The Trouble With Boys

The Trouble With Boys

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/

They're kinetic, maddening and failing at school. Now educators are
trying new ways to help them succeed.

By Peg Tyre, Newsweek

Jan. 30, 2006 issue - Spend a few minutes on the phone with Danny
Frankhuizen and you come away thinking, "What a nice boy." He's
thoughtful, articulate, bright. He has a good relationship with his
mom, goes to church every Sunday, loves the rock band Phish and spends
hours each day practicing his guitar. But once he's inside his large
public Salt Lake City high school, everything seems to go wrong. He's
16, but he can't stay organized. He finishes his homework and then
can't find it in his backpack. He loses focus in class, and his
teachers, with 40 kids to wrangle, aren't much help. "If I miss a
concept, they tell me, 'Figure it out yourself'," says Danny. Last year
Danny's grades dropped from B's to D's and F's. The sophomore, who once
dreamed of Stanford, is pulling his grades up but worries that "I won't
even get accepted at community college."

His mother, Susie Malcom, a math teacher who is divorced, says it's
been wrenching to watch Danny stumble. "I tell myself he's going to
make something good out of himself," she says. "But it's hard to see
doors close and opportunities fall away."

What's wrong with Danny? By almost every benchmark, boys across the
nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary
school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with
learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in
special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls
on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't
like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a
University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on
college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the
undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent. This
widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of
Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society,
families and democracy."

With millions of parents wringing their hands, educators are searching
for new tools to help tackle the problem of boys. Books including
Michael Thompson's best seller "Raising Cain" (recently made into a PBS
documentary) and Harvard psychologist William Pollack's definitive work
"Real Boys" have become must-reads in the teachers' lounge. The Gurian
Institute, founded in 1997 by family therapist Michael Gurian to help
the people on the front lines help boys, has enrolled 15,000 teachers
in its seminars. Even the Gates Foundation, which in the last five
years has given away nearly a billion dollars to innovative high
schools, is making boys a big priority. "Helping underperforming boys,"
says Jim Shelton, the foundation's education director, "has become part
of our core mission."

The problem won't be solved overnight. In the last two decades, the
education system has become obsessed with a quantifiable and narrowly
defined kind of academic success, these experts say, and that myopic
view is harming boys. Boys are biologically, developmentally and
psychologically different from girls-and teachers need to learn how
to bring out the best in every one. "Very well-meaning people," says
Dr. Bruce Perry, a Houston neurologist who advocates for troubled kids,
"have created a biologically disrespectful model of education."

Thirty years ago it was girls, not boys, who were lagging. The 1972
federal law Title IX forced schools to provide equal opportunities for
girls in the classroom and on the playing field. Over the next two
decades, billions of dollars were funneled into finding new ways to
help girls achieve. In 1992, the American Association of University
Women issued a report claiming that the work of Title IX was not
done-girls still fell behind in math and science; by the mid-1990s,
girls had reduced the gap in math and more girls than boys were taking
high-school-level biology and chemistry.

Some scholars, notably Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, charge that misguided feminism is what's been
hurting boys. In the 1990s, she says, girls were making strong, steady
progress toward parity in schools, but feminist educators portrayed
them as disadvantaged and lavished them with support and attention.
Boys, meanwhile, whose rates of achievement had begun to falter, were
ignored and their problems allowed to fester (click here for related
essay).

Boys have always been boys, but the expectations for how they're
supposed to act and learn in school have changed. In the last 10 years,
thanks in part to activist parents concerned about their children's
success, school performance has been measured in two simple ways: how
many students are enrolled in accelerated courses and whether test
scores stay high. Standardized assessments have become commonplace for
kids as young as 6. Curricula have become more rigid. Instead of
allowing teachers to instruct kids in the manner and pace that suit
each class, some states now tell teachers what, when and how to teach.
At the same time, student-teacher ratios have risen, physical education
and sports programs have been cut and recess is a distant memory. These
new pressures are undermining the strengths and underscoring the
limitations of what psychologists call the "boy brain"-the kinetic,
disorganized, maddening and sometimes brilliant behaviors that
scientists now believe are not learned but hard-wired.

When Cris Messler of Mountainside, N.J., brought her 3-year-old son Sam
to a pediatrician to get him checked for ADHD, she was acknowledging
the desperation parents can feel. He's a high-energy kid, and Messler
found herself hoping for a positive diagnosis. "If I could get a
diagnosis from the doctor, I could get him on medicine," she says. The
doctor said Sam is a normal boy. School has been tough, though. Sam's
reading teacher said he was hopeless. His first-grade teacher complains
he's antsy, and Sam, now 7, has been referring to himself as "stupid."
Messler's glad her son doesn't need medication, but what, she wonders,
can she do now to help her boy in school?

For many boys, the trouble starts as young as 5, when they bring to
kindergarten a set of physical and mental abilities very different from
girls'. As almost any parent knows, most 5-year-old girls are more
fluent than boys and can sight-read more words. Boys tend to have
better hand-eye coordination, but their fine motor skills are less
developed, making it a struggle for some to control a pencil or a
paintbrush. Boys are more impulsive than girls; even if they can sit
still, many prefer not to-at least not for long.

Thirty years ago feminists argued that classic "boy" behaviors were a
result of socialization, but these days scientists believe they are an
expression of male brain chemistry. Sometime in the first trimester, a
boy fetus begins producing male sex hormones that bathe his brain in
testosterone for the rest of his gestation. "That exposure wires the
male brain differently," says Arthur Arnold, professor of physiological
science at UCLA. How? Scientists aren't exactly sure. New studies show
that prenatal exposure to male sex hormones directly affects the way
children play. Girls whose mothers have high levels of testosterone
during pregnancy are more likely to prefer playing with trucks to
playing with dolls. There are also clues that hormones influence the
way we learn all through life. In a Dutch study published in 1994,
doctors found that when males were given female hormones, their spatial
skills dropped but their verbal skills improved.

In elementary-school classrooms-where teachers increasingly put an
emphasis on language and a premium on sitting quietly and speaking in
turn-the mismatch between boys and school can become painfully
obvious. "Girl behavior becomes the gold standard," says "Raising Cain"
coauthor Thompson. "Boys are treated like defective girls."

Two years ago Kelley King, principal of Douglass Elementary School in
Boulder, Colo., looked at the gap between boys and girls and decided to
take action. Boys were lagging 10 points behind girls in reading and 14
points in writing. Many more boys than girls were being labeled as
learning disabled, too. So King asked her teachers to buy copies of
Gurian's book "The Minds of Boys," on boy-friendly classrooms, and in
the fall of 2004 she launched a bold experiment. Whenever possible,
teachers replaced lecture time with fast-moving lessons that all kids
could enjoy. Three weeks ago, instead of discussing the book "The View
From Saturday," teacher Pam Unrau divided her third graders into small
groups, and one student in each group pretended to be a character from
the book. Classes are noisier, Unrau says, but the boys are closing the
gap. Last spring, Douglass girls scored an average of 106 on state
writing tests, while boys got a respectable 101.

Primatologists have long observed that juvenile male chimps battle each
other not just for food and females, but to establish and maintain
their place in the hierarchy of the tribe. Primates face off against
each other rather than appear weak. That same evolutionary imperative,
psychologists say, can make it hard for boys to thrive in middle
school-and difficult for boys who are failing to accept the help they
need. The transition to middle school is rarely easy, but like the
juvenile primates they are, middle-school boys will do almost anything
to avoid admitting that they're overwhelmed. "Boys measure everything
they do or say by a single yardstick: does this make me look weak?"
says Thompson. "And if it does, he isn't going to do it." That's part
of the reason that videogames have such a powerful hold on boys: the
action is constant, they can calibrate just how hard the challenges
will be and, when they lose, the defeat is private.

When Brian Johns hit seventh grade, he never admitted how vulnerable it
made him feel. "I got behind and never caught up," says Brian, now 17
and a senior at Grand River Academy, an Ohio boarding school. When his
parents tried to help, he rebuffed them. When his mother, Anita, tried
to help him organize his assignment book, he grew evasive about when
his homework was due. Anita didn't know where to turn. Brian's school
had a program for gifted kids, and support for ones with special needs.
But what, Anita asked his teachers, do they do about kids like her son
who are in the middle and struggling? Those kids, one of Brian's
teachers told Anita, "are the ones who fall through the cracks."

It's easy for middle-school boys to feel outgunned. Girls reach sexual
maturity two years ahead of boys, but other, less visible differences
put boys at a disadvantage, too. The prefrontal cortex is a knobby
region of the brain directly behind the forehead that scientists
believe helps humans organize complex thoughts, control their impulses
and understand the consequences of their own behavior. In the last five
years, Dr. Jay Giedd, an expert in brain development at the National
Institutes of Health, has used brain scans to show that in girls, it
reaches its maximum thickness by the age of 11 and, for the next decade
or more, continues to mature. In boys, this process is delayed by 18
months.

Middle-school boys may use their brains less efficiently, too. Using a
type of MRI that traces activity in the brain, Deborah Yurgelun-Todd,
director of the cognitive neuroimaging laboratory at McLean Hospital in
Belmont, Mass., tested the activity patterns in the prefrontal cortex
of children between the ages of 11 and 18. When shown pictures of
fearful faces, adolescent girls registered activity on the right side
of the prefrontal cortex, similar to an adult. Adolescent boys used
both sides-a less mature pattern of brain activity. Teenage girls can
process information faster, too. In a study about to be published in
the journal Intelligence, researchers at Vanderbilt University
administered timed tests-picking similar objects and matching groups
of numbers-to 8,000 boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 18. In
kindergarten, boys and girls processed information at about the same
speeds. In early adolescence, girls finished faster and got more right.
By 18, boys and girls were processing with the same speed and accuracy.

Scientists caution that brain research doesn't tell the whole story:
temperament, family background and environment play big roles, too.
Some boys are every bit as organized and assertive as the
highest-achieving girls. All kids can be scarred by violence, alcohol
or drugs in the family. But if your brain hasn't reached maturity yet,
says Yurgelun-Todd, "it's not going to be able to do its job
optimally."

Across the nation, educators are reviving an old idea: separate the
girls from the boys-and at Roncalli Middle School, in Pueblo, Colo.,
administrators say, it's helping kids of both genders. This past fall,
with the blessing of parents, school guidance counselor Mike Horton
assigned a random group of 50 sixth graders to single-sex classes in
core subjects. These days, when sixth-grade science teacher Pat Farrell
assigns an earth-science lab on measuring crystals, the girls collect
their materials-a Bunsen burner, a beaker of phenyl salicylate and a
spoon. Then they read the directions and follow the sequence from
beginning to end. The first things boys do is ask, "Can we eat this?"
They're less organized, Farrell notes, but sometimes, "they're willing
to go beyond what the lab asks them to do." With this in mind, he hands
out written instructions to both classes but now goes over them step by
step for the boys. Although it's too soon to declare victory, there are
some positive signs: the shyest boys are participating more. This fall,
the all-girl class did best in math, English and science, followed by
the all-boy class and then coed classes.

One of the most reliable predictors of whether a boy will succeed or
fail in high school rests on a single question: does he have a man in
his life to look up to? Too often, the answer is no. High rates of
divorce and single motherhood have created a generation of fatherless
boys. In every kind of neighborhood, rich or poor, an increasing number
of boys-now a startling 40 percent-are being raised without their
biological dads.

Psychologists say that grandfathers and uncles can help, but emphasize
that an adolescent boy without a father figure is like an explorer
without a map. And that is especially true for poor boys and boys who
are struggling in school. Older males, says Gurian, model
self-restraint and solid work habits for younger ones. And whether
they're breathing down their necks about grades or admonishing them to
show up for school on time, "an older man reminds a boy in a million
different ways that school is crucial to their mission in life."

In the past, boys had many opportunities to learn from older men. They
might have been paired with a tutor, apprenticed to a master or put to
work in the family store. High schools offered boys a rich array of
roles in which to exercise leadership skills-class officer, yearbook
editor or a place on the debate team. These days, with the exception of
sports, more girls than boys are involved in those activities.

In neighborhoods where fathers are most scarce, the high-school dropout
rates are shocking: more than half of African-American boys who start
high school don't finish. David Banks, principal of the Eagle Academy
for Young Men, one of four all-boy public high schools in the New York
City system, wants each of his 180 students not only to graduate from
high school but to enroll in college. And he's leaving nothing to
chance. Almost every Eagle Academy boy has a male mentor-a lawyer, a
police officer or an entrepreneur from the school's South Bronx
neighborhood. The impact of the mentoring program, says Banks, has been
"beyond profound." Tenth grader Rafael Mendez is unequivocal: his
mentor "is the best thing that ever happened to me." Before Rafael came
to Eagle Academy, he dreamed about playing pro baseball, but his
mentor, Bronx Assistant District Attorney Rafael Curbelo, has shown him
another way to succeed: Mendez is thinking about attending college in
order to study forensic science.

Colleges would welcome more applications from young men like Rafael
Mendez. At many state universities the gender balance is already
tilting 60-40 toward women. Primary and secondary schools are going to
have to make some major changes, says Ange Peterson, president-elect of
the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions
Officers, to restore the gender balance. "There's a whole group of men
we're losing in education completely," says Peterson.

For Nikolas Arnold, 15, a sophomore at a public high school in Santa
Monica, Calif., college is a distant dream. Nikolas is smart: he's got
an encyclopedic knowledge of weaponry and war. When he was in first
grade, his principal told his mother he was too immature and needed
ADHD drugs. His mother balked. "Too immature?" says Diane Arnold, a
widow. "He was six and a half!" He's always been an advanced reader,
but his grades are erratic. Last semester, when his English teacher
assigned two girls' favorites-"Memoirs of a Geisha" and "The Secret
Life of Bees" Nikolas got a D. But lately, he has a math teacher he
likes and is getting excited about numbers. He's reserved in class
sometimes. But now that he's more engaged, his grades are improving
slightly and his mother, who's pushing college, is hopeful he will
begin to hit his stride. Girls get A's and B's on their report cards,
she tells him, but that doesn't mean boys can't do it, too.

With Andrew Murr, Vanessa Juarez, Anne Underwood, Karen Springen and
Pat Wingert

Fred Goodwin, CMA wrote:

The Trouble With Boys

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/

They're kinetic, maddening and failing at school. Now educators are
trying new ways to help them succeed.

By Peg Tyre, Newsweek
[]
Scientists caution that brain research doesn't tell the whole story:
temperament, family background and environment play big roles, too.
Some boys are every bit as organized and assertive as the
highest-achieving girls. All kids can be scarred by violence, alcohol
or drugs in the family. But if your brain hasn't reached maturity yet,
says Yurgelun-Todd, "it's not going to be able to do its job
optimally."
-----------------------------
That's not the problem. By definition a boy's brain is as developed
as it is supposed to be at any given age. But the current society
demands literally no development of "patience" skills for boys as
it once did. Kids are pushed mindlessly toward team sports, with no
effort to reward them for efforts of concentration and quiet effort.
This used to be considered a virtue, and now people act like it is
asking too much of boys, but not girls! THAT'S why the chasm between
their performance profiles!
Steve

I was intrigued, Steve, when a scientist explained during one of our
faculty meetings the development of the brain. Of particular interest
was his statement that the greatest growth spurt in final brain
development occurs during the teen years. The brain is not fully
developed, we were taught, until one is 21 years of age. I was
interested in learning that what is not fully developed in the teen
brain is a symbolic brake. Acceleration is fully enabled; stop is not.
Simply sharing, as you seem to be someone who enjoys learning.

wrote:

I was intrigued, Steve, when a scientist explained during one of our
faculty meetings the development of the brain. Of particular interest
was his statement that the greatest growth spurt in final brain
development occurs during the teen years.
-----------------------
Growth and development are irrelevant to human rights. Children have
the right not to be bullied because they are conscious human beings,
not because they are fully developed physically or mentally. Lesser
development would indicate they have MORE right to be protected from
this adult fascism of others who either pretend to be or may be, more
"developed".

We know so little about the brain, we do not even know how it works,
but the least notable biophysical difference is seized upon, without
any truly achieved level of knowledge or understanding, by promugators
of lies as support for their particular lie. In this case, bigots who
would be fascists over children for their own satisfaction or advantage
seek to use spurious guesswork factoids of technically trivial repute
as grounds for their child-abuse and self-congratulation.


The brain is not fully
developed, we were taught, until one is 21 years of age.
------------------------
Depends who you ask. Some would say its development could not possibly
be "complete" until death. And who wants a more developed fascist?
It depends what people do with things they "develop", as well as WHAT
"develops".

Children run before their skeletons are "developed". That is, in fact,
HOW they seem to develop best! Should we deprive them of anything they
choose to do when it requires practice to develop in that same manner?


I was
interested in learning that what is not fully developed in the teen
brain is a symbolic brake. Acceleration is fully enabled; stop is
not.
----------------------
Oh they seem to stop just fine when playing, or they'd die prematurely.

Calling something by a name when nature didn't give it any name, and
which you have a vested interest in naming to support your own lies,
is nothing more than self-serving name-calling. There is no decisive
knowledge of what does what in the brain, it is far too complex, as
complex as the very world which it represents to itself internally.

Pretending at this current very backward period of time, that is quite
soon to be regarded as ancient dark-age history, that we know much of
anything that could reasonably justify depriving anyone of their
rights and desires, is simply fatuous nonsense.


Simply sharing, as you seem to be someone who enjoys learning.
-----------------------
Some organs grow after long use, others before any use. What kind
of thing is this? They don't know. They just lie to please their
bigoted purposes. Saying that someone is less developed, whether
physically, genetically, or mentally, is just the way in which
bigoted fascists try to justify the enslavement of others.
Steve