Males and Schooling – Part 2
Some unique situations boys face at school.
The stark absence of male teachers in public schools today (explored in the previous essay) coincides with the starkly grim academic performance of boys in school today. That crisis among boys in school is a worldwide phenomenon. As Kay Hymowitz has written:
Boys’ lagging school outcomes show up everywhere, from the enlightened Nordics to the hidebound Gulf States. An OECD survey, based on a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measure of 64 countries, summarized the situation this way: boys “are less likely than girls to attain basic proficiency in core subjects, report investing less time and effort on schoolwork, and express more negative attitudes to school.” … The usual cultural and economic characteristics that once illuminated so many academic inequalities are of only limited help here. Yes, the size of the education gap varies by race and class. It is more than three times larger in the most disadvantaged families than it is among well-off girls and boys -- in part, perhaps, because boys in higher-income communities see more highly educated successful men than boys in blue-collar and poor neighborhoods do. Low-income children, particularly blacks, more often grow up with a single mother. Studies repeatedly associate this arrangement with boys’ disruptive behavior, lower grades, and grade retention. Whether because of a missing role model, the emotional loss, money woes, the instability in the home that follows a breakup, or all of the above, fatherlessness takes a toll on boys’ school achievement, with lifelong repercussions.
Boys’ evolution-driven tendencies are also at play. As Kay Hymowitz has written:
There’s compelling reason to think that a more genetic -- or, in the derogatory terminology of gender theory, “essentialist” -- explanation for boys’ disadvantage is at work. Signs of boys’ relative verbal delay show up way before hegemonic masculinity could infect their minds. On average, girls start talking earlier than boys. At 16 months, girls have a vocabulary of 95 words, while boys’ vocabulary is, on average, only 25. Boys make up more than 70 percent of late talkers and just 30 percent of early talkers. They produce word combinations, on average, three months later than girls. As they grow older, boys are at greater risk of developing language problems like dyslexia and stuttering … Language development is just one form of social communication in which girls outpace boys. At 12 months, boys don’t make as much eye contact as girls do, and they’re not as proficient at imitating gestures like pointing, a skill that appears related to later language development. They’re less adept at “joint attention,” that is, looking at a picture or toy with a caretaker. Autism, a disorder that causes sufferers to misinterpret or entirely miss social stimuli, is also more common among males.
And how do boy behavioral issues affect grading? As Hymowitz writes:
[T]he reading [gender] divide can’t be boiled down to “girls are hardwired to read.” Girls get a boost from stronger “soft” or “noncognitive” skills. Long-standing stereotype has it that boys are more typically goof-offs and more physically restless than their well-behaved sisters; teachers of the youngest kids know firsthand that male-female differences in sitting still, paying attention, and waiting to be called on are not mere sexist generalizations. Boys also tend to be less organized, a quality that most parents who have had the misfortune to peer into their sons’ school backpacks can attest to. Several years ago, the New York Times reported that affluent parents were hiring $100-an-hour tutors to help their sons organize their backpacks, their homework due dates, and college applications. After working with one such coach, a high school junior marveled: “I always thought I could do it, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t. I just needed that backing, that structure. I was turning in my assignments on time. I was working ahead on my classes. I was organized in a way I never had been before.” A number of studies support the idea that girls have superior self-control when they begin school, and even gain on boys over time. Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania may have been the first to suggest that girls actually outperform expectations based on achievement tests, while boys underperform because of noncognitive weaknesses. “[B]oys in all racial categories across all subject areas are not represented in grade distributions where their test scores would predict,” concludes one 2013 paper. Boys “who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math and science tests are nevertheless graded less favorably by their teachers, but this less favorable treatment essentially vanishes when non-cognitive skills are taken into account.” Jayanti Owens of Brown University traces boys’ higher average levels of behavior problems back to ages four and five, concluding that they can partially predict the gender gap in schooling at ages 26 to 29, controlling for other observed early childhood factors. A much smaller percentage of girls have behavior problems, yet these don’t seem to produce the same long-term disadvantage; “early behavior problems predict outcomes more for boys than for girls.” Once again, it’s not just American boys; the OECD discovered a self-regulation gap in girls’ favor in 36 countries.
From Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution’s book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It:
As Reeves writes:
It is true that boys still perform a little better than girls do on most standardized tests. But this gap has narrowed sharply, down to a thirteen-point difference in the SAT, and it has disappeared for the ACT. It is also probably worth noting here that SAT and ACT scores matter a lot less in any case, as colleges move away from their use in admissions, which, whatever other merits this has, seems likely to further widen the gender gap in postsecondary education.
Boys tend to lag in general reading skills, which leads to a cascading array of related problems. As Hymowitz writes:
A good place to start digging into the gender gap is reading. Reading is not just any old skill that a child can compensate for by, say, excelling in science. Deciphering and understanding texts are crucial skills for any knowledge-economy work, including in STEM fields. You must be able to read textbooks and, eventually, research papers, in order to master science. Understanding the instructions on exams is necessary to scoring well on them, and comprehending written warnings is essential if you want to conduct experiments without maiming your lab partner. And there’s a lot more at stake than chemistry spills. A widely cited study by Esteban Aucejo and Jonathan James discovered that verbal skills are a much better predictor of college attendance than math skills (a topic we’ll come to shortly)—and while math skills have no impact on the development of verbal skills, verbal skills do seem to boost math skills. Reading is where girls really trounce boys. Their superiority in “language arts” is the largest and most persistent finding in all the gender-gap data relevant to school performance. In teacher–student assessments in the early grades, the girl–boy gap in reading is more than 300 percent larger than the white–black reading gap. Controlling for family and school characteristics, the racial gap declines considerably, but controlling for those characteristics makes no difference to the reading gender gap. Standardized reading tests in later grades confirm teachers’ judgment: girls consistently outperform boys. Fordham Foundation president Michael Petrilli traced the NAEP reading scores of college grads in their mid-twenties back through their school years. In the graduating class of 2013, 42 percent of females had scored proficient in reading, while only 33 percent of male students did. When those students were in eighth grade, the gap was much the same: 57 percent of students scoring at NAEP proficiency in reading were girls. In fourth grade, the gap was again similar: 54 percent of students scoring proficient were girls. The reading gender gap is nearly universal: girls outperformed boys by an average of 38 points across OECD countries in the PISA 2012 survey -- the equivalent of one year of school -- as they’ve done consistently throughout all the PISA cycles since. In another survey of fourth-graders, girls topped boys in reading in 48 out of 50 countries and tied in the other two. We might use this syllogism: “Good readers go to college; girls are good readers; ergo …”
Making matters worse, as Frederick Hess writes:
Today, when I peruse classroom libraries, recommended book lists, or stuff like the summer reading suggestions from the American Library Association, I don’t see much that seems calculated to appeal to boys. One reason that boys read less than girls may be that we’re not introducing them to the kinds of books they may like. There was a time when schools really did devote too much time to generals and famous battles, but we’ve massively overcorrected.
Popular media news stories that focus on college gender gaps are only exploring the tip of the educational iceberg. As Hymowitz has summarized:
[F]ocusing on college, as so many media stories do, misses a big part of the problem. In fact, the education gender gap favoring girls goes all the way back through the education pipeline, showing up in high school, middle school, and even in the proverbial little red schoolhouse. No one suggests that the gap results from any male cognitive deficiency; average IQ scores for the sexes don’t vary that much … As a powerful minority of activists, educators, and academics seek to dismantle—or at least, blur—the sex binary, gender gaps are an uncomfortable reminder of the reality of what the French call—or at least, used to call—la différence. But there’s no way to help boys, or to alleviate the societal woes that follow from their struggling school performance, without directly confronting the fact that, for some only partly understood neurological-hormonal-genetic reasons, they develop differently from girls. And let’s face it, the boy problem isn’t going away, whatever pronouns kids want to use. Consider some specifics. Boys have lower grades than girls throughout their primary and secondary school years. They have more behavior problems. Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder; to wind up in special-education classes; and to be held back, be suspended, or drop out. Hence, they’re less likely to graduate from high school. In fact, the high school graduation gap between girls and boys is within a hair of the gap between poor and middle-class kids.
There’s also evidence that the absence of a male presence in schools aggravates the problems posed by the absence of fathers at home among many boys, especially among black boys. As Reeves writes:
Half of Black women raising children are doing so without a husband or cohabiting partner, in stark contrast to women of other racial groups, especially whites. Black mothers are three times as likely as white mothers to be single parents (52% v. 16%), and half as likely to be living with a spouse (41% v. 78%). Most births to Black women take place outside marriage (around 70%), compared to about half the births to Hispanic women, and 28% of those to white women … Boys suffer more from family instability, especially from the exit of biological fathers. Boys raised by single parents, especially single mothers, have worse outcomes than girls (including their own sisters) at school and lower rates of college enrollment, in part because of bigger differences in behavioral problems in the classroom. “Boys do especially poorly in broken families,” write Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan.
As Kay Hymowitz adds:
Fatherlessness doesn’t seem to have the same impact on girls; the puzzling difference may help explain why the biggest gender gap of any demographic group is seen among black kids. Black boys’ school performance has lagged behind that of black girls for decades now; 66 percent of black college-degree recipients are women; they earn 70 percent of black master’s degrees and more than 60 percent of doctorates. So socioeconomic advantage improves boys’ performance relative to girls, just as disadvantage, whether racial or economic, does the opposite. But the puzzle remains: rich boys remain in the shadows of their female siblings the same way poor boys trail behind their poor sisters.
Black women are now far surpassing black men in graduation rates. As Reeves writes:
Black women are seizing educational opportunities long denied to them, and on some fronts they have overtaken white men. Black girls are more likely than white boys to have graduated from high school; young Black women aged 18 to 24 are more likely than young white men to be enrolled in college; and a higher proportion of Black women aged 25 to 29 hold postgraduate degrees than white men of the same age.
These educational problems among boys, not surprisingly, extend to males’ high school and college experiences generally, regardless of race. As Reeves writes:
By now it should not be a surprise to learn that boys are less likely than girls to graduate high school. In 2018, 88% of girls graduated from high school on time (i.e., 4 years after enrolling), compared to 82% of boys. The male graduation rate is only a little higher than the 80% among poor students. You might think these were easy numbers to come by, a quick Google search away. I thought they would be when I started writing this paragraph. But in fact it took a small Brookings research project to figure it out, and for reasons that are instructive. States are required by federal law to report high school graduation rates by race and ethnicity, proficiency in English, economic disadvantage, homelessness, and foster status. These kinds of data are invaluable for assessing trends for the groups at greatest risk of dropping out. But oddly, states do not have to report their results by sex. Getting the numbers cited above required scouring the data for each state … [T]he closer I looked, the bleaker the picture became. The gender gap in college degrees awarded is wider today than it was in the early 1970s, but in the opposite direction. The wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while women’s wages have risen across the board … Women now account for 36% of the undergraduate degrees awarded in STEM subjects, including 41% of those in the physical sciences and 42% in mathematics and statistics.49 But there have been no equivalent gains for men in traditionally female subjects, such as teaching … [T]aking into account other factors, such as test scores, family income, and high school grades, male students are at a higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group, including poor students, Black students, or foreign-born students.
These statistics don’t seem to get popularized on t-shirts. On the contrary, as Hymowitz has written:
According to the Tao of blue-state T-shirts -- the sort that every nine-year-old soccer-playing girl in my Brooklyn neighborhood wears -- “The Future Is Female.” On college campuses, that future has arrived. Women are now 60 percent of college graduates, men a mere 40 percent. This gender gap is not new -- among college grads, the ratio has moved in women’s favor since the early 1980s -- but it has reached a record extent, and people are paying attention … Along with their subpar overall college graduation numbers, boys now constitute a minority of M.A.s and Ph.D.s and of medical and law students.
We began the first essay in this series by pointing out the seemingly vast ignorance of gender gaps in teaching and educational performance at one local school board. But ignorance regarding the situation of males in the education system extends all the way to the presidential level. From Reeves’ book:
In 2021, President Biden created a White House Gender Policy Council, a successor to the previous Council on Women and Girls, which had been abolished by Donald Trump. But while the name changed, the mission did not. The formal charge of the new Council is “to guide and coordinate government policy that impacts women and girls.” In October 2021, the Council published a National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, the first in U.S. history. The strategy is entirely asymmetric. No gender inequalities related to boys or men are addressed. The fact that women now outnumber men in college is noted, but only in order to highlight the fact that women hold more student debt than men. This is absurd. It is like complaining that men pay more income tax because they earn more. There is no mention at all in the strategy of the sizable gender gaps in favor of girls in K–12 education … [T]his one will drive policy. The strategy directs all government departments and agencies to “establish and prioritize at least three goals that will serve to advance the objectives identified in this strategy, and detail the plans and resources needed to achieve them in an implementation plan.” Flawed thinking makes for bad policy.
This particular preference for females at the national policy level seems to be reflected at the personal level, at least where IVF procedures in the U.S. are concerned. As has been reported in Slate, sex-selective in vitro fertilization is banned in most countries, but not the U.S., where it is used most often to sex-select in favor of girls:
Many [of those in the U.S. using IVF procedures] … want daughters. The ability to act on that desire—an option mostly unheard of in the rest of the world—has sparked a small but growing trend in American family planning. It has expanded the concept of reproductive choice and bodily autonomy to for-profit procedures that will alter future generations. It speaks to a crisis in boys and lopsided expectations for daughters … One study found that white parents having a first child picked female embryos 70 percent of the time.* (Parents of Indian and Chinese descent were more likely to pick boys.) Anecdotes back this up, with message boards filled with moms dreaming of a “mini me.” … Close looks at demographic data suggest that families with daughters tend to have fewer subsequent children than do families with sons, indicating a sense that a daughter is what makes a family complete … What’s so bad about boys? “Toxic masculinity,” said many women I spoke to, even those who were, sadly, already boy moms. For many, going through all the trouble to ensure a girl feels like a social good … Virtually all the industrialized world—including Canada, Australia, and every European country besides Cyprus—bans sex selection except in rare medical cases. Most nations prohibit the practice on the grounds that it promotes sexism and that the children born from it may be harmed by gendered expectations. Widespread preference for a certain sex can also skew the population—as in India and China, where abortion and infanticide of girls have resulted in tens of millions more men than women.
In the next and final essay in this series, we’ll look at another potential solution to boys’ educational shortcomings, namely vocational training.