Hold your fingers roughly two inches apart for an idea of the disparity that exists between American fourth-grade girls and boys in reading and writing. Double that space, and you'll see how far apart they stand by the time they hit the eighth grade.
Jason Rearick / The Citizen
Educators are concerned that many boys are losing interest in school, particularly at the middle school level, where achievement differences between the genders are striking.
Educators are concerned that many boys are losing interest in school, particularly at the middle school level, where achievement differences between the genders are striking.
Seem dramatic? The illustration might state the obvious to any parent or teacher who bears daily witness to boys who fail to complete homework, struggle on tests or disrupt class. Some who have researched the issue, though, say teachers need look no further than their own students to solve a long-accepted stereotype about boys: that they're simply not inclined to reading, let alone following the structure and limits of a classroom setting.
Still, area middle school principals like Bruce MacBain, drawn to national headlines that mirror their own observations of boys in their building, are wondering what's going on. As dedicated educators, they want to stem the issue now, before things get worse. Guided by MacBain, the Moravia Middle School principal, administrators turned their attention earlier this month to a recently growing national concern.
Last October, the U.S. Department of Education released a voluminous study that looked at boys' problems in school from multiple perspectives. Among its conclusions, the report found that boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to be held back in elementary school, a third more prone to dropping out of high school and twice as likely to be identified with a learning disability.
Earlier this month, the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy and Research issued a 26-page report weighing high school graduation rates by gender and race. The results were jolting. Just over a third of boys in this country's public high schools do not graduate. Among states with the lowest overall graduation rates, New York saw 54 percent of its boys complete high school in 2003, versus 61 percent of its girls.
Colleges and universities now report turning tides in enrollment, with young women far outnumbering young men on campus. Syracuse University says its ratio is now 56 percent female to 44 percent male. Cayuga Community College disclosed that 60 percent of students on its campus are female.
“What's so ironic is that 10 years ago, it was all about how colleges could attract females. Now it's about getting males on campus and keeping them,” said Chris Duffy, the director of admissions at Cayuga Community College.
But discrepancies in students' educational success become most apparent in middle school.
MacBain doesn't need to study the data to see something's wrong. He just scans the photographs of National Honors Society inductees at his school over the years. Picture after picture shows hosts of girls assembled around handfuls of boys. This year's photo depicts one boy amid a cluster of 14 girls.
“You can see there's definitely something going on,” he said.
In Cato-Meridian, meanwhile, a look at printouts for last year's eighth-grade honor roll tells a similar story: over four consecutive quarters, an average of 33 girls achieved honors, compared with an average of 17 boys.
“There's been a definite discrepancy in who has made the honor roll and who has not,” Sean Gleason told a packed Cato school board meeting about a month ago.
Last year's eighth-grade science assessments reinforced Gleason's concerns. Two girls scored below basic proficiency while 10 boys received equally low marks. The story repeated itself in math, with nine girls scoring at below basic proficiency, and double that number in boys achieving low scores.
Cato-Meridian parent Della Weston has a front-row seat to the differences between boys and girls when it comes to school. The mother of 15 children, Weston said she notices her daughters enjoy reading more than her sons.
“It's more important to girls to get good grades, generally, than boys,” she said.
Still, Weston's four sons - 17, 14, 13 and 10 - are not all similarly disinterested in school. One she said, “gets extremely good grades.” Another she said, would rather play video games than focus on homework.
Weston did not seem terribly surprised to learn Gleason had noticed disparities between boys and girls academically. She said she was curious to find out what the principals' group discovered, over their discussions, about how boys learn.
MacBain heads up the Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES Middle School Principals Group - which meets each month. He said the topic generated little interest when he'd brought it up with his colleagues last year. Their early April discussion now sees most agree that, in different ways (math or ELA scores, retention rates, etc.), each school was seeing some indication of what MacBain still hesitates to call “a problem” with boys.
“If girls have just gotten better, how do we get boys to be better?” he said.
Drawn to the national headlines, MacBain armed his colleagues with copies of a January story in Newsweek called, “The Trouble with Boys.” He and other administrators began informing themselves of the issue's scope, and of the kinds of tools they might gather to help them address the matter. The story certainly got the administrators talking, at least wanting to look harder at their own data to see if it supported any of the arguments the magazine made.
The magazine article focused on scientists who differentiate between “the boy brain,” and girls' own capacities, and scholars who claim “misguided feminism” is at play in how schools shortchange boys. Responding to research the article cited, school administrators across the country have developed separate classrooms for boys, or supplemented their classroom syllabi with reading materials to which boys might be more drawn (newspapers, news magazines, science fiction books, books with male protagonists).
Michael W. Smith slammed the Newsweek story for its sensationalism and its all-encompassing outlook on boys. Smith, a Temple University professor and co-author of “Reading Don't Fix No Chevy's: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men,” appealed to the inclination of parents and educators everywhere when he said schools might do better to evaluate boys should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
“We make a mistake when we think of boys as a big monolith. They're individuals,” he said.
Smith's statement might appeal to local administrators, teachers and parents who hesitated to make broad generalizations about boys in their classrooms and their families.
Researchers agree that the disparity becomes most conspicuous at the middle school level. After that, everyone has different ideas on what's the root cause:
* Policy - in the early 1990s, the American Association of University Women published a study examining “how schools shortchange girls.” The study essentially charged America's public schools with neglecting girls - who it said received less attention than boys in the classroom, particularly in math and science. Gender bias was blatantly at play, the report said. Boys held strongholds in certain subjects and as a result the achievement gap, particularly in science, was growing.
The report quickly gave rise to smaller classrooms, increased AP or other accelerated courses, opened up technology and science classes to more girls, and amended existing federal Title I and Title IX laws to maintain gender equity in education.
* Nature - MacBain leans toward the idea that biology largely determines how boys behave and learn in school. He is drawn by arguments that say the brain governs factors like impulse control, spatial and verbal skills - even how children play. Intrigued by some scholars' and scientists' emphasis on “the boy brain,” hard-wired in the womb by hormones, MacBain wondered if perhaps policy that mandates everything from classroom structure to syllabus content demands unrealistic expectations from boys.
Thinking whether one might create a more “biologically respectful” format for boys, MacBain currently entertains the idea of creating separate classrooms for girls and boys, as a number of schools across the country already have.
* Nurture - A wide body of research indicates social attitudes toward male behavior proves biology is less at work in determining how boys behave than social expectations. Boys may even define male behavior by eliminating pursuits they see as uniquely feminine. “Chevy's” stipulates reading may be one of those pursuits.
The authors suggest that teachers actively view their students as individuals with unique interests and strengths - talents they bring to school every day but can't necessarily show off in a classroom setting. They maintain that teachers' more active interests in their students' extra-curricular pursuits (i.e. music, humor, politics, clothing, etc.) helps them connect with their students as people, to everybody's benefit.
Ken Hilton subscribes more to the nurture theory. A statistician in suburban Rochester's Rush-Henrietta school district, Hilton uses the aforementioned two-finger illustration to bring home the idea of existing performance gaps between girls and boys.
No fan of the No Child Left Behind Act, the 20-year veteran of public school administration applauded the law for no other reason than it forced states and schools to break down and report on achievement in student subgroups. Though the legislation tells states to look at gender, it does not require them to report their findings in that area.
Hilton first gained awareness of disparities in school achievement nearly eight years ago, after a school board member attending his son's induction to the National Honors Society talked about an experience that virtually echoes Bruce MacBain's observations at Moravia.
The predominant “click, click click” of high heels across the auditorium stage prompted the official to ask Hilton what was happening.
The self-professed “geek type” went right to work, looking at who took AP courses, breaking down SAT and Regents test scores, middle school achievement in math and science, National Honors Society membership, etc.
“In all those areas I began to see significant under-achievement by boys from top to bottom,” Hilton said, adding that the disparity is most apparent in English Language Arts (ELA) test results - a subject in which girls have a proven knack, and in which they score miles ahead of boys. (Standardized math tests for the eighth grade, are also, essentially reading tests. No longer content to see answers standing on their own at the end of a problem, schools now ask students to analyze and explain how they arrived at their solutions).
Two years ago, Hilton began weighing fourth and eighth-grade achievement in his district by socio-economics illustrating Rush-Henrietta as a “typical” school district (“We send some kids to Yale and some kids to jail,” he said). Hilton compared his and 12 other blue-collar, middle-class New York school districts with nine schools in wealthier communities in the state. He found negligible gaps in achievement between boys and girls in the wealthier districts, while girls in blue-collar and middle-class schools gained significantly more academic ground than boys in verbal skills. Girls also did better in math.
Hilton said nurture was the only way to explain the difference between rich and poor districts. He ventured that parents in wealthier districts tend to model reading to their children, while boys growing up in less affluent communities “go home to fathers who don't have their nose in a book as much.”
“There's no time in girls' or boys' lives when gender identity is more uncertain than in middle school. If 11, 12, 13-year-old boys are in environments where it's not seen as masculine to read, they won't value reading, either,” he said.
Back in Cayuga County, school leaders realize they don't have all the answers. At the tail end of the school year, principals hope that two experts MacBain lined up for their final meeting next month can provide more insight, and perhaps some concrete tips for handling or staving off the issue. By all accounts, they have a long way to go.
“We're right at the beginning stages,” MacBain said.
Staff writer Olivia Goldberg can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 235 or olivia.goldberg@lee.net
Still, area middle school principals like Bruce MacBain, drawn to national headlines that mirror their own observations of boys in their building, are wondering what's going on. As dedicated educators, they want to stem the issue now, before things get worse. Guided by MacBain, the Moravia Middle School principal, administrators turned their attention earlier this month to a recently growing national concern.
Last October, the U.S. Department of Education released a voluminous study that looked at boys' problems in school from multiple perspectives. Among its conclusions, the report found that boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to be held back in elementary school, a third more prone to dropping out of high school and twice as likely to be identified with a learning disability.
Earlier this month, the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy and Research issued a 26-page report weighing high school graduation rates by gender and race. The results were jolting. Just over a third of boys in this country's public high schools do not graduate. Among states with the lowest overall graduation rates, New York saw 54 percent of its boys complete high school in 2003, versus 61 percent of its girls.
Colleges and universities now report turning tides in enrollment, with young women far outnumbering young men on campus. Syracuse University says its ratio is now 56 percent female to 44 percent male. Cayuga Community College disclosed that 60 percent of students on its campus are female.
“What's so ironic is that 10 years ago, it was all about how colleges could attract females. Now it's about getting males on campus and keeping them,” said Chris Duffy, the director of admissions at Cayuga Community College.
But discrepancies in students' educational success become most apparent in middle school.
MacBain doesn't need to study the data to see something's wrong. He just scans the photographs of National Honors Society inductees at his school over the years. Picture after picture shows hosts of girls assembled around handfuls of boys. This year's photo depicts one boy amid a cluster of 14 girls.
“You can see there's definitely something going on,” he said.
In Cato-Meridian, meanwhile, a look at printouts for last year's eighth-grade honor roll tells a similar story: over four consecutive quarters, an average of 33 girls achieved honors, compared with an average of 17 boys.
“There's been a definite discrepancy in who has made the honor roll and who has not,” Sean Gleason told a packed Cato school board meeting about a month ago.
Last year's eighth-grade science assessments reinforced Gleason's concerns. Two girls scored below basic proficiency while 10 boys received equally low marks. The story repeated itself in math, with nine girls scoring at below basic proficiency, and double that number in boys achieving low scores.
Cato-Meridian parent Della Weston has a front-row seat to the differences between boys and girls when it comes to school. The mother of 15 children, Weston said she notices her daughters enjoy reading more than her sons.
“It's more important to girls to get good grades, generally, than boys,” she said.
Still, Weston's four sons - 17, 14, 13 and 10 - are not all similarly disinterested in school. One she said, “gets extremely good grades.” Another she said, would rather play video games than focus on homework.
Weston did not seem terribly surprised to learn Gleason had noticed disparities between boys and girls academically. She said she was curious to find out what the principals' group discovered, over their discussions, about how boys learn.
MacBain heads up the Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES Middle School Principals Group - which meets each month. He said the topic generated little interest when he'd brought it up with his colleagues last year. Their early April discussion now sees most agree that, in different ways (math or ELA scores, retention rates, etc.), each school was seeing some indication of what MacBain still hesitates to call “a problem” with boys.
“If girls have just gotten better, how do we get boys to be better?” he said.
Drawn to the national headlines, MacBain armed his colleagues with copies of a January story in Newsweek called, “The Trouble with Boys.” He and other administrators began informing themselves of the issue's scope, and of the kinds of tools they might gather to help them address the matter. The story certainly got the administrators talking, at least wanting to look harder at their own data to see if it supported any of the arguments the magazine made.
The magazine article focused on scientists who differentiate between “the boy brain,” and girls' own capacities, and scholars who claim “misguided feminism” is at play in how schools shortchange boys. Responding to research the article cited, school administrators across the country have developed separate classrooms for boys, or supplemented their classroom syllabi with reading materials to which boys might be more drawn (newspapers, news magazines, science fiction books, books with male protagonists).
Michael W. Smith slammed the Newsweek story for its sensationalism and its all-encompassing outlook on boys. Smith, a Temple University professor and co-author of “Reading Don't Fix No Chevy's: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men,” appealed to the inclination of parents and educators everywhere when he said schools might do better to evaluate boys should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
“We make a mistake when we think of boys as a big monolith. They're individuals,” he said.
Smith's statement might appeal to local administrators, teachers and parents who hesitated to make broad generalizations about boys in their classrooms and their families.
Researchers agree that the disparity becomes most conspicuous at the middle school level. After that, everyone has different ideas on what's the root cause:
* Policy - in the early 1990s, the American Association of University Women published a study examining “how schools shortchange girls.” The study essentially charged America's public schools with neglecting girls - who it said received less attention than boys in the classroom, particularly in math and science. Gender bias was blatantly at play, the report said. Boys held strongholds in certain subjects and as a result the achievement gap, particularly in science, was growing.
The report quickly gave rise to smaller classrooms, increased AP or other accelerated courses, opened up technology and science classes to more girls, and amended existing federal Title I and Title IX laws to maintain gender equity in education.
* Nature - MacBain leans toward the idea that biology largely determines how boys behave and learn in school. He is drawn by arguments that say the brain governs factors like impulse control, spatial and verbal skills - even how children play. Intrigued by some scholars' and scientists' emphasis on “the boy brain,” hard-wired in the womb by hormones, MacBain wondered if perhaps policy that mandates everything from classroom structure to syllabus content demands unrealistic expectations from boys.
Thinking whether one might create a more “biologically respectful” format for boys, MacBain currently entertains the idea of creating separate classrooms for girls and boys, as a number of schools across the country already have.
* Nurture - A wide body of research indicates social attitudes toward male behavior proves biology is less at work in determining how boys behave than social expectations. Boys may even define male behavior by eliminating pursuits they see as uniquely feminine. “Chevy's” stipulates reading may be one of those pursuits.
The authors suggest that teachers actively view their students as individuals with unique interests and strengths - talents they bring to school every day but can't necessarily show off in a classroom setting. They maintain that teachers' more active interests in their students' extra-curricular pursuits (i.e. music, humor, politics, clothing, etc.) helps them connect with their students as people, to everybody's benefit.
Ken Hilton subscribes more to the nurture theory. A statistician in suburban Rochester's Rush-Henrietta school district, Hilton uses the aforementioned two-finger illustration to bring home the idea of existing performance gaps between girls and boys.
No fan of the No Child Left Behind Act, the 20-year veteran of public school administration applauded the law for no other reason than it forced states and schools to break down and report on achievement in student subgroups. Though the legislation tells states to look at gender, it does not require them to report their findings in that area.
Hilton first gained awareness of disparities in school achievement nearly eight years ago, after a school board member attending his son's induction to the National Honors Society talked about an experience that virtually echoes Bruce MacBain's observations at Moravia.
The predominant “click, click click” of high heels across the auditorium stage prompted the official to ask Hilton what was happening.
The self-professed “geek type” went right to work, looking at who took AP courses, breaking down SAT and Regents test scores, middle school achievement in math and science, National Honors Society membership, etc.
“In all those areas I began to see significant under-achievement by boys from top to bottom,” Hilton said, adding that the disparity is most apparent in English Language Arts (ELA) test results - a subject in which girls have a proven knack, and in which they score miles ahead of boys. (Standardized math tests for the eighth grade, are also, essentially reading tests. No longer content to see answers standing on their own at the end of a problem, schools now ask students to analyze and explain how they arrived at their solutions).
Two years ago, Hilton began weighing fourth and eighth-grade achievement in his district by socio-economics illustrating Rush-Henrietta as a “typical” school district (“We send some kids to Yale and some kids to jail,” he said). Hilton compared his and 12 other blue-collar, middle-class New York school districts with nine schools in wealthier communities in the state. He found negligible gaps in achievement between boys and girls in the wealthier districts, while girls in blue-collar and middle-class schools gained significantly more academic ground than boys in verbal skills. Girls also did better in math.
Hilton said nurture was the only way to explain the difference between rich and poor districts. He ventured that parents in wealthier districts tend to model reading to their children, while boys growing up in less affluent communities “go home to fathers who don't have their nose in a book as much.”
“There's no time in girls' or boys' lives when gender identity is more uncertain than in middle school. If 11, 12, 13-year-old boys are in environments where it's not seen as masculine to read, they won't value reading, either,” he said.
Back in Cayuga County, school leaders realize they don't have all the answers. At the tail end of the school year, principals hope that two experts MacBain lined up for their final meeting next month can provide more insight, and perhaps some concrete tips for handling or staving off the issue. By all accounts, they have a long way to go.
“We're right at the beginning stages,” MacBain said.
Staff writer Olivia Goldberg can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 235 or olivia.goldberg@lee.net
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mayfieldga wrote on Sep 21, 2009 12:00 PM:
The truth is in the information age, differential treatment from an early age is creating vast differences in support, knowledge, and accumulated skills over time.
Girls should know if a woman appears weak, this creates more support for her. If a boy appears weak, this tends to incur more aggression and neglect leftover from the nineteenth century belief Males should be strong the antidote being more aggression to make him tougher. In the information age, this treatment is hurting young boys and over time and leaves men unable to compete.
The nineteenth century belief Males should be strong heavily adversely affects Males from an early age onward in three large areas.
first area society's belief, Males should be strong allows aggression toward Males (differences as early as nine months) I am referring to more commanding, abrupt, harsh words, less positive eye-contact, more intimidating eye-contact, and more harsh physical treatment. This aggression creates much higher average stress that makes learning information age skills more difficult. The lower the socioeconomic bracket the more amplified and more allowed aggression toward those Males. The increased aggression Males receive, creates four bad things for Males mentally, emotionally, and socially: 1. It creates higher average layers of mental frictions (redefined from higher average stress) which inhibit thinking, learning, and motivation in mental areas. 2. These higher layers of mental frictions also create improper pace and intensity in approaching mental work (apply too much effort when approaching new material) and higher tension that hurts motivation to learn. 3. The aggression Males receive and less positive (nurturing) attention also create the higher average stress, which then creates the nervous energy or over activity. 4. This aggression Males receive creates the Male ego or defensive cushion that the Male develops from an early age to protect them from the aggressions they receive from society. This Male ego or defensive cushion has the negative consequences of further alienating Males from various mental, emotional, social, and academic supports they might receive from society. When Males hear firm or hard words from others like teachers or others their minds are thinking defense and not thinking about learning and enjoying the learning process. When boys are talked to it is often with firm short commands, not the soft, kind, ease of nurtured stability necessary for mental/emotional stability. Everyone should test this out in to see for themselves. The combination of high layers of mental frictions and defensive cushion are working to create an impediment to learning that accumulates in harm over time for men.
The Second area of concern: In society today, men are given love, honor, respect, and support or the essentials of their self-worth only on the “condition of sufficient” achievement, money, power, status or image. The Male child must generate love from others, while Female child will receive this for being a girl. Again, this is all a part of the nineteenth century belief Males should be strong
Males who can achieve in the classroom will do so. He will receive sufficient love, honor, respect, and support for academics and will continue to put forth more effort. When a Male Child is not showing a measure of achievement in school, he will tend to receive more neglect, abuse, and ridicule from parents and “teachers” than the Female child. This signals to the Male Child that he will not receive the essentials of self-worth in academics. He will then push himself in areas such as games, sports, and other pursuits to receive love, honor and respect (self-worth) from his peers. Over a period of years, this leaves Males far behind Females in mental, emotional, social, and academic knowledge and skills.
Third area of concern: In addition, generally Males “are not given” - kindness, ease, gentleness, and stable - mental, emotional, social, and academic support, attention, knowledge and skills (unless by accident). Society in its ignorance from the nineteenth century belief Males should be strong considers such attention and support as coddling the Male child. Society still holds that Males should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Over a period of years, this is leaving many Males grossly unable to compete in the information age, which requires a slow accumulation of many complex mental, emotional, social, academic skills and talents. This is creating the ever growing international Male Crisis that will only get worse for Males and then get much worse for Females when Males begin to take back with interest, their power and status. I feel society will continue maintaining this mistreatment of Males until a critical point is reached. The truth is, little boys need just as much coddling as the girls and just as much kind, considerate mental, emotional, social, and academic support as the girls.
Due to the nineteenth century belief women should be protected and still in effect today, this has created much protection for many women. When they are talked to from young age, they are given more kind, delicate, more considerate treatment. They are given much more kind, positive, upbuilding eye contact and attention. This continues from infancy right on through adulthood by family and society in general. This creates very low layers of mental frictions collectively for women. This makes thinking, learning, and motivation in mental areas much easier. Since girls are not required to be strong, this protection and continuous attention from day one also create a high speed expressway of continuous, mental, emotional, social and academic support, knowledge, and skills that accumulate in advancement in many areas over time (years). Again, listen to the difference in how little girls are talked to with more gentleness, ease, and nurtured stability, even in adulthood. These two continual supports from society over time provide nearly everything a person needs today to succeed in the information age. Since women are given through protection (for some, even indulgence), the benefits of love, honor, respect, and continual support, all of the benefits of self-worth from an early age without qualification (simply for being girls), they are working with much more continual support and interaction to accumulate more continual mental, emotional, social, and academic knowledge and skills that can be transformed easily into money, power, status, and image. Even after this, society’s protection, care, and continued support along with its views of beauty and charm help women in the information age.
Complete theory with applications to improve, to all on request. "
Cindy Hlywa wrote on May 10, 2006 3:07 PM:
Lou Nelson wrote on May 10, 2006 1:10 PM:
john delich wrote on May 10, 2006 11:39 AM:
Mary Arnold Schwartz wrote on May 10, 2006 10:25 AM:
Tina Bodenheimer wrote on May 10, 2006 10:05 AM:
Marion Crombie wrote on May 10, 2006 9:47 AM:
Andrea Campana wrote on May 9, 2006 11:14 PM: