Why boys really are in a crisis

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Why boys really are in a crisis
By JOE MANTHEY



A recent "study" by Sara Mead of the think tank Education Sector was the
subject of Tuesday's op-ed column entitled "Complicit parents may be
contributing to 'boy crisis'" by Judith Warner.

The flawed report is part of the rising "gender feminist" (those who believe
that women and girls are in thrall to a "culturally conditioned" system of
male dominance) backlash against helping boys academically.

Gender feminists spin the facts in order to claim that boys' lower academic
performance relative to their sisters is not a gender issue but due to
"behavioral and emotional" reasons,as Warner wrote, or "larger educational
and social problems," as Mead wrote.

Is their claim actually true?

No. Mead's primary source was the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, which relies on sampling data and thereby only offers a tiny
snapshot of the big picture. She then incorporated selective observation of
this small sample by primarily using fourth-grade and to a lesser degree,
eighth-grade test scores, while ignoring those of 12th-graders.

While I concur with Mead that sometimes the word "crisis" gets overused, in
the case of what boys face in school today, it is accurate. And especially
worrisome is the cavalier tone of Mead and Warner, who discount the serious
problem facing a significant portion of boys in the industrialized world's
classrooms.

They reveal their elitism when they argue that there is no real boy crisis
in education because it's only the "Hispanic and black boys and boys from
low-income homes"who are being left behind. According to equity feminists
(those who celebrate women's achievements and who seek, in partnership with
men, to assist both sexes) like Jenna Brooke O'Neil, Professor of Women
Studies at University of Nevada, Reno, "There's a long history in the
feminist movement of women of color distancing themselves from the white
feminists at the top of the heap, who still are ignorant of and/or
insensitive about issues facing nonwhite people, male and female."

In fact, while grade-school boys trail girls academically by a small
margin,Department of Education statistics document that, of graduating high
school seniors, 23 percent of white sons of college-educated parents scored
"below basic" in reading achievement.For girls from the same families: 7
percent. These same "privileged" families' sons are four times more likely
as their sisters to be "below basic" in writing achievement. This literacy
gender gap just gets wider in non-educated and non-white families.

According to the Digest of Educational Statistics, boys are more likely to
drop out of high school than girls, more likely than their female
counterparts to be diagnosed as having ADHD/ADD and be prescribed stimulate
medications such as Ritalin - regardless of race and income. In all 50
states, girls outscore boys in standardized testing. Two-thirds of D's and
F's go to boys and 70 percent of learning disabled students are male -
regardless of race and income.

Mead claims that "there is not sufficient evidence - or the right kind of
evidence - available to draw firm conclusions"in response to the claim that
boys suffer academically because teachers, most of whom are female, are not
taught in their child development and teacher training programs about the
neurobiological differences between males and females and how these
differences affect behavior and learning styles.

This denial of scientific evidence is straight from the gender feminist
playbook: Mead actually wrote, "... it is notoriously difficult to draw
casual links between observations about brain structure or activity and
human behavior ... correlations between differences in brain structure and
observed differences in male and female behavior do not necessarily mean
that the former leads to the latter."

Nonsense.

Mead showed her true colors when she claimed: "The idea that women might
actually surpass men in some areas seems hard for many people to swallow."
Hence, it's time for "reasonable conversation" about gender issues "without
unfairly undermining the gains girls have made in recent decades."

In other words, people who want to help boys must somehow want to hurt girls
and are threatened by the advancement of women. This ad hominem argument is
another one right out of their playbook. Perhaps she might want to consider
the wisdom of the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, who wrote, "When one
sex suffers, both sexes suffer."

My challenge to academics like Sara Mead and Warner is to get out of their
ivory towers, liberate themselves from their long-term obsession to destroy
the patriarchy, and actually set foot on an elementary school campus and
observe boys in the classroom. There they would see firsthand boys asking
questions like, "Do I have to draw a flower?" "May I please get out of my
seat and move around? I'll even pick up trash."