Are Boys Really in Trouble?

"Boys make up two-thirds of students in special education -- including 80 percent of those diagnosed with emotional disturbances or autism -- and boys are two and a half times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The number of boys diagnosed with disabilities or ADHD has exploded in the past 30 years, presents a challenge for schools and [is] causing concern for parents. But the reasons for this growth are complicated, a mix of educational, social, and biological factors. Evidence suggests that school and family factors -- such as poor reading instruction, increased awareness of and testing for disabilities, or over-diagnosis -- may play a role in the increased rates of boys diagnosed with learning disabilities or emotional disturbance. But boys also have a higher incidence of organic disabilities, such as autism and orthopedic impairments, for which scientists do not currently have a completely satisfactory explanation. Further, while girls are less likely than boys to be diagnosed with most disabilities, the number of girls with disabilities has also grown rapidly in recent decades, meaning that this is not just a boy issue."

Mead notes in the report that the headlines about men disappearing from college, and says this:

"Because men are less likely to go to college and more likely to drop out, the share of college students who are men has declined. From 1970 to 2001, men's share of college enrollment fell from 58 to 44 percent, while women's share blossomed from 42 to 56 percent. And fully 57 percent of bachelor's degrees in 2001 were awarded to women.

"But these numbers don't necessarily indicate an emerging crisis. Like many other trends in gender and education, they're nothing new. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the increase in women's share of college enrollment occurred more than two decades ago, between 1970 and 1980.

"Overall trends, moreover, can be misleading. Women are overrepresented among both nontraditional students -- older students going back to college after working or having a family -- and students at two-year colleges. Among students enrolled in four-year colleges right out of high school, or traditional college students, the percentages of men and women are closer -- and the dating situation is not as dire."

The report also critiques the work of Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens, whose Gurian Institute has pioneered methods to help boys learn. Mead quotes this 2004 statement by Gurian and Stevens:

"Girls have, in general, stronger neural connectors in their temporal lobes than boys have. These connectors lead to more sensually detailed memory storage, better listening skills, and better discrimination among the various tones of voice. This leads, among other things, to greater use of detail in writing assignments."

Mead's response is:

"This paragraph offers a classic example of how some practitioners misapply brain research to education and gender. For starters, 'neural connectors' is not a scientific term -- by the time the research evidence behind this claim gets to readers of this article, it is dramatically watered down and redigested from what the initial studies said.

"But the real problem here is that Gurian and Stevens attempt to string together a series of cause-and-effect relationships for which no evidence exists. Yes, there is some evidence of greater interconnection between different parts of women's brains. Yes, some studies have found that women remember an array of objects better than men do and that they are better at hearing certain tones than men are. (It's also worth noting that most of these studies were conducted not with children but with adults.) And some teachers may say that boys do not use detail in writing assignments.

"But there is no evidence causally linking any one of these things to another. Gurian and Stevens simply pick up two factoids and claim they must be related. They also ignore many other potential explanations for the behavior they describe, such as the possibility that boys use less detail because they are in a greater hurry than girls, or that they tend to read books that have less detailed description and therefore use less in their own writing."

I asked Gurian and Stevens to respond. Gurian said: