MB Civic

By Cathy Young  |  July 3, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

IN THE 1990s, reports of a crisis among girls, allegedly caused by pervasive sexism in schools and in the larger society, were soon followed by counter reports debunking the alarm. Now, the “boy crisis” story is following the same pattern. After the unsettling headlines in newspapers and magazines comes a new study, reported last week in The Washington Post, asserting that, by and large, American boys are doing fine. The report, titled “The Truth About Boys and Girls” and issued by the Washington-based think tank Education Sector, reviews the data about educational achievement and concludes: “The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse, it’s good news about girls doing better.”

But is the reality somewhat more complicated?

It is true that claims of a crisis among boys, like the earlier claims among girls, have been exaggerated. At the risk of self-promotion, I will note that I made this point in a 2001 article in Reason magazine, “Where the Boys Are,” discussing the then-new concerns that boys and young men were languishing in schools and colleges while girls and young women were thriving. While more boys than girls flounder in schools, I noted, the vast majority of boys do not.

The Education Sector study, authored by analyst Sara Mead, stresses the good news. Average National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores on reading and math have been mostly rising in recent years, after declining in the 1970s and 1980s. The gender gap favoring girls in reading has largely remained unchanged, but girls have made progress toward catching up with boys in math. Young men are now behind young women in college attendance, but both sexes are attending college in higher numbers than ever.

Unfortunately, the report tends to downplay some real problems. For instance, reading scores for 17-year-old boys have been declining in recent years, with a steadily growing gender gap. It is true that a similar gap existed in the early 1970s (before narrowing in the 1980s when average performance improved for both sexes, but especially for boys, and then widening again in the 1990s when girls’ scores remained steady while those of boys began to drop). However, just because male underachievement isn’t new doesn’t mean that it’s not a serious issue.

The report does acknowledge that boys are considerably more likely than girls to drop out of school (“about 65 percent of boys who start high school graduate four years later, compared with 72 percent of girls”) and that “these statistics, particularly those for black and Hispanic males, are deeply troubling.” But then it concludes: “There is some good news, though, because both men and women are slightly more likely to graduate from high school today than they were 30 years ago.”

Evidence that high school girls today tend to have higher educational aspirations than boys, and attend and graduate from college in higher numbers, is treated in similar fashion: Things aren’t getting worse for boys; they’re getting better for everybody, but especially for girls.

Still, what if it were the other way round? Suppose high school and college graduation rates were improving for everyone but especially for boys and young men, putting them ahead of girls and young women by a growing margin. Would anyone be stressing the good news that, in absolute terms, young women were doing better than before? I doubt it.

What’s more, the world has changed in the past 30 years. As the report itself admits, well-paying jobs for people without a college education — let alone without a high school diploma — are much harder to come by than they were. In a knowledge-based economy, education is far more essential to success than it used to be.

The report also suggests that the problem of black and Hispanic male educational underachievement should be seen primarily as a racial issue, not a gender issue. Racial disparities in educational achievement are considerably larger than gender gaps, but, among African-Americans in particular, young women are now vastly outperforming young men. Surely, this is a trend worth examining.

A moratorium on words such as “crisis” and “war” when discussing the problems of boys or girls in America is a good idea. But the Education Sector study seems to bend over backward to avoid acknowledging that, in some areas, boys’ problems may be a cause for gender-specific attention. Are we too worried about a possible backlash against female gains to admit that if boys’ academic achievement is lagging behind that of girls, that is a legitimate cause for concern?

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine.