Are Boys Really in Trouble?

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 27, 2006 11:22 AM

Some of my editors don't think reporters like me should be allowed to write columns. There is too much temptation, they say, for us to vent our pet peeves and ruin our reputations for objectivity.

But sometimes having an online column like this one can help us be even more balanced and comprehensive than we could otherwise be. For instance, I have a lot of space here. Saying the Internet is infinite doesn't mean much to someone who does not have an infinite amount of time to type his columns, but I can still get many more words in here than I can in a news story in The Post.

To test the practicality of that insight, I am going to do something that I have not done before: cite a story I just wrote for The Post and provide here some of the intriguing material I would have put in the story if they had given me two or three times more space, like I deserve.

Here is the story . It is about a provocative new report called "The Truth about Boys and Girls," which argues that despite all the hype about a boy crisis in our schools, such as the recent Newsweek coverline: "At every level of education, they're falling behind," American boys are in many ways in better shape than ever.

The report by a Washington-based think tank, the Education Sector, uses long-term data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boys' tests scores are up in elementary and middle schools, as are the numbers of young males going to and graduating from college. The co-directors of the Education Sector are education policy analyst and Virginia state school board member Andrew Rotherham and education author and journalist Tom Toch.

As I say in the story:

"Although low-income boys, like low-income girls, are lagging behind middle class students, as a gender boys are scoring significant gains in elementary and middle school and are much better prepared for college, the report says. It concludes that much of the pessimism about young males seems to derive from inadequate research, sloppy analysis and discomfort with the fact that while the average boy is doing better, the average girl has gotten ahead of him.

" 'The real story is not bad news about boys doing worse,' the report says, 'it's good news about girls doing better.'

"A number of articles have been written over the last year lamenting how boys have fallen behind. The report . . . explains why some educators think this emphasis is misplaced and fear a focus on gender differences could sidetrack federal, state and private efforts to put more resources into inner city and rural schools, where both boys and girls need better instruction.

" 'There's no doubt that some groups of boys -- particularly Hispanic and black boys and boys from low-income homes -- are in real trouble," Education Sector senior policy analyst Sara Mead says in the report. 'But the predominant issues for them are race and class, not gender.' "

Mead adds in her report, "Closing racial and economic gaps would help poor and minority boys more than closing gender gaps, and focusing on gender gaps may distract attention from the bigger problems facing these youngsters."

The report also says this about the preponderance of boys with learning disabilities:

"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:

"I understand the need for an academic report to find villains, etc., but to denigrate us seems unnecessary. We have devoted immense resources and basically our very lives to helping solve the issues children face in this culture. . . .

"It has seemed necessary for two decades in the academic piece of the gender debate to handle with suspicion the obvious brain differences between girls and boys. Academic reports want to minimize these differences because there has been such a long history of female oppression over the centuries -- oppression emboldened by old biological notions. I understand this urge to minimize. When I began studying brain research in 1983, I had to resist the urge to minimize also. When I published "The Wonder of Boys" [a book written by Gurian] 10 years ago, some folks said similar things as this report says. Minutae of language was argued over, and people even said, 'He's a throwback' (and worse!)

"But the reality is that every teacher and every parent knows how different boys and girls are. . . . Some folks are still debating the issue academically, yes, but tens of thousands of people are already using the brain and biological sciences to solve the problems faced by boys and girls. The Gurian Institute, especially under Kathy's wonderful direction, is solution-oriented, and we've been able to help communities and schools innovate toward helpful change based on neural science. It's good stuff, it's working, and I think it proves that science-based practical tools are very worthwhile in schools and homes."

Stevens said:

"We do, of course, have a lot of wonderful scientific evidence on this issue, and we recognize that what we know today is only a fraction of what we will someday know. But, we cannot afford to WAIT until we know everything about the differences to pay attention to what we DO know, because there are too many children who will be affected in the meantime.

"We certainly agree that more research is needed, and we are working and participating in organized efforts to promote such research. But, without our work, and the work of others in the field, no one would even be talking about the issue, and nothing would be happening.

"So-we should thank the media for paying attention, and sometimes doing what some media does by over-reacting to the word 'crisis' but ultimately by getting attention to focus on something we believe needs attention. I personally find the media we work with pretty careful about what they print, making sure to check a variety of reliable sources before publication."

I asked for comment from Leonard Sax, executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education. He said the "insistence that gender doesn't matter simply doesn't jive with reality. For example: last month I led several seminars on gender and education at Dickinson State University, in Dickinson, N.D. -- about one hundred miles west of Bismarck. This university's enrollment is almost 100 percent white, with a small smattering of Asian students. Nevertheless, the leadership of the university shared with me that their biggest concern is the attrition of male students. Fewer than 40 percent of men who enroll at any state university in North Dakota will ever graduate, they told me -- compared with more than 60 percent of women.

"These are all white men, mostly from middle-class families. And I could give many other examples. Just one more example: The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram (Maine's largest-circulation newspaper) ran a four-day series of front-page articles on 'The New Gender Gap,' March 26, 27, 28, and 29, 2006. The opening article, Sunday March 26th, was entitled 'Boys in Jeopardy At School,' which -- along with its companion article, 'Sometimes dropping out is [a] measure of lost interest' -- occupied almost the entire front page. The photo accompanying that article showed one boy sitting in a classroom surrounded by girls. The caption explained that the boy, Nick Danton, is the ONLY boy in his high school's AP Literature class. Maine, like North Dakota, is a state where more than 90 percent of the students are Caucasian. The Maine public schools portrayed in this series of four articles are all in middle-class neighborhoods. But these middle-class white boys are giving up on school in unprecedented numbers. The authors of the Education Sector report need to look beyond NAEP test scores and other reports from the National Center for Educational Statistics. They need to get out of Washington, D.C., and New York City and go visit some real schools."

For an independent appraisal from someone not deep into the gender issue, I asked Craig Jerald, an educational consultant with great experience analyzing national school data, to give his view:

"Mead's relative even-handedness is important because there's a danger this might turn into one of those black and white debates where one side says there's an awful crisis and the other says there's nothing at all to be concerned about. The answer is somewhere in between, pretty much as Mead characterizes it in the last few pages.

"Ed Sector is right to call foul on all the crisis rhetoric, and we should stop using that word, though there are a few troubling statistics and trends that deserve further investigation, both those she mentions and those she underplays, such as the huge gap in writing skills and troubling trends in reading among older boys. And I agree with the recommendation that those issues deserve more study by researchers and attention by classroom teachers, rather than a full-scale assault with lots of new policies and programs, especially if it would pull attention and resources away from the racial and economic achievement gaps that dwarf all other educational problems.

"That said, I'm a bit more concerned about the confluence of gender, poverty, and race for some groups such as Black and Hispanic boys than she seems to be. She acknowledges this, but says we should focus on the race gap to solve the gender gap for those groups. I'm not entirely sure. There might be a need to focus on males in the context of our efforts to solve the racial achievement gap even if there's no general 'boy crisis.'

"Black boys in particular are terribly bad off, their life chances are so dismal compared to any other group, that they might need extra help beyond what educators and policymakers are already doing to address racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps. I would characterize the gender gaps as cause for some concern and further study, the racial and socioeconomic gaps as a crisis, and the plight of black boys as a downright social disaster."

There is much more to be said, but I think I share the view of all of these writers that it would be good to have more and better research on this topic, which is going to be a key part of the education debate for many years to come.