Young Men Dropping Out of School

Boys Failing in U.S. Schools

During the 1990's, while girls were thriving in American schools like never before, the academic media buzzed with stories about how they were in "crisis"-disenfranchised by a culture whose school system historically favored boys. In 1997, the same year the auspicious declarer of this crisis, Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, received the $250,000 Heinz Award for "transform[ing] the paradigm for what it means to be human," 4,483 American young people between the ages of five and twenty-four killed themselves: 701 females and 3,782 males.

Girls in crisis? "A myth," Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute asserts, perpetuated by pro-female "partisans" whose research is based primarily on anecdotal evidence. Just look at the facts, she says. Boys "dominate dropout lists, failure lists, and learning-disabilities lists."

All right, let's look at the statistics. The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education reports that 34% of boys are in grades below their age, compared with 26% of girls. In 12th grade, only 28% of boys rate as proficient readers on federal tests, with girls pulling in at 44%. In addition, boys are three times more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactive disorder.

A whopping 73% of learning disabled students, in fact, are boys. "Instead of pushing sound solutions," reports USA Today in an October 2003 editorial on these trends, "many educators merely advocate prescribing more attention-focusing Ritalin for the boys, who receive the drug at four to eight times the rate of girls." In a dyslexia study focusing on Connecticut schools, Yale neuroscientist Sally Shaywitz found that the mostly female teaching staff was quick to identify rambunctious boys over quiet girls as potentially learning disabled-an action with serious consequences for all students regardless of gender. "These results are just one example of what might be learned about the role gender plays in education," the article observes, "especially in elementary school, where 85% of the teachers are women."

A troubled performance in elementary school can linger and magnify in the later grades. It's the proverbial vicious circle. Sommers believes that "[t]he performance gap between boys and girls in high school leads directly to the growing gap between male and female admissions to college." Nationally, women have outnumbered men in institutions of higher education since 1993. According to researchers at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies, the ratio in 2000 was 128 female undergraduates for every 100 male; that ratio is expected to grow to 138/100 by 2010.

Clearly, if it's true that females are in crisis in public education, then males are in absolute catastrophe. What can be done to reverse these trends, stamp out institutionalized gender bias, and attain more balanced enrollment and performance figures? Short of a revolution in our system of values (which informs all our institutions, certainly schools' curricula), perhaps the most difficult task of all is degendering integral parts of the education system. Generally speaking, early childhood education is presently a "feminine" domain while government education agencies remain "masculine" ones. Having a stronger male voice in early childhood education will not only benefit male students but also bring in more money from government agencies whose wallets reside in the back pockets of men.

Equally difficult but crucial to any meaningful discussion on institutionalized gender bias is a critique of coeducation itself. Kathryn Herr, an associate professor of education at UNM-Albuquerque, spent 1999-2000 studying 1,100 male and female middle-school students who were being educated in single-sex classrooms. "Both [boys and girls] reported that single-sex classes made for a safer environment," she reported. Girls "felt somewhat more comfortable" without boys around; boys believed they were "in it together" and reportedly felt more "supported" and "known by their classmates and their teachers."

We do not speak of "coeducation" anymore because "education" pretty much means coeducation. Certainly there are positive attributes to having boys and girls interact in the same classrooms; but these attributes ought not automatically cancel out whatever negatives come with the mix. One negative may be the overall tone of the coeducational classroom environment. According to Eden Lin, a 17 year-old boy at Belmont High School in Massachusetts, "[g]uys have a more confrontational way of doing things than girls." He told a task force organized by superintendent Peter Holland to address the poor performance of boys in his district that schools should allow male students to be more "aggressive" in their approach to learning: "I think it would be riding the natural impulses of males to learn that way." His friend Brian Caliando, also 17, agreed. Teachers discourage argument in coeducational classrooms, he complained, which many boys thrive on.

These boys may be onto something. In a 1995 study at the University of Pennsylvania, 37 men and 24 women were injected with radioactive glucose ("brain food") that caused their brains to "act up." Positron emission tomography (PET) scanned and projected onto a computer screen the regions of their brains where most activity occurred. Men's brains showed most activity in the temporal-limbic system, which controls emotional reactions like assertion and aggression, whereas women's brains showed most activity in the posteria Cingulate gyrus, a more complex and evolutionarily newer region dubbed "the thinking brain."

Aggression as a potential learning style? Such a notion is anathema to many education schools where the paradigm of collaborative learning is all the rage. Students working in groups overseen by teachers who do not "teach" per se but "facilitate" the projects at hand is a strongly subscribed-to model, itself a rebellion against the traditional model of teacher as active-agent lecturing to rows of students passively receiving and recording information. Cooperation, not confrontation, is the socializing scheme at work here. In addition, for schools plagued by drugs, violence, and gang rivalry, aggression (a loaded word even I use with reticence) is the last characteristic teachers wish to evoke from their male students.

William Pollock, author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, agrees that "coeducational schools are the most boy-unfriendly places on earth" but believes aggression is part of the problem plaguing boys. Far from being the "natural impulse of males," aggression is socially imposed as part of a "Boy Code" that forces boys to mask their pain and hide their feelings. This view is shared by Carol Gilligan, who is now declaring that boys, too, are in "crisis." From her predictably feminist vantage point, boys go awry because they haven't bonded sufficiently with their mothers and hence are out of touch with their feminine sides-a maladjustment schools need to address pedagogically. While theoretically intriguing, when compared with statistical evidence gathered in several countries showing a clear link between fatherless families and problems with boys, this deficit model of masculinity loses much of its persuasive appeal.

Semantics and theories aside, studies show that boys learn best by moving around and handling objects--by "hands-on learning"--but are often prevented from such activities in grades where subjects become decidedly more "academic" and standardized examinations (the Bush Administration's panacea for underachievement) determine what constitutes success and failure in school and, in many cases I suppose, in life as well. When boys become restless in stifling environments, they run the risk of being deemed disruptive (read: aggressive) or, more likely, as having deficient attention spans. Traits that in another world's education system may be lauded as desirable in ours are nipped in the bud with arguably disastrous results.

A shorter version of this article was published in The Horse Fly, Taos, New Mexico, November 2003