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Exclusive Excerpt from The Trouble With Boys
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Let's take a closer look at how boys are doing. What we find is that, on the whole, in crumbling public schools in poor neighborhoods, in elite schools that serve the very rich, and in many middle class suburban schools around the country boys are doing less well than girls. Not every boy is struggling. Everywhere you look, some high performing boys are doing as well as, in many ways, even better than, the smartest and most accomplished girls. But generally, boys, for a number of reasons -- some new and some that would be familiar to our parents and their parents -- are not keeping pace with girls when it comes to learning.
How are they failing? Many more boys than girls are identified as having learning disabilities and were relegated to special education classes. That disparity is nationwide. Across the United States and in every socioeconomic grouping, boys make up the overwhelming majority of kids who get that special ed label. Why? Part of the reason has to do with simple biology. Pediatricians find that more boy babies than girl babies are likely to be born with vision problems, hearing impairment, and gross motor disabilities, which can interfere with learning. But there are also good indicators that boys, for reasons we'll discuss later, simple aren't fitting into the flow of the school day in the same way as girls. Boys represent the overwhelming number of behavioral problems. They are prescribed medicine for attention-related disorders at twice the rate of girls, and far from leveling out, the number of boys taking attention related drugs continues to climb-- growing 48 percent between 2000 and 2008. Boys themselves are report that they are more likely to be the target of bullying and even violent crime like assault.
Think boys can handle it? The pressure is on boys to appear stoic but there are worrisome signs that at some deeper level, boys are not OK. There has been much in the popular press about high rates of depression among adolescent girls, and indeed girls are more likely to report feeling blue. But boys are much more likely than girls to kill themselves. According to epidemiologists and the Center for Disease Control, suicide rates among adolescent boys skyrocketed from the 1950's to the 1980's and remain high. Currently between the ages of 5 and 14, boys are three times as likely to die by their own hand as girls. Between the ages of 15 and 19, boys kill themselves the rates of their female classmates.
Boys learn less than girls in school. How do we know this? The U.S. Department of Education churns out data on on the nation's students by testing and questioning a representative sample of school-goers and then breaking the results down by ethnicity and gender. Periodically, the National Center for Educational Statistics issues a report -- The Nation's Report Card -- to let us know how kids are doing. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the academic under-achievement of boys in an entrenched national problem.
Let's take a look at the data. The Department of Education keeps close tabs on how children perform on standardized tests for all major subjects at ages 9, 13, and 17-- ages that roughly correspond to fourth grade, eighth grade and senior year in high school. You can take a look at it if you go to http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/results2004.
Trends in average reading scale scores and score gaps for students ages 9, 13, and 17, by gender: 1971-2004
Average writing scale scores, by gender, grades 4, 8, and 12: 1998 and 2002
As you can see, a great deal about students achievement has changed in the last thirty years. In the 1970's, girls lagged badly behind boys in high school math. By the early 1990's, girls had all but closed that gap. In 2004, high school girls scored within 3 points of the boys.
In the same period of time, the NCES data on reading, the linchpin skill for academic success, shows boys lagging far behind. The longer boys stay in school, they further they fall behind girls. Fourth grade boys scored five points below fourth grade girls. In middle school that gap widens to ten points. By high school, that gap has widened to 14 points -- and in high school, boys are actually doing worse in reading than the were doing thirty years. In writing, boys start far behind and never catch up. The gap between elementary school females and females and males, which was 16 points in 1998, grew to 17 points in 2002. The gap between male and female high school students in writing grew from 19 points to a whopping 24 points. It's no wonder 72 per cent of girls and only 65 percent of boys graduate from high school and that college undergraduates in the United States are 57.3 percent female.
These are the grim statistics. Now the question is, what is causing boys to under-achievement and what can parent and educators do to help them without hurting our high performing girls?
Excerpted with permission of the author, Peg Tyre, from The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents & Educators Must Do.
