crap most schools teach these days), as long as the same rules are applied equally to all students irrespective of race or sex.
“we give out academic credit for playing sports and grade students on a pass/fail basis, measures that are unlikely to improve the education of any student. ”
I’m all against grading sports for pass/fail the year, except in severe cases where the student didn’t show up for it where mandatory.
I’m all for pass/fail grades for almost everything else. The soft system of never failing students because it hurts their self esteem is too silly to consider seriously and massively hurts the education kids are getting.
Instead of teaching them that performance is rewarded (with a passing grade) they learn that slacking will not harm you.
To: LetMeSpellItOutForYou
Re: Doug Anglin civil rights complaint
Second post.
We are indeed familiar with Dr. Sommers’ work on this subject over the past decade. There once were also good male scientists raising similar alarms, but almost all of them were eventually steamrolled by the women’s lobby groups. The problem, as we see it, is an inability of the school system to see fault with the methods it applies toward the teaching of boys. It is not nearly not so simple as the “application of discipline”. We point to diametrically opposite results achieved with boys in private all-boys schools, regardless of race or socio-economic status.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that I was educated in psychology and sociology (child development) during the 1960s, and was then diverted to other directions for the next three decades by an Army that had use of me overseas in a different capacity. I returned home to what seemed like a foreign society and have been playing catch-up ever since. My friends on this topic – all average, aging, middle class guys spread around the country – are not organized in any way except through a common interest as responsible adult men in the future welfare of both our boys and our nation. Most of us are now retired professional career soldiers and/or intelligence officers (so we understand about the discipline thing). Any contributions from us would be individual, voluntary and as able.
After so many frustrating years of watching this problem grow and grow, while schools, teachers and women, along with their many lobby groups, remain silent, we are convinced that the only thing that will ever change anything is if staggering damages are awarded for a successful class action law suit on behalf of all boys shortchanged over the past two decades by our public school districts across the country. We do not see the matter as a “vague and open-ended grievance”, but it is obvious that boys have never had a lobby group of any kind to help keep an even keel on these matters.
Therefore, since the key always seems to be quotas (by other labels) in our society, we would suggest simply subtracting the number of boys who were admitted to college from the number of girls so admitted, add in the scholarship gender differences, and see what kind of figure sounds appropriate for two decades of institutionalized gender discrimination. These numbers are now in the many hundreds of thousands. Those damages would then go to fund appropriate new programs, preferably apart from our existing public schools, to help all boys catch up as fast as possible with the girls in the future.
Since none of us is a practicing attorney, we cannot comment on how this might be possible, either with this or any other case. We are hoping to generate some interest in the topic among responsible men who do possess such expertise. We DO know that the longer we as a society wait for some really major action to come along, for someone else to fix the problem, nothing will change, and the worse off we will be as a nation. We are now sinking faster than any of us wants to admit.
We do NOT consider this a political preference type issue. However, some of us were also considering how to make the subject a campaign issue if any of the candidates for President in 2008 turns out to be a woman — as a corresponding responsibility that goes along with every right.
Robert , US Regular Army (ret)