Please, I'm sick of hearing how Sommers et al have "revealed" the shoddy
research in the AAUW groundbreaker study and have thus completely
undermined
the legitimacy of the research and the entire gender equity issue! Anybody
that has read the study knows that they conducted very little new research
themselves, but mostly just summarized over 1100 (as I recall) research
studies for the last 25 years! So now we can point to a handful that don't
have the best methodology or poorly drawn conclusions and that dismisses
it?
Good try but no way! Even if a large percent of the research studies (20%)
have some flaws, that would still leave hundreds of hundreds of studies
with
findings replicated over and over in many different ways and by many
different institutions. AAUW is historically a white, upper-middle class
organization and it remains one. (I went to one of their national meetings
in the early 90s and thought, if you substituted the women for men, that it
would look as conversation and white-bread as, say, the 1969 Miami GOP
Convention!) It was only after they decided that their yearly focus would
be
on K-12 issues in girls' education that they became a "quickly radicalized"
organization (so said George Will the same year I went to the national
conference!) I'd bet that a percentage of the membership regreted getting
"into" the gender equity issue since by daring to hire folks to survey the
research and present a summaries of findings (the infamous "AAUW How
Schools
Shortchange Girls report) they were indeed likened to a "left-wing
organization." Please, please, please spare us!!!!
Christy Hammer
CHammer@aol.com
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