Boy Trouble

Boy Trouble

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060...whitmire012306

by Richard Whitmire, The New Republic Online

It's been a year since Harvard President Larry Summers uttered some
unfortunate speculations about why so few women hold elite
professorships in the sciences. During Summers's speech, a biologist,
overwhelmed by the injustice of it all, nearly collapsed with what
George F. Will unkindly described as the vapors. Since that odd January
day, Summers has been rebuked with a faculty no-confidence vote, untold
talk-show hosts have weighed in, and 936 stories about the controversy
have appeared in newspapers and magazines (according to LexisNexis).
Impressive response, especially considering the modest number of these
professorships available.

Compare that with what happened after the U.S. Department of Education,
also about a year ago, released a 100-plus-page report weighing
academic progress by gender. The results were bracing. Nearly every
chart told the same story. Boys are over 50 percent more likely than
girls to repeat grades in elementary school, one-third more likely to
drop out of high school, and twice as likely to be identified with a
learning disability. The response? Near-total silence.

What's most worrisome are not long-standing gender differences but
recent plunges in boys' relative performance. Between 1992 and 2002,
the gap by which high school girls outperformed boys on tests in both
reading and writing--especially writing--widened significantly. Given
the reading and writing demands of today's college curriculum, that
means a lot of boys out there are falling well short of being
considered "college material." Which is why women now significantly
outnumber men on college campuses, a phenomenon familiar enough to any
sorority sister seeking a date to the next formal. This June, nearly
six out of ten bachelor's degrees awarded will go to women. If the
Department of Education's report is any indication, in coming years,
this gender gap will grow even larger.

The report illustrates a dramatic and unsolved mystery: At some point
in the early '80s, boys' relative academic records and aspirations took
a downward turn. So far, no one has come up with a good explanation for
this trend, but it's a story that affects millions of boys and their
families. And yet, according to LexisNexis, the report was cited by
name in only five newspaper and magazine articles.

Not only has there been little media attention to this crisis in boys'
education, but there has been surprisingly little research. And the
conventional wisdom offered up to explain the problem--boys play too
many video games and listen to too much hip-hop music--can't explain a
gender slide that's affecting not just the United States but much of
the developed West. It also can't explain why boys in a few schools
manage to duck the gender gap. But promising new answers have begun to
surface--and from some very unlikely places.

What we know for certain about this mostly ignored gender trend comes
from surveys that measure the academic attitudes of teen students. In
the early '80s, boys and girls were almost evenly matched in their
college ambitions. A decade later, everything had changed. Academic
aspirations for girls soared as those of boys pretty much flatlined.
And the trend has continued, with girls who say they plan to go to
college or graduate school now far outnumbering boys. Among female high
school seniors, 62.4 percent said they definitely planned to graduate
from a four-year college program, compared with 51.1 percent of male
high school seniors, according to a 2001 survey by the University of
Michigan Institute for Social Research.

A few things about this mystery are known. The gender gap between boys'
and girls' academic achievement has long existed in the black
community. Nearly twice as many black women as black men attend
college, according to the latest numbers from the Department of
Education. But, in recent years, the slippage broadened to the white
middle class. American Council on Education researcher Jacqueline King
has produced data showing startling shifts among middle-class white
college students. Only eight years ago, the campus gender balance for
this group (incomes $30,000 to $70,000) was an even 50-50. As of last
year, the proportion of white men had dropped to 43 percent. In
middle-class suburbs, it's common to hear parents wondering out loud
why their daughters go to the colleges of their choice while their sons
struggle to get into second-tier schools.

What's happening in those homes is itself something of a puzzle.
Patrick Welsh, an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School in
Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., offered the
outside world a glimpse in a piece he wrote for The Washington Post in
2003. Welsh described his bafflement over privileged white boys who
felt obligated to party too much and study too little. Their most
obvious role models for how seriously to take life appeared to be
popular rap artists.

But, as Welsh pointed out, even these underperforming boys nearly
always landed a spot in some college. That's due to one of the
best-kept secrets in college admissions today: the affirmative action
campaign to recruit men. Most admissions directors sifting through
stacks of applications from men and women can only sigh at the
contrast. The average male applicant has far lower grades, writes a
sloppy essay, and sports few impressive extracurriculars. Those
admissions directors face a choice: Either admit less-qualified men or
see the campus gender balance slip below 40 percent male, a point at
which female applicants begin to look elsewhere.

What little research has been done on this shift in the gender gap
falls roughly into two camps--the feminists and the pragmatists. The
feminist viewpoint is summarized in "Raising and Educating Healthy
Boys: A Report on the Growing Crisis in Boys' Education." This study,
performed by the Educational Equity Center at the Academy for
Educational Development and published last March, effectively asks: Why
can't boys be more like girls? Boys are locked into a masculinity box,
the feminist researchers say. Most boys stay inside that box, living by
a macho boy code that precludes developing the "language of feelings"
needed to express themselves or relate to teachers. Boys who break out
of this box are doomed to a life of teasing and being bullied. In other
words, young boys never get sufficiently acquainted with their feelings
to write A-rated essays.

Expecting boys to become more like girls, however, will strike parents
of boys as a bit odd--especially liberal parents who swore they'd never
give their children violent toys, only to watch their sons mold clumps
of clay into submachine guns.

The pragmatists, mostly male researchers, peer inside the school door
and see a feminized world that needs tweaking. Professor Jeffrey
Wilhelm, co-author of Reading Don't Fix No Chevys, decries the dearth
of boy-friendly reading material. Most literature classes demand that
students explore their emotions (not a strong point for boys).

Other pragmatists point to the simple things: Basing grades on turning
in homework on time guarantees lower grades for boys. Studies
consistently show boys have more trouble than girls turning in homework
on time. Some educators and parents explain this by saying that many
boys simply forget or decline to turn in completed homework. Here's the
boy-thinking: If I answered the homework question to my satisfaction,
the task is done. Why turn it in? If you're the parent of a girl, that
may sound bizarre. It isn't. Parents of slumping boys know differently.


The problem with these theories is that they can't explain the rare
cases in which schools have managed to keep boys' learning on par with
that of girls. The Education Trust, a Washington-based education reform
group that looks after the education interests of less privileged
students, scoured the nation for gender success stories and turned up
Indian River School District in rural Delaware. Indian River's
Frankford Elementary appears to be an unlikely candidate for achieving
any sort of academic success, let alone overcoming the gap between
boys' and girls' achievement: 76 percent of the students qualify for
subsidized lunches, 22 percent land in special education, and 64
percent are either Latino or black. Most of the Latinos are sons and
daughters of Mexican agricultural workers who have limited English
skills.

And, yet, here's Frankford's 2004 state report card for fifth-graders:
100 percent of boys and 95 percent of girls meet state reading
standards. When I contacted them, school leaders expressed pride at
their success in educating poor and minority students but appeared
bewildered when told they had conquered the gender gap. Turns out their
education strategy had nothing to do with getting boys in touch with
their feelings or eliminating late-homework penalties. Rather, the
strategy was a roll-up-your-sleeves effort initially sparked by a state
campaign to improve literacy skills. Students whose problems were
identified early received extra help from teachers. A special eye was
kept on black boys. Most important, no excuses were accepted--when boys
fell behind, teachers weren't allowed to consider that the norm.

While the national research into this issue is dismal, a handful of
individual researchers have turned up some important discoveries. The
culprit they identify has little to do with the influence of
anti-academic hip-hop music, too many video games, or the sometimes
exasperating tendency of boys to be boys. The key appears to be
literacy skills.

Ken Hilton is an unlikely pioneer in gender-gap research. Hilton is a
statistician who works out of a small cinderblock office in the
administration building of the Rush-Henrietta schools in the suburbs of
Rochester, New York. Six years ago, then-school board member Dirk
Hightower showed up to see his son inducted into the National Honor
Society. What he saw was a long line of girls moving across the stage:
"I heard nothing but heels clicking," Hightower recalls. Concerned
about the obvious gender gap, Hightower asked Hilton what was going on.
Hilton couldn't answer Hightower's question, but vowed to get to the
bottom of it. Hilton is a pocket-protector kind of guy who arrives at
his half-basement office every Sunday to catch up on work. When he
promises results, he delivers. Now, six years later, Hilton has some of
the best research into the gender gap available anywhere. (Though it
hasn't been published or peer-reviewed.) And he seems barely aware of
this. I'm the first national reporter even to inquire.

Hilton conducted a series of studies, culminating in the summer of 2004
with a large survey of 21 school districts across New York state.
Twelve were blue-collar and middle-class districts just like
Rush-Henrietta. Another nine were among the wealthiest school districts
in the state. Here is what Hilton found: In the first group, the
blue-collar and middle-class schools, girls not only excelled in verbal
skills but each year put a little more academic distance between
themselves and the boys. Even in math, long thought to be a male
stronghold, girls did better. But the real leap for girls was in
reading. Another significant find: In these districts, the big hit boys
take in reading happens in middle school, as they hit puberty. That's
when a modest gap in verbal skills evident in elementary school doubles
in size. As for the wealthy schools, more on them later.

Combine Hilton's local research with national neuroscience research,
and you arrive at this: The brains of men and women are very different.
Last spring, Scientific American summed up the best gender and brain
research, including a study demonstrating that women have greater
neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, the region of the brain
associated with verbal skills. Now we've reached the heart of the
mystery. Girls have genetic advantages that make them better readers,
especially early in life. And, now, society is favoring verbal skills.
Even in math, the emphasis has shifted away from guy-friendly problems
involving quick calculations to word and logic problems.

Increasingly, teachers ask students to keep written journals, even as
early as kindergarten. What gets written isn't polished prose, but it
is important training, say teachers, some of whom rely on the book Kid
Writing, which advocates the use of writing to teach children basic
skills in a host of subjects. The teachers are only doing their jobs,
preparing their students for a work world that has moved rapidly away
from manufacturing and agriculture and into information-based work.
It's not that schools have changed their ways to favor girls; it's that
they haven't changed their ways to help boys adjust to this new world.

Suddenly, the anecdotal evidence becomes obvious. Open the door of any
ninth-grade "academy" that some school districts run--the clump of
students predicted to sink in high school--and you'll see a potential
football team. Nearly all guys. Ninth grade is where boys' verbal
deficit becomes an albatross that stymies further male academic
achievement. That's the year guys run into the fruits of the
school-reform movement that date back to the 1989 governors' summit in
Charlottesville, Virginia, where Democrats and Republicans vowed to
shake up schools. One outcome of the summit is that, starting in ninth
grade, every student now gets a verbally drenched curriculum that is
supposed to better prepare them for college. Good goal, but it's
leaving boys in the dust.

The findings of the other researchers all play roles here. The
feminists are right to finger macho, anti-reading attitudes of boys,
especially in blue-collar districts. Patrick Welsh isn't wrong to cite
the influence of hip-hop music. It's just that these are lesser players
within a larger landscape.

Those who continue to argue that toxic American culture is to blame may
be unaware that this is a phenomenon that afflicts many post-industrial
Western countries. A 2002 study by the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development found low academic performance to be more
of a problem among boys than girls in 19 of 27 countries. Special
problems were found in Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and
Spain. In 21 of the 27 countries, the number of women graduating from
university exceeded the number of men.

But why are some boys faring better than others and a few schools
managing to level the gender playing field? Hilton's research on the
wealthiest schools is revealing. Girls still do better in verbal skills
in those districts. But Hilton discovered an important distinction.
When the wealthy boys enter middle school, they don't lose ground. And
that holds steady through high school.

Why the smaller verbal gender gaps in upper-income families? Hilton can
only feel his way on this one, in part by drawing lessons from his own
family, which teems with educators. At nights and on weekends, Hilton
saw his father reading, just as the boys hitting puberty in the
wealthiest districts see their well-educated fathers reading. If your
father reads, it's not viewed as a sissy thing, as it's seen by many
blue-collar students. Not only would that explain why the verbal gap
doesn't widen for boys in the wealthiest districts, but it would also
explain why the Harvards and Princetons and Stanfords have no trouble
drawing talented men. Those schools run close to a 50-50 gender balance
among undergraduates.

Reversing the academic underachievement among most boys may require an
old-fashioned assault on poor reading skills. Frankford Elementary
managed that, but even Indian River boys begin to lose ground in middle
school, the black hole of U.S. education. Maybe Maryland has a partial
answer. The state has been breaking out its test-score data by gender
since 1992, which is why Maryland Superintendent of Schools Nancy
Grasmick is dismayed by the gender gaps she sees--72 percent of girls
read at a proficient or advanced level by eighth grade, compared with
61 percent of boys.

Here's part of the Grasmick plan: Take existing comic books and graphic
novels deemed to cover academic disciplines and sprinkle them around
classrooms. Let the boys believe they're pulling a fast one on the
teachers by grabbing a quick read. Sounds bizarre, but it's based on
good hunches: Boys who become successful readers in high school often
attribute that success to making a transition from comic books to
school books in late elementary school. Why not offer
curriculum-as-comic books? It just might work. It also might not. But
at least Maryland is trying, which is better than most states.

Another solution lies with teachers' colleges, which, to date, have
been part of the problem. Michael Gurian, author of Boys and Girls
Learn Differently!, says his survey of education classes reveals that
99 percent fail to offer courses on biological learning differences.
There is decent research on this, but it is rarely passed along to
teachers.

Any solution to the problem must begin by acknowledging that it exists.
And, unfortunately, the crisis in boys' education is woefully
underexposed. Partly, that is understandable. Reporters look around
their world and see men dominant in academics, business, and politics.
What's to worry about? Plenty, as it turns out. Nearly all those male
leaders now at the top of their field earned at least a bachelor's
degree. And, in today's information world, a bachelor's degree is just
a starting point. But, each year, fewer and fewer men make it to that
starting line. That's a problem that merits attention--at least more
than five articles.

Richard Whitmire, a USA Today editorial writer, researched this issue
while a fellow with the Journalism Fellowships in Child and Family
Policy at the University of Maryland.

Fred Goodwin, CMA wrote:

Boy Trouble

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060...whitmire012306

by Richard Whitmire, The New Republic Online
--------------------------
The NR is a brainless rightist rag best used to wrap fish and ****.


It's been a year since Harvard President Larry Summers uttered some
unfortunate speculations about why so few women hold elite
professorships in the sciences. During Summers's speech, a biologist,
overwhelmed by the injustice of it all, nearly collapsed with what
George F. Will unkindly described as the vapors. Since that odd January
day, Summers has been rebuked with a faculty no-confidence vote, untold
talk-show hosts have weighed in, and 936 stories about the controversy
have appeared in newspapers and magazines (according to LexisNexis).
Impressive response, especially considering the modest number of these
professorships available.

Compare that with what happened after the U.S. Department of Education,
also about a year ago, released a 100-plus-page report weighing
academic progress by gender. The results were bracing. Nearly every
chart told the same story. Boys are over 50 percent more likely than
girls to repeat grades in elementary school, one-third more likely to
drop out of high school, and twice as likely to be identified with a
learning disability. The response? Near-total silence.
-----------------------
That's true and we all know why both happen. Women are shut out
of advancement because of child-bearing and differently organized
aggression profiles, and because they are still victim of old boy
networking. If it were genetic it would never have already been
changed successfully in dozens of arenas.

Boys are the victims of the male aggression profile getting more of
them into trouble with society instead of benefitting them
career-wise. That which makes men aggress is not always useful.
Steve