[Mb-civic] NOT JUST FOR PARENTS: The Myth of 'The Boy Crisis' - Caryl Rivers, Rosalind Barnett - Washington Post Sunday Outlook

[William Swiggard]

The Myth of 'The Boy Crisis'
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By Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Chait Barnett
Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Sunday, April 9, 2006; B01

It was the early 1900s, and boys were supposedly in crisis. In monthly 
magazines, ladies' journals and books, urgent polemics appeared, warning 
that young men were spending too much time in school with female 
teachers and that the constant interaction with women was robbing them 
of their manhood. In Congress, Sen. Albert Beveridge of Indiana railed 
against overeducation. He urged young men to "avoid books and in fact 
avoid all artificial learning, for the forefathers put America on the 
right path by learning completely from natural experience."

What boys needed, the experts said, was time outdoors, rubbing elbows 
with one another and learning from male role models. That's what led -- 
at least in part -- to the founding of the Boy Scouts in 1910.

Now the cry has been raised again: We're losing our boys. The media have 
been hyping America's new "boy crisis" in magazine cover stories, a PBS 
documentary and countless newspaper articles. Boys, these reports 
lament, are falling behind in academic achievement, graduating from high 
school at lower rates than girls, occupying fewer seats in college 
classrooms, displaying poorer verbal skills.

This time, experts are calling for a complete overhaul of American 
education based on gender, saying that boys are wired differently from 
girls, learn in different ways and may just need their own schools. 
Boys, they say, are at a disadvantage in the many classrooms headed by 
female teachers, who are supposedly hostile to their sex. One male high 
school student in Massachusetts has even filed a federal lawsuit 
claiming that his school is biased against males.

But are American boys in academic free fall? Not really, if we look 
closely. Nor do they need special boys-only classrooms to teach them in 
ways tailored for their unique brains.

The boy crisis we're hearing about is largely a manufactured one, the 
product of both a backlash against the women's movement and the media's 
penchant for continuously churning out news about the latest dire threat 
to the nation. The subject got a big boost last year when first lady 
Laura Bush announced that she was going to turn her attention to the 
problems of boys.

But those problems are hardly so widespread. The alarming statistics on 
which the notion of a crisis is based are rarely broken out by race or 
class. When they are, the whole picture changes. It becomes clear that 
if there is a crisis, it's among inner-city and rural boys. White 
suburban boys aren't significantly touched by it. On average, they are 
not dropping out of school, avoiding college or lacking in verbal 
skills. Although we have been hearing that boys are virtually 
disappearing from college classrooms, the truth is that among whites, 
the gender composition of colleges is pretty balanced: 51 percent female 
and 49 percent male, according to the National Education Association. In 
Ivy League colleges, men still outnumber women.

One group of studies found that although poor and working-class boys lag 
behind girls in reading when they get to middle school, boys in the 
wealthiest schools do not fall behind, either in middle school or in 
high school. University of Michigan education professor Valerie Lee 
reports that gender differences in academic performance are "small to 
moderate."

When it comes to academic achievement, race and class completely swamp 
gender. The Urban Institute reports that 76 percent of students who live 
in middle- to higher-income areas are likely to graduate from high 
school, while only 56 percent of students who live in lower-income areas 
are likely to do so. Among whites in Boston public schools, for every 
100 males who graduate, 104 females do. A tiny gap.

But among blacks, for every 100 males who graduate, 139 females do. 
Florida's graduation rates among all students show a striking picture of 
race and class: 81 percent for Asians, 60 percent for whites, 48 percent 
for Hispanics and 46 percent for blacks.

A peculiar image of the "typical" boy has emerged in many media reports: 
He's unable to focus, can't sit still, hates to read, acts up in class, 
loves sports and video games, gets in trouble a lot. Indeed, such boys 
exist -- it has long been established that boys suffer more from 
attention deficit disorder than girls do -- and they need all the help 
they can get. But research shows this is not the typical boy. Boys, in 
fact, are as -- or more -- different from one another as they are from 
girls.

Nonetheless, some are advocating boys-only classrooms in which boys 
would be taught in boot-camp fashion. In a recent Newsweek cover story, 
Houston neurologist Bruce Perry described today's co-ed classes as a 
"biologically disrespectful model of education." In the New Republic, 
Richard Whitmire wrote of a "verbally drenched curriculum" that is 
"leaving boys in the dust." New York Times columnist David Brooks 
suggested that boys ought to be given books about combat, to hold their 
interest. (Forget Julius Caesar, give them GI Joe?)

There's actually not much evidence that most boys lack verbal skills. In 
2005, University of Wisconsin psychologist Janet Hyde synthesized data 
from 165 studies on verbal ability and gender. They revealed a female 
superiority so slight as to be meaningless. And psychologist Diane 
Halpern of Claremont McKenna College looked at many studies of verbal 
and math abilities and found that, overall, the gender differences were 
remarkably small.

This research casts doubt on the idea, championed by author Michael 
Gurian ("The Wonder of Boys") and others, that boys' and girls' brains 
are so different that they must be taught in very different ways. 
Although there are indeed some structural differences in the brains of 
men and women, we don't know what they mean. Perhaps very little. In the 
19th century, scientists thought that the greater size of the male brain 
meant that men were a lot smarter. We now know how off the mark that was.

The Massachusetts student who has brought the discrimination suit 
against his high school wants boys to be given credit for sports and to 
be excused from the school's community service requirement. But might 
that not send the message to boys that they are inherently too dumb to 
get academic credit and too insensitive to be concerned about community 
issues?

Many, perhaps most, boys would be bored to tears in the kind of 
classroom that is now being described as "boy-friendly" -- a classroom 
that would de-emphasize reading and verbal skills and would rely on rote 
learning and discipline -- because it is really a remedial program in 
disguise. That's great for boys who need it, but most boys, especially 
those in affluent suburban schools, don't.

Still, as Newsweek reported, educators "are reviving an old idea: 
separate the girls from the boys." We may see a rush to single-sex 
classrooms that won't really be good educational policy. California 
tried such classrooms in the 1990s under Gov. Pete Wilson, but they did 
not succeed in boosting academic achievement. In fact, according to a 
2001 Ford Foundation report, the academic success of both girls and boys 
is influenced more by small classes, strong curricula and qualified 
teachers than by single-sex settings.

The Department of Defense offers a better model. DOD runs a vast network 
of schools on military bases in the United States and abroad for more 
than 100,000 children of service members. And in those schools, there is 
no class and race gap. That's because these schools have high 
expectations, a strong academic focus, and hire teachers with years of 
classroom experience and training (a majority with master's degrees). Of 
course, this solution costs money, and has none of the sex appeal of the 
trendy single-sex-school quick fix.

Obsessing about a boy crisis or thinking that American teachers are 
waging a war on boys won't help kids. What will is recognizing that 
students are individuals, with many different skills and abilities. And 
that goes for both girls and boys.

Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Rosalind 
Chait Barnett is a senior scientist at the Women's Studies Research 
Center at Brandeis University.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/07/AR2006040702025.html
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