Yes... although the cynic in me wonders if this is fudged a bit by curving the tests.
That was kind of my point. The people setting the standards are ultimately the ones evaluating "achievement" here. Given that higher achievement directly reflects on those same persons, and therefore translates into higher funding for their operations, they have a vested interest in grading themselves well on that metric. A lot of students are "pushed through" regardless of whether they meet the set standard or not for that exact reason. Frankly, a strong argument could be made that "the standard" isn't as high as it used to be anyway.
Take this High School entrance exam (meant to be given to rural farm kids) from 1912, for example. Most
college exams tailored to supposedly "savvy" suburban Millennials aren't so difficult these days.
Most Adults Would Likely Fail This 1912 8th Grade Test
Don't even get me started on the kind of craziness that tends to take place in East Asian educational systems either!
The fact of the matter is that our educational system simply isn't as "elite" as it used to be. It's more about filling quotas, and "checking the boxes" necessary to secure funding from higher organizations, than it is actual meaningful education. It tends to cater more towards the "lowest common denominator" as such.
The poor outcomes we're seeing from students once they get out of school would seem to indicate that this allegedly "linear" path of achievement from previous decades you mention is more fluff than fact.
Do you want to take a wild guess who "the strapped ass" policy disproportionally affected?
And who says that was necessarily a bad thing? :shrug:
Corporal punishment actually teaches something. It puts the impetus on the person punished to change their behavior, and teaches them that there are consequences if they fail to do so.
Spank the kid's ass, write a note informing his parents - so he gets a double dose when he goes home that day - and send him back to class. He either gets the message, and changes his way of doing things, or you rinse and repeat the process as necessary until he does.
Medication, by way of contrast, robs personal responsibility from the equation entirely. The child is basically taught that there is something "wrong" with them which removes their culpability for their own behavior, and they become dependent upon external chemicals to alter that state of being. They never learn how to cope. They never learn how to control or discipline themselves.
Expelling children willy-nilly over the slightest offense, meanwhile, is
beyond counter-productive. It not only impedes their schooling, but it creates a bureaucratic paper trail which basically marks the child as being a "bad egg" from then on forward. That affects both how they are treated by those in power over them, and how they respond to the environment.
Modern squeamishness is a hindrance, not a blessing.
It furthermore, it's not just affecting boys. It's affecting them in a particular way.
Granted.
Also, the "left teacher" rant is absolute nonsense. Males still have an achievement gap even in boys-only schools with male teachers, and in university where male teachers are more common than female.
Lol. If you say so.
It's not exactly a secret that the "Ecofarms," "Captain Courtesies," "Lursas," and etca of the world tend to be the ones holding the power behind both writing curriculum and setting administrative agendas in today's educational system (Hell! Even in a highly Conservative State like SC, educators tend to be FLAMINGLY Liberal, by and large). If you don't think that has an impact on the culture of education, and how certain subjects (gender differences among them) are approached by administrators and teachers alike, you're dreaming.
I'm not really sure what you're referring to with regard to college. Men still have an edge in the hard sciences, and more generally "serious" kinds of academics, as far as I'm aware. Women tend to dominate the "softer" fields, like Education, Communications, Liberal Arts, and etca.
They do so there for the same reasons they do in lower level schools. Those fields don't require actual smarts so much as they do the ability to charm people, and the willingness to do large quantities of boring busy work in an attentive and diligent manner. Women are naturally better than men where the former is concerned, and guys just don't
care enough to try regarding the latter, by and large. :shrug: