Bush is attacking equal education for girls

Echidne has a really good post on how dismantling Title IX is not about improving education by any means. She is almost too nice about it, though, trying to see if there's a chance that this is about anything but reducing female educational opportunities.
Well, it's not. I went to a high school that was openly hostile to Title IX. Our school district already suffered from a paucity of funds and most people felt that it was a waste of limited resources to dole them out equally to boys and girls. In a limited resource situation, people tend to want to put what little they have towards those who have the best shot at succeeding, and it was difficult to justify investing in girls, when it was assumed most of them wouldn't go on to get a higher education anyway. Girls' athletics were particularly suspect; the general opinion was that since girl athletes don't do anything for the school the school shouldn't really do much for them. Title IX was viewed as draining money from the "important" programs like football and into stupid programs like girls' tennis. There was also alot of hostility towards having girls in traditionally male classes like ag or welding; their very presence was assumed to be undermining the boys' ability to get their all-important work done. And I know my home ec teacher was not happy about having boys in her class; she thought they distracted the girls from the all-important lessons on how to keep your vanilla wafers from sinking in your banana pudding. The only class that really intergrated well was typing class, and that's probably only because it was part of a larger computer class and computers are seen as more than acceptable for boys and girls to learn how to use.
Now I've been out of high school for less than a decade, so I don't imagine attitudes have changed much. Especially considering that when I was in high school, attitudes don't seem to have changed much since, oh, 1957. There is no chance that given the opportunity to dismantle what little they have done to help bring girls to equality, they will jump all over it. This is something that needs to be taken very seriously, to say the least. Of course, most of what this administration does is alarming, so yeah, I'm getting pretty exhausted by it.