Boys’ education stirs much debate, brings little consensus
The cover of the January 30, 2006, issue of Newsweek trumpeted “The Boy Crisis.” A front-page story in the March 15, 2006, issue of Education Week proclaimed “Concern Over Gender Gaps Shifting to Boys.” Indeed, even U.S. First Lady Laura Bush has gotten involved, telling National Public Radio she feels as though “we’ve sort of shifted our gaze away from boys for the last several decades.”
Concerns about boys’ educational achievement reaches beyond the boundaries of any one country. Articles on this topic have appeared in Canada and the United Kingdom, too. On a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 reading test, 15-year-old, female students outscored males in all but one of the 41 participating countries. And here are some telling statistics from the United States.
Whereas men once significantly outnumbered women on college campuses, they now make up only about 44% of students at American institutions of higher learning.
Boys ages 5–12 are 60% more likely than girls to have repeated at least one grade.
Boys are 33% more likely than girls to drop out of high school.
Suggested reasons for these discrepancies vary: a mismatch between the way boys behave and learn and the way classrooms are set up, differences in the way boys’ and girls’ brains operate, lack of male role models for reading in an educational system where the vast majority of teachers are female, and lack of male modeling for the importance of reading in general.
“Beginning in the early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don’t-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is generally a worse fit for boys than for girls,” wrote Michael Gurian, founder of the Gurian Institute in Colorado, earlier this year in The Providence Journal. “When we decide, as we did with our daughters, that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with our sons—when we look closely at the system that boys learn in—we will discover these boys again, for all that they are.”
But is the situation a crisis? Indeed, is it even really a problem at all? A June 2006 study by Washington-based think tank Education Sector analyzed three decades of National Assessment of Educational Progress data and concluded that, over the past three decades, boys’ test scores are mostly up, more boys are going to college, and more are getting bachelor’s degrees. “The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse,” the report says. “It’s good news about girls doing better.”
Education Sector senior policy analyst Sara Mead puts it this way in the report: “There’s no doubt that some groups of boys—particularly Hispanic boys and boys from low-income homes—are in real trouble. But the predominant issues for them are race and class, not gender.”
William G. Brozo of George Mason University, author of the IRA book To Be a Boy, to Be a Reader, agrees that we need to pay special attention to the situation of males in high-poverty communities, but says that statistics alone don’t tell the whole story. “Teachers can tell you the stories about boys in their classrooms,” he says. “They say over and over again that the students who are hardest to motivate, who are most often in special education are boys. There is a global pattern of underachievement for boys.”
So what can be done? In an article coming out in the September issue of Educational Leadership, which has a special subtheme on gender issues, Brozo says that he makes three key recommendations:
1. We have to continue to find ways to bridge the competencies that boys have outside of school with the skills they need to handle academic tasks. For instance, in one project teachers helped low-performing students learn word families by analyzing the song lyrics from popular music. Then students created their own songs using these word families.
2. We need to match reading materials to boys’ interests outside of school. We need to find an entry point by getting to know boys on a personal level and finding out what they value in their lives.
3. We need to find men in the community to serve as reading mentors for boys, especially in low-income neighborhoods.
Some communities have tried this approach with success. In Canada, Professor Heather Richmond of St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and elementary school teacher Cheryl Miles brought undergraduate students from St. Thomas University, the majority of whom were hockey players, into classrooms in Fredericton to act as reading mentors for a group of grade 4 and grade 5 pupils. While girls’ attitudes toward reading remained more positive than boys’ after these visits, the boys grew more excited about reading over time.
Likewise, some communities have experimented with book clubs aimed at males. Brozo describes a Boys in Literacy Initiative (Club B.I.L.I.) in northern Virginia targeted at boys who are becoming disaffected with reading in the middle grades. The key to success for such clubs, he says, is to find reading materials that get the boys motivated, whether they be books or the lyrics to hip hop songs.
At the 2006 IRA annual convention, Timothy G. Weih of the University of Northern Iowa described a research project that involved setting up an offsite book club for middle school boys. The 10 boys, ages 13–15, were given the choice of several books to read; they selected Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko. The five-week club, which was facilitated by a man and met after school at a local bookstore, ended with a conference call with the author. The club was so successful that two subsequent book clubs were formed.
Based on his observations of the book club in action, Weih offered these recommendations for people considering similar projects:
Hold the meeting off the school grounds (at a bookstore or local library, for instance). This makes the meeting seem less formal and more fun.
Bear in mind the types of books boys typically like and let them make the actual choices themselves. Provide limited choices, do book talks for the suggested titles, and then have the boys vote. Examine many characteristics of the book, including style and format.
Model what you hope to get back in terms of discussion.
Get boys who know each other.
Provide snacks.
Crisis or not, it’s clear that educators need to continue to try to find ways to get boys reading and keep them reading. “One of the key factors that contributes to keeping boys, especially low SES boys, reading is engagement, ” Brozo says. It’s also important to provide role models, whether they be fathers or other males in the community.
Brozo, for one, hopes the education community can move beyond the “us against them” and “crisis” discourse that has characterized the mass media coverage of this topic. “I hope we can put our energies where they need to be,” he says, “on kids who are seriously at risk. But let’s enrich both genders and not leave anyone behind for any reason—political or otherwise.”
Boys and books. (August 2006). Reading Today, 24(1), 1.
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