So this is an older book, published in 2010, which I happened upon in the main nonfiction section rather than the new books section.\u00a0 I\u2019ll just give a brief summary here:<\/p>\n
Boys are falling behind.\u00a0 Anecdotally, there are valedictorian and top-honors groups in high school which are all-female, or nearly so.\u00a0 Statistically, boys at every level, from poor to middle-class, of all races and ages, are falling behind girls in test scores, grades, and intention to attend college.\u00a0 The conventional wisdom that girls do better than boys at verbal skills but boys are better when it\u2019s math related doesn\u2019t hold true any longer \u2014 girls are now better in both.<\/p>\n
The fundamental reason?\u00a0 Not video games, or favoritism towards girls, or a \u201chip-hop\u201d culture, or ADHD boys being required to sit still.\u00a0 This is an international problem, at least in other English-speaking countries such as Britain and Australia (although there, there\u2019s more attention to it), where the impact of these supposed culprits is not the same, but boy troubles are, and the gaps have only relatively recently emerged where these supposed causes are long-standing.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s that literacy skills have become emphasized and far more important in schooling than ever before.\u00a0 \u201cReading readiness\u201d is a preschool skill, and actual reading instruction begins in kindergarten, too soon for many boys, leaving them behind and\u00a0struggling to catch up.\u00a0 What\u2019s more, by the time they may be able to catch up, in the middle school years, the emphasis turns to literature; and, throughout, the classroom expectation is not to read for information but to discuss feelings and the personal relationships in the assigned text.\u00a0 On top of that, expectations for writing skills have\u00a0increased, another boy weakness.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
This is part of why girls dominate even the boy strengths of math and science \u2014 the author says that the SAT and other math testing has changed significantly in recent years, with every\u00a0problem a story problem,\u00a0leaving boys who would have been able to do the math\u00a0challenged just to\u00a0set up the problem.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
And, while he\u00a0doesn\u2019t blame boys\u2019 problems on feminism in the classroom, he does say that their difficulties have been ignored because it doesn\u2019t fit the narrative that girls are in trouble, and that many\u00a0of those in the education world\u00a0take the facts and say that black and Hispanic boys are in trouble,\u00a0so it\u2019s a\u00a0matter of racial\/ethnic inequality, but white boys are doing just fine, when that\u2019s not what the\u00a0statistics\u00a0show.\u00a0 At the same time, statistics broken apart by sex aren\u2019t even very easy to come by because researchers aren\u2019t interested.<\/p>\n
As a mom to three boys, this does worry me a great deal, especially since one of the three has exactly these\u00a0typical \u201cboy\u201d literacy difficulties \u2014\u00a0he\u2019s not yet in high school, but I already know\u00a0he\u2019ll be doomed if he wants to apply to the sort of college that requires a self-reflective\u00a0personal essay.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
But\u00a0it\u2019s not as simple as saying,\u00a0\u201ctake away these expectations,\u201d since even career fields which would have, in the past, required\u00a0little more than the ability to work with ones hands, now do require a higher degree of literacy, for example, to work through a repair manual.\u00a0 Boys need help to succeed in gaining these now-important literacy skills, and he provides examples of programs both in the US and internationally, none of which are earth-shattering \u2014 the main point is that they pay attention to boys and how they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n
SIDE NOTE:\u00a0 I picked up another book at the same time: Still Failing at Fairness:\u00a0 How Gender Bias Cheats Girls and Boys in School and What We Can Do About It, by David & Myra Sadker & Karen R. Zittleman (originally published in 1994; revised 2009).\u00a0 Apparently, they live in a completely different world.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a typical paragraph:\u00a0 \u201cMale students frequently control classroom conversation .\u00a0 They ask and answer more questions.\u00a0\u00a0 They receive more praise for the intellectual quality of their ideas.\u201d\u00a0 (p. 66)\u00a0 later:\u00a0 \u201cGirls receive less instructional time, less help, and fewer challenges.\u201d\u00a0 (p. 66).\u00a0 They cite worksheets in which children are asked to pair tools with a picture of a man and cleaning items with a picture of a woman (no reference or date given).\u00a0 They cite a 1975 (!) study on the prevalence of male vs. female characters in readers.\u00a0 As to the \u201cboys\u2019 crisis,\u201d they claim this is mostly a political backlash, with the only true crisis being among minority boys, or among boys harmed by \u201csex stereotypes\u201d, such as boys who are emotionally harmed by the expectation that they should be stoic, and because they\u2019re prevented from expressing their feelings, or because \u201csociety continues to define masculinity in terms that sound anti-intellectual, antifeminine, and antischool\u201d (p. 208).\u00a0 Essentially, in their world, time has stood still.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So this is an older book, published in 2010, which I happened upon in the main nonfiction section rather than the new books section.\u00a0 I\u2019ll just give a brief summary here: Boys are falling behind.\u00a0 Anecdotally, there are valedictorian and top-honors groups in high school which are all-female, or nearly so.\u00a0 Statistically, boys at every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n