The Trouble With Boys
They're kinetic, maddening and failing at school. Now educators are trying new ways to help them succeed.
Spend a few minutes on the phone with Danny Frankhuizen and you come away thinking, "What a nice boy." He's thoughtful, articulate, bright. He has a good relationship with his mom, goes to church every Sunday, loves the rock band Phish and spends hours each day practicing his guitar. But once he's inside his large public Salt Lake City high school, everything seems to go wrong. He's 16, but he can't stay organized. He finishes his homework and then can't find it in his backpack. He loses focus in class, and his teachers, with 40 kids to wrangle, aren't much help. "If I miss a concept, they tell me, 'Figure it out yourself'," says Danny. Last year Danny's grades dropped from B's to D's and F's. The sophomore, who once dreamed of Stanford, is pulling his grades up but worries that "I won't even get accepted at community college."
His mother, Susie Malcom, a math teacher who is divorced, says it's been wrenching to watch Danny stumble. "I tell myself he's going to make something good out of himself," she says. "But it's hard to see doors close and opportunities fall away."
What's wrong with Danny? By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy."
With millions of parents wringing their hands, educators are searching for new tools to help tackle the problem of boys. Books including Michael Thompson's best seller "Raising Cain" (recently made into a PBS documentary) and Harvard psychologist William Pollack's definitive work "Real Boys" have become must-reads in the teachers' lounge. The Gurian Institute, founded in 1997 by family therapist Michael Gurian to help the people on the front lines help boys, has enrolled 15,000 teachers in its seminars. Even the Gates Foundation, which in the last five years has given away nearly a billion dollars to innovative high schools, is making boys a big priority. "Helping underperforming boys," says Jim Shelton, the foundation's education director, "has become part of our core mission."
The problem won't be solved overnight. In the last two decades, the education system has become obsessed with a quantifiable and narrowly defined kind of academic success, these experts say, and that myopic view is harming boys. Boys are biologically, developmentally and psychologically different from girls--and teachers need to learn how to bring out the best in every one. "Very well-meaning people," says Dr. Bruce Perry, a Houston neurologist who advocates for troubled kids, "have created a biologically disrespectful model of education."
Thirty years ago it was girls, not boys, who were lagging. The 1972 federal law Title IX forced schools to provide equal opportunities for girls in the classroom and on the playing field. Over the next two decades, billions of dollars were funneled into finding new ways to help girls achieve. In 1992, the American Association of University Women issued a report claiming that the work of Title IX was not done--girls still fell behind in math and science; by the mid-1990s, girls had reduced the gap in math and more girls than boys were taking high-school-level biology and chemistry.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- Next Page »
Loading Menu
Member Comments
Posted By: economicwrestler @ 09/05/2008 1:39:23 PM
Comment: Our public school education system is a disaster. This came about for many reasons. Society: parents aren't allowed to discipline their own child without fear that child services is going to knock on the door. A good parent knows what their own child needs, whether it is a spanking or time out. Also, single family homes aren't suited to put the child first. The single parent is working all the time and has their own life to worry about. Instead of reading to the child, playing with the child or showing the child how something is done, the single parent puts in a DVD so the child will be entertained and stay out of the parents way while she catches up on work, email, etc. Then when the child starts acting out or becomes restless, our society says we have to medicate the child because it has to be ADHD. Our society thinks everything can be fixed with a pill. I own pharmacies and I know very few children to be ADHD that truly needs the medicine. The others are an inconvenience so they get the medics. Society, in general, has allowed our educations system to flounder because we don't discipline our children, we tell our children that if they fail at something it is the systems fault not the failing child's fault, and way to many parents are unconcerned about the schools and the children in them. Except, of course, their own child. And sometimes he/she really doesn't matter. It also fails politically. Everything teachers do nowadays is watched over to make sure it isn't somehow biased. Making sure that woman had the same opportunity is an awesome idea in theory, but in practice some girls mom will feel that her daughter isn't given something so it must be sexism. She complains to the school and eventually all the boys start to suffer because all the resources are spent on the girls. If we could take a huge step politically and allow or mandate that all schools have subjects where the sexes are separate so that it enables both sexes to learn the material by using the best method for the different sexes. Some subjects should be coed, but the majority and the important subjects should be separate. Also, allow for recess and gym class. Oh, and uniforms. The government should make uniforms mandatory. Finally, pay our teachers more. They get into the profession to give back to the children. I know, there are some teachers out there that just plain stink at what they do and couldn't teach anybody. The school will find this out and fire her. But the majority of teachers are good people that are trying their best to educate America's future. Give the more resources, better pay, and children willing to learn and they will succeed. The child that is ready to learn will be disciplined at home, read to, worked with and taught manners at home. This would go a long way in helping our poor public school system
Posted By: mjkittredge @ 04/11/2008 3:50:39 AM
Comment: Ok, I couldn't ignore THIS: quote " If your child is not taking interest in studies it means teen are struggling from learning disability." That is BS. Not taking an interest in studies could come from a variety of reasons, foremost among them the classes being boring, and the material not relevant to the students lives.
The problem as I see it, is that teachers and the subjects they teach, and the way they teach them, the work they assign is given a free pass. It faces little if any scrutiny. Sure, teachers submit their lesson plans to the school board, but they get a free pass from them too. Parents just assume that what and how the teachers are teaching is the right thing, without having a clue.
The downside to this lack of scrutiny, is that huge amounts of young peoples lives are wasted, sitting bored in pointless classes learning material and subject matter that they will never put to use. Sure, they spend hours and hours copying notes until their fingers are sore. Sure, they listen to hours and hours each day of long rambling lectures. And they diligently fill in either (A)(B)(C) with their number 2 pencil. Unfortunately, when this information isn't put to any practical use on a regular basis, students will eventually forget most of it.
Not only is their time wasted, they become frustrated and distrusting of a school that forces these things upon them, and clueless parents with rose colored glasses who figure it's great learning preparing kids for their future lives.
The only useful things I got out of school, 1-12, was basic math, and touch typing. Things I could have learned on my own, without any schooling. The other subjects, I have had no use for other than a few questions in Trivial Pursuit games.
The classes and their coursework need a comprehensive review, and more relevant subjects need to be taught instead.
Posted By: Elistra @ 03/25/2008 7:30:19 PM
Comment: The problem, as I see it, is discipline.
Generally speaking, mothers tend to come down hard on their daughters, but nowhere near hard enough on their sons. Fathers usually operate in reverse, functioning as a disciplinarian to their sons, while giving the daughters the benefit of the doubt.
These days, a mother is often the only parent that a child has.
Because of this, the usual rearing environment forces girls to abandon most of the negative behavioral traits they might otherwise have. Even if the daughter can't stand her mom, that very dislike encourages her to hustle up and get with the program. After all, acheiving financial independence means that contact with her mother in adulthood is purely elective, not compulsory.
However, this same rearing environment is acting against the long-term interests of boys, because mothers tend to enable poor behavior in their sons... behavior that a father would never tolerate. It's not just role-modeling... it's having a parent willing to draw a line in the sand and demand better behavior from the boy, and most mother's simply don't.