Where the Boys Are Not

Page through Newsweek‘s January 30th cover story “The Boy Crisis”, and you’ll learn what
parents and educators have known for some time: boys have
become the underclass in traditional public schools. Lest you
doubt their disadvantage in modern classrooms, consider that
the academic performance of American boys lags behind girls in
every subject. Boys are over-represented in special
education classes by a ratio of 2 to 1. When it comes to
higher education, boys don’t fare much better: the percentage
of males in undergraduate programs has dropped 24 percent from
1970 to 2000. Now, boys are a minority on the average college
campus, accounting for just 44 percent of the student
body.

To what do we owe this unprecedented feminization
of education? Increasingly, experts are suggesting our “boy
crisis” is the result of 30 years of a politicized attempt to
remediate societal unfairness to girls. In 1972, a strong
feminist movement pushing for gender equity resulted in the
federal law, Title IX. This law prohibits discrimination on
the basis of sex in any federally-funded educational program.
Title IX (and its attendant changes in public classrooms and
on sports fields) has opened new doors for girls, but it has
done so on the backs of American boys.

Michael Thompson, psychologist and
author of Raising Cain, states that in public school
classrooms, “boys are treated like defective girls.” This is
largely because teaching practices in many public schools do
not adapt to the different learning styles of boys. One
solution, according to Newsweek, is to resurrect the
single-sex school.

Fortunately, long-standing federal opposition to single-sex schools on
the grounds of gender-based discrimination is finally
yielding, allowing this movement to gain political strength. Many
parents and educators see same-sex schools as a way to
circumvent the mismatch between boy-girl learning styles,
freeing teachers to tailor instructional methods to the boys
(or girls) in front of them.

Let’s hope the
miseducation of our boys serves as a cautionary tale for
legislators and policymakers. In today’s world, that means
bridging modern-day racial and economic achievement gaps
should not create a new class of forgotten students.
The federal government’s zeal to “leave no child behind” is
laudable, but so, too, is the goal of working toward
measurable achievement gains for already-proficient
students.

What can we do to avoid repeating history?
First, we should hold schools accountable for improving the
performance of all children – students already at or
above grade level, as well as low-performing students.
Currently, the State Board of Education receives reports measuring achievement level movement
across the board, but this information rarely garners the
attention it deserves. Second, we must give families the
freedom to choose schools for their children. Parents, not
bureaucrats, know best when it comes to the educational needs
of children.

In the end, our past educational failures
have the power to teach us a great deal about what works and
what doesn’t. As writer Norman Cousins once observed,
“History is a vast early warning system.” We would do well to
heed it.

Lindalyn Kakadelis writes a regular column for the North Carolina Education Alliance, www.nceducationalliance.org.