[gblake]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

All that said, this does appear, on the surface, as a case of fulfilling gender stereotypes, which is, unfortunately, something our society seems really good at doing all the time. We constantly push our stereotypical images, guiding different groups down different paths, which is something that we really should change, and something it would be great to see public places like the library try to tackle. This is an opportunity to educate the employees of that library, provide them with a shining example of non-stereotypical gender roles, and get them on our side. Not an opportunity to contemplate a lawsuit that really wouldn't have any winner.

Not disagreeing, but, if valid measurements show that young mens' knowledge and abilities do erode significantly more than young womens' during school breaks; trying out a boys-only STEM program might be a useful experiment to run. After the results are in, the hypothetical program might adopt a more nuanced admission policy (and that policy might reject anyone who isn't at high risk of academic problems, including (my guess) the student who wants into the currently program).

I know a little about one large urban school system that use grant money to run a multi-million dollar STEM experiment that attempted to reduce students' post-summer-break test score declines. I believe the program was a glowing success.

That program enrolled students from "Title 1" schools (low-income communities). That was something of a broad brush approach to picking participants; but I'm *guessing* that it was a reasonable compromise to use in a large city in order to get usable result measurements without adding the expense and logistics of identifying and admitting candidate students one-by-one.

However, if you were the most-at-risk student in the least-affluent, non-Title-1 school district in that city, you might have wanted to start a virtual petition.

Was the program I described a good one, or an evil one? It didn't give every student a chance to participate.. It discriminated based on age, based on the student's neighbors' wealth, based on the total school system's boundaries, based on ...

Blake
PS: [TOTALLY TONGUE-IN-CHEEK]Extrapolating from the tiny bit of hopefully-accurate information we have about the program's reason for existing, the obvious way to change the program's goals in the future would be for the young women in the town to agree to purposefully do poorly on their back-to-school exams. If they do that, they will need summer programs more than the boys do.[/TOTALLY TONGUE-IN-CHEEK]