Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That's Leaving Them Behind

Read an Excerpt

Bev McClendon clearly remembers the day she discovered

the difficulties boys were having in her elementary school. She and the

other parents with children at Pearl Creek Elementary in Fairbanks,

Alaska, had gathered for the spring awards ceremony. Nestled into a

wooded hillside and surrounded by homes that overlook the Alaska Range

to the south, Pearl Creek is a school with a dream location and a student

body to match. With the University of Alaska as a neighbor, the school

draws the children of professors as well as the sons and daughters of Fair

banks's doctors and lawyers. Parents here have ambitious plans for their

children, which makes the spring awards day a big event. This day had

a beautiful start. The birch trees had greened up the week before and

temperatures rose enough to hold the picnic for the sixth graders outside.

Following the picnic about 150 parents filed into the school to sit on

folding chairs facing a tiny elevated stage. Sitting to the side on bleachers

were the sixth graders about to be honored. As the principal called out

the awards, often given in clusters, the honored students climbed the stage

to receive their awards.

"It was very visual,'' said McClendon. "You would see one, two, three,

four girls climb up to the stage and then walk off. And then another three

or four girls would be called up. Here were all these little girls getting the

awards.'' Of the roughly twenty awards given out, it was pretty much a

clean sweep of academic awards for the girls that day. Wait, two boys won

a "most improved'' and a third boy got a good sense of humor/positive

attitude award. Ouch. McClendon remembers saying to herself, "Oh,

that's horrible.''

It's not as if the school didn't see this coming. In the days prior to

the awards ceremony, school counselor Annie Caulfield realized she had a

problem. Awards that normally went to one boy and girl, such as the

American Legion prize, were instead going to two girls. The prospect of a

potentially embarrassing girl sweep caused Caulfield to check on past

awards. "Over the last eight years we've seen gradual changes, with more

girls winning, and then 'bam.' This year was so blatant, so one-sided. I

encouraged the teachers to go back and look again, but they felt this is

what it needed to be.'' What keeps boys off awards stages is a combination

of academics and behavior; they don't earn perfect grades and they are

more prone to playground tussles. While those boy/girl differences have

held for decades, something has happened in recent years to accelerate the

problem.

McClendon has few regrets her son didn't get an award that day. He

gets plenty of accolades. But what about the other smart boys at Pearl

Creek? Other parents of boys, especially those with younger boys in the

school, appeared worried that day. "I'm a staunch feminist, but my God

look at what they're doing. You can't tell me there were no boys in that

school who deserved an award.''

To avoid this situation in the future, school officials faced a dilemma:

either they start practicing affirmative action for boys or suspend the

awards ceremony. They chose the latter. Pushing the problem from public

view to avoid another embarrassing clean-sweep ceremony, however, falls

short of a long-term solution. This is not a local problem confined to Pearl

Creek Elementary. Boys falling behind in school are both a national and

international phenomenon involving far more than playground rough

housing. In the United States, the problem is most obvious in high-

poverty urban schools, where boys are losing sight of the girls. In Chicago,

the girls at Gen. George Patton Elementary School outpaced the boys by

fifty-five points on the 2007 state reading tests. Boys are four and a half

times as likely as girls to get expelled from preschool and four times as

likely to suffer from attention-deficit disorders. In state after state, boys

are slipping behind girls in math scores on state exams, which steps on

all the conventional wisdom about boys excelling in math, while falling

far behind girls in reading. And while the problem is most serious in poor

neighborhoods, the awards day snapshot offered up by the upper-income

Pearl Creek Elementary is mirrored in middle- and upper-middle-income

schools around the country.

Most worrisome, boys' academic ambitions have skidded. As recently

as 1980 more male than female high school seniors planned to graduate

from college, federal surveys of high school seniors told us. By 2001, how

ever, girls moved ahead of boys on that question by a startling eleven

percentage points (updates to that survey show the gap persists). What

happened to boys in those twenty-one years? Answering that question is

what this book is about. Those flagging ambitions explain the dramatic

gender imbalances unfolding on most college campuses, many of which

hover near a 60-40 balance favoring women on graduation day. Why are

the gender imbalances worse on graduation day? Because men are both

less likely to enroll and more likely to drop out before earning degrees.

The journey to find the answer to the question of why this is happen

ing began more than a decade ago when, like every other education re

porter at the time, I bought into the reports that schools were treating

girls unfairly, shunting them aside in favor of aggressive boys thrusting

their arms into the air to answer teachers' questions. As the father of two

girls, I was outraged, and I wrote those stories uncritically. By hindsight,

we now know that that research was flawed. I was wrong to write those

stories. As my own daughters matured past the elementary school years, I

began to witness just how wrong those reports were. My nephews never

seemed to fare as well as my nieces. The brothers of our daughters' friends

rarely did as well as their sisters. The proof was playing out in the college

enrollment and graduation numbers, where women increasingly dominated:

Boys, not girls, were the ones struggling in school; men, not

women, were falling behind in college graduation numbers. And these are

not just poor minority boys falling behind. Plenty of them come from

schools such as Pearl Creek Elementary.

• *
•

Thanks to a reporting fellowship at the University of Maryland, I began a

query into this issue that would persist for many years and include the

launching of a website/blog, whyboysfail.com. I quickly discovered that

the boy troubles are international and that several countries, including

Australia, are far ahead of the United States in probing the roots of the

mystery. The journey to answer the question of why boys suddenly lose

interest in school eventually led me to Australia, where the government

sponsors research that schools use to buck up the boys, who, like the boys

in the United States, lag well behind the girls. In just one year, using

techniques such as switching to a reading program that relies more on

phonics, breaking the curriculum into manageable "chunks'' to help the

organizationally challenged boys, introducing some single-sex classrooms,

and arranging parent-teacher conferences well before exams rather than

after the tests to give parents a heads up if their children were in trouble,

Blue Mountains Grammar evened out the gender imbalances among its

At Blue Mountains Grammar, these were not trial-and-error experi

ments. Rather, they were based on results of a federal investigation into

the boy problems that were released in 2003. The cause of the boy

troubles Australian investigators settled on is relatively uncomplicated and

mirrors the cause already identified by Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and

other countries that have researched the issue: The world has become

more verbal, and boys haven't. Boys lack the literacy skills to compete in

the Information Age, a theme that will be explored in greater depth in

later chapters. College has become the new high school, and the currencies

of any education after high school are verbal skills and the ability to read

critically and write clearly. That explains both the recent nature of the

problem and its occurrence in so many countries around the world. The

lack of literacy skills, especially the ability to write well, also helps explain

why fewer men go to college and, once there, are less likely than women

to earn degrees.

The boy problems in Australia aren't any worse than the boy problems

in the United States. They appear quite similar, as do the boy problems

in other Western countries. What makes the United States unique is its

relative indifference to the issue. Here, the U.S. Department of Education

has yet to launch a single probe into the problem. No doubt, the depart

ment is influenced by critics who say the gender gaps are just another

manifestation of the long-standing problems of race and poverty. As a

separate issue, the "boy troubles'' are mostly a myth, they argue. It's true

that the gender gaps are starkest in the large urban school districts. In

July 2009 the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University

released a study that tracked the students who graduated from Boston

Public Schools in 2007. The conclusion: For every 167 women in four-

year colleges there were only 100 males. Is poverty the cause? The male

and female students came from identical homes and neighborhoods. Is

race the issue? That's not what the study uncovered. In fact, black females

were five percentage points more likely to pursue any further study after

high school--community colleges, four-year colleges, or technical/

vocational schools--than white males.