Page through Newsweek’s January 30th cover story “The Boy Crisis”, and you’ll learn what parents and educators have known for some time: boys have become the underclass in traditional public schools. Lest you doubt their disadvantage in modern classrooms, consider that the academic performance of American boys lags behind girls in every subject. Boys are over-represented in special education classes by a ratio of 2 to 1. When it comes to higher education, boys don’t fare much better: the percentage of males in undergraduate programs has dropped 24 percent from 1970 to 2000. Now, boys are a minority on the average college campus, accounting for just 44 percent of the student body.
To what do we owe this unprecedented feminization of education? Increasingly, experts are suggesting our “boy crisis” is the result of 30 years of a politicized attempt to remediate societal unfairness to girls. In 1972, a strong feminist movement pushing for gender equity resulted in the federal law, Title IX. This law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally-funded educational program. Title IX (and its attendant changes in public classrooms and on sports fields) has opened new doors for girls, but it has done so on the backs of American boys.
Michael Thompson, psychologist and author of Raising Cain, states that in public school classrooms, “boys are treated like defective girls.” This is largely because teaching practices in many public schools do not adapt to the different learning styles of boys. One solution, according to Newsweek, is to resurrect the single-sex school.
Fortunately, long-standing federal opposition to single-sex schools on the grounds of gender-based discrimination is finally yielding, allowing this movement to gain political strength. Many parents and educators see same-sex schools as a way to circumvent the mismatch between boy-girl learning styles, freeing teachers to tailor instructional methods to the boys (or girls) in front of them.
Let’s hope the miseducation of our boys serves as a cautionary tale for legislators and policymakers. In today’s world, that means bridging modern-day racial and economic achievement gaps should not create a new class of forgotten students. The federal government’s zeal to “leave no child behind” is laudable, but so, too, is the goal of working toward measurable achievement gains for already-proficient students.
What can we do to avoid repeating history? First, we should hold schools accountable for improving the performance of all children – students already at or above grade level, as well as low-performing students. Currently, the State Board of Education receives reports measuring achievement level movement across the board, but this information rarely garners the attention it deserves. Second, we must give families the freedom to choose schools for their children. Parents, not bureaucrats, know best when it comes to the educational needs of children.
In the end, our past educational failures have the power to teach us a great deal about what works and what doesn’t. As writer Norman Cousins once observed, “History is a vast early warning system.” We would do well to heed it.