Trends
Title IX: More Than About Sport

You probably already know that Title IX, the groundbreaking gender equity law, has increased the number of female athletes exponentially since it was passed in 1972. But did you know it has given women and girls a huge boost academically, too?

In 1999-00, for example, women snared 43 percent of the college degrees in medicine and 46 percent of the degrees in law, up from 9 and 8 percent, respectively, in 1972-73.

Thomas Wolanin, senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, says although Title IX is often thought of as the athletics law, "it was really about young women getting academic opportunities they had been excluded from." Even now, he notes, women still lag sorely behind in college administration and in scientific and technical fields.

Yet recent attention to the law is focusing, again, on sports, as the Bush administration considers changes to the law-in part to answer critics such as male wrestlers, who claim Title IX effectively discriminates against them.

Wolanin and others contend the problem is really high-profile sports such as college football, which eat up big chunks of athletic scholarship monies. "If you gave out half as many college football scholarships," he says, you could give wrestling and swimming more attention, too."

Oops-I Thought It Was Asia

So you sent Suzy to the map and she couldn't find...the Pacific Ocean.

If it's any consolation, 3 in 10 young adults worldwide are having the same challenge. According to a National Geographic Society survey, many of the world's 18- to 24-year-olds are on the brink of geographic illiteracy. And young Americans are struggling the hardest. Among 3,000 youth surveyed from nine countries, U.S. youngsters scored next to last, followed by Mexico's youth. Less than 15 percent of American youth could locate Iraq and Israel, and they struggled with the location of other well-known countries. And almost one-third grossly overestimated the U.S. population, putting it at a whopping 1 to 2 billion, not 289 million.

Experts say geographic knowledge increases with more teaching of it in school and at home, as well as through travel, language proficiency, and personal identification with current events. So to help usher young adults to a geographic higher plane, the National Geographic Society has put together a coalition of media, policy, and education organizations-of which NEA is a part-to map out a plan for improvement. Stay tuned. For more on the survey (and to test your own literacy), see http://geosurvey.nationalgeographic.com/geosurvey/.

Separate Once Again

Think segregation went the way of the '60s? Think again, says a new study from Harvard University's Civil Rights Project (CRP). Using data from the 2000-01 school year, the CRP tracked sharp declines across the country in the percentage of Caucasians in public schools attended by minorities. "The numbers are startling," says Chungmei Lee, CRP research associate and a study co-author. Indeed, the progress made in achieving integrated schools since the 1960s, she says, has effectively been reversed. But unlike in the '60s, the trend is hardly toward just a separation of African-Americans and Caucasians. Latinos, often clustered in poor, urban schools with limited exposure to native English speakers, are now the most segregated of all minority groups, says Lee. In New York, for example, almost 60 percent of Latinos attend schools with 90-100 percent minority enrollment.

Although minority student enrollment has climbed to 40 percent nationally, the CRP says the average white student still attends a school that is 80 percent white. In the Northeast and Midwest, one-fourth of African-American students are enrolled in virtually all-minority schools. The South, although rapidly re-segregating after a series of Supreme Court decisions ending court-ordered integration, still offers the best chance for students of different races to work together in school.

Lee says the fix necessarily lies in the courts. "Some people assume desegregation only benefits minority students," she notes, "but we know from a variety of studies that children in diverse schools learn to think analytically because they're exposed to different points of view."

For more, read A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream? at www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu/note.

Disciplined Kids? Parents Wish

If teachers think they have it rough keeping Johnny from pouncing on Bobby, they're in fine company. According to a recent survey, just 34 percent of parents report success in teaching their kids self-control and self-discipline, and they report similar slow progress teaching "absolutely essential values" such as wanting to do one's best in school.

The national survey of 1,600 moms and dads by Public Agenda, a nonprofit public opinion research organization, found parents are pretty frustrated in their quest to raise responsible kids and believe their jobs are complicated by endless negative messages from the mass media. As a result, only about half say they've done a good job ensuring their children are honest and truthful, and even fewer report success in teaching them how to have self-control, do things for themselves, and spend money carefully.

As always, there's a ray of hope, as more than 60 percent of parents say they've managed to teach their kids to be courteous and polite. So next time Johnny pops Bobby, no doubt Johnny will apologize. Furiously. For more, see www.publicagenda.org/specials/parents/parents.htm.