While newspaper headlines proclaim that boys are at-risk in our schools, is there a valid concern or is this issue blown out of proportion?
NAEP Scores Show Boys Scoring Behind Girls
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, is released in March. In 2009 the NAEP testing results show boys in all 50 states and the District of Columbia scoring below girls in all three reading areas:
- Basic
- Proficient
- Advanced
And, they scored lower in both grades 4 and 8. While boys never scored above girls in 2009, boys did tie in two cases. Another report published by the Independent Center on Education Policy (CEP) reported that proficiency rates of boys fall below girls in every state where data was collected.
Boys Hold Literary Deficits
Journalist Richard Whitmire, author of the 2010 book, Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind [Amacom, 2010] argues that boys’ literary deficits affect every aspect of the curriculum in schools. “Many state math assessments contain nothing but word problems, as do the SAT and ACT college admissions tests. What has gone unnoticed is that many boys can’t wade through the puzzling words and sentences to get to the actual math calculation.” [1]
Experts Disagree on How to Improve Education for Boys
If statistics show that boys are falling behind, why are schools not making immediate changes? Some are. Many states have adopted single-sex education and making widespread changes to how boys are being taught. Boys need more “action” and competition than girls among other issues. Single-sex classrooms are more “boy-friendly.” However, there is a stalemate in education because women’s groups have the opinion that helping boys in schools would put girls at a disadvantage. A women’s business group, Catalyst, recently found that recent MBA graduates, men started at higher positions and averaged $4,600 more their first year than women in their first year.
Some believe there is no crisis for boys in school at all. Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center disagrees that boys are more at-risk than girls. Barnet and Rivers, coauthors of Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships , believe that all learners are at-risk to some degree. “All learners, regardless of sex, are more different from one another than they are similar and reject categorizing all boys’ reading and all girls’ reading and talking about a boy crisis.” [1]
Is the Boy’s Crisis Universal?
The poor reading scores for boys have raised eyebrows all over the world. In 2006, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study measured fourth-grade reading performance in 40 nations. The study once again showed that girls outscore boys in every location where data was available. The CEP found additional information regarding race. The gaps between boys and girls are smaller in white and Asian children. The gaps are larger among African American, Latino, and Native American students. Naomi Chudowsky, coauthor of the CEP report states, “Just to put this in perspective, a 10-point gap is still pretty significant, but we’re seeing much wider gaps between racial and ethnic groups.” [1]
Steps Schools Can Take to Level Playing Field
William Pollack, author of the book Real Boys [Henry Holt & Co., 1998] is a clinical professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and states school could make simple changes to make the climate more boy-friendly. He advocates action-oriented stories and graphic novels in an effort to motivate boys to read. Action books were removed because they were seen as too violent. Books without action and graphic content appeal to girls more than boys. Pollock states, “In removing violence, we removed action.” Pollock also suggests that schools allow boys to read comic books and sports-themed materials.
Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, also makes suggestions for improving reading:
- Provide support across the grades: Increasing students’ access to reading support at all levels of schooling can prevent reading challenges from multiplying as students struggle with reading demands in all subjects.
- Think (and act) locally: Boy-girl reading gaps can vary widely by location. Rather than basing decisions on national or even state-level data, district officials may wish to investigate possible reading gaps in their own schools first.
- Focus on the big picture first: Even if state or local data suggest wide reading gaps by gender, these may be accompanied by even wider gaps along racial and ethnic lines. As Chudowsky notes, addressing gaps between different subgroups is ultimately about improving the achievement of all students. [1]
The challenge to schools is to assist students that are behind to make greater gains than their proficient peers so they can catch up.
[1] Sadowski, Michael. “Putting the ‘Boy Crisis’ in Context: Finding solutions to boys’ reading problems may require looking beyond gender,” Harvard Education Letter, Volume 26, Number 4, July/August 2010.
*Michael Sadowski is an assistant professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College in New York City.
Barbara Pytel - Email me Experience Although I was never particularly fond of going to school as an ELL student, I ironically became a teacher, ...
