Arrested Pulse

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 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” claims Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute. Just look at the statistics, she says. Boys “dominate dropout lists, failure lists, and learning-disabilities lists.”

Study after study point to academic declines by boys nationally. 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.

Boys, in fact, account for 73% of all learning disabled students. They are prescribed the attention-focusing drug Ritalin 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 and a red flag signifying the role gender plays in seemingly benign infrastructures.

A troubled performance in elementary school can linger and magnify in the later grades. 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 university enrollments since 1993.

So what can be done to create a more balanced performance record between boys and girls in U.S. education? Degendering elementary education as a “feminine” domain is one good place to start. Nationally, 85% of elementary school teachers are women. Attracting more men to this profession should be a central objective of education schools across the country.

Coeducation--putting males and females together in the same classes through the primary and secondary school levels--must be examined more critically. 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 “safe” learning environments many well-meaning educators seek to cultivate. Self-assertion and confrontation, which many boys thrive on, are strongly discouraged in such classrooms.

Studies show that boys learn best by moving around and handling objects-—by “hands-on learning”—-but are prevented from such activities as subjects become more word- and book-based. Their restlessness in stifling environments does not automatically signify deficient attention spans. Parents and educators need to become aware of the potential obstacles faced by boys in our schools and address them accordingly. If girls are in crisis in American education, then boys are in absolute catastrophe.