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Dr. Glover, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, with a doctorate in Marriage and Family Therapy, is married to Elizabeth Oreskovich, a psychotherapist who with Dr. Glover co-directs the Center For Healing And Recovery. They have four children and make their home in Tacoma, Washington.

ARE MEN AND WOMEN DIFFERENT ? - Part 3
Boys Falling Through the Cracks
by
Robert A. Glover, Ph.D. © 2005

“Believing that differences exist between human groups is very different from believing that some groups are inherently inferior to others.” (Steven Mithen, “The Prehistory of the Mind”)

Two previous articles in this series detailed the uproar created in some academic circles when Dr. Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University suggested that in some cases, men might be better at math than women. In a response to angry protest from a handful of academics, Dr. Summers pledged to spend $50 million dollars over the next ten years to improve the climate for female scientists at his university. Dr. Summers based his commitment on the fact that “Universities like Harvard were designed a long time ago, in many respects, by men for men.”

While it is true that as recent as 1975, men graduating from college outnumbered women, Since1981, more women than men have been enrolling in college. In 2002, the percentage of men enrolled in public colleges hit an all-time low of 43.3 percent compared to 56.7 percent for women. (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 6, 2005)

Changes over the last few years have made the American educational system more user friendly for girls than it was in the past. Many of these changes were brought about by concerns generated in academic circles that girls were getting short changed when compared to boys. The fear was that not only were girls losing out academically in a system that was perceived to favor boys, but also that the self-esteem of the average young girl was taking a battering as a result.

While educators and academics focused on how to help girls fare batter academically, few have paid attention to the staggering number of boys who are falling through the cracks of the American educational system. The following information is not meant to take anything away from the need to tailor educational policies that benefit girls, but to illustrate that while girls have moved ahead, boys have fallen way behind.

Here is the reality about the current state of affairs for boys in our country’s public schools:

• Adolescent boys are twice as likely as adolescent girls to be diagnosed as learning disabled.

• Two-thirds of high school special-education and handicapped students are male.

• Adolescent male learning disabilities are more intractable, on average, than those of adolescent females.

• Adolescent males drop out of high school at four times the rate of adolescent females (this includes females who drop out to have babies).

• Ninety percent of adolescent discipline problems in schools are male, as are most expulsions and suspensions.

• Adolescent males are significantly more likely than adolescent females to be left back a grade.

• Adolescent males on average get worse grades than adolescent females.

• The majority of salutatorians and valedictorians now are female.

• Compared to girls, boys finish their education less frequently, they finish high school with lower average grades, and fewer go to college.

• According to the National Center for Educational Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education, fewer boys than girls now study advanced algebra, geometry, and chemistry.

• Adolescent males are outscored by adolescent females by twelve points in reading and seventeen points in writing.

• The U.S. Department of Education recently pointed out that this gender gap in reading/writing is equivalent to about one and one half years of school.

• The average high school freshman girl is reading as well as the average high school junior boy.

(Above statistics from “A Fine Young Man, What Parents, Mentors and Educators can do to Shape Adolescent Boys into Exceptional Men” by Michael Gurian)

These startling statistics are probably due to a number of factors. As I wrote in the second part of this series, even though males out-represent females at the top end of brain bell curve, males are also over-represented at the bottom end of the curve. The male brain is responsible for more geniuses, but it is also more fragile than the female brain. This alone contributes to many of the special needs boys have academically.

Many other social, economic, racial, and educational factors also contribute to the situation. Many more boys are growing up in broken and single parent homes than in the past. Boys have fewer positive male role models. The primary grades are dominated by female teachers. Boys spend more time playing video games and watching TV than ever before. Boys are exposed to ever increasing levels of violence.

But there are other factors within the educational system itself that are contributing to the problem.

Standardized testing in schools across the country has created a situation where school administrators are eliminating recess and PE to leave more time for teaching the students how to pass the tests. Even though the Surgeon General states that children need at least 30 minutes of exercise per day, only one state in the country has mandatory physical education in grades K-12.

The public school system in Tacoma, WA (where my son Steve attended school) recently eliminated recess completely in elementary school. Administrators claimed that teachers needed the extra time to adequately prepare students for standardized testing (how much information do we need to cram into a seven year-old’s head in a day?).

As a child, I used to joke that lunch, PE, and recess were my favorite classes. It was PE and recess that kept me sane as a young boy during the hours I spent in the classroom. I can’t imagine how I would have survived elementary school without the chance to run, play, compete, tussle, socialize, and exert myself physically.

If you have spent any amount of time around young boys, you know how active they can be and how much they need physical activity to burn off excess energy. Try keeping a seven year old boy sitting in one place and focused for six to seven hours on a subject in which he is not particularly interested and it is no surprise more and more boys are being diagnosed with learning disabilities and ADD/ADHD.

Consider a fairly typical seven year old boy in the average second grade classroom. He gets up at 5:30 in the morning so his mother can drop him off at daycare on her way to work. His breakfast consists of a Pop-Tart or Egg McMuffin. After two hours of preschool, he gets on the bus for school. Here he sits on a hard plastic chair for seven hours with no break for exercise or recreation (perhaps many school administrators have forgotten the cardinal rule of education -- the mind can only absorb and much as the butt can endure).

This typical boy has an 80% chance of his teacher being female. The bulk of the average school day will be training in two basics -- how to please a woman and how to pass a nationally mandated standardized test. Oh, yeah, his lunch will consist of a bag of potato chips and a Mountain Dew (purchased in the school cafeteria vending machines). He will then catch the bus back to day care until his mother picks him between 6:30 and 7:00PM. Before bed he will have to do his homework, chores, eat dinner (often fast food), and maybe watch a little TV or play a video game.

Now, consider the average day of this same boy 10 years later when he is a high school junior (if he makes it that far). Now instead of being dropped off at day care before school, he drags himself out of bed, skips breakfast all together, and plays an hour of Halo before driving himself to school. On the way, he is likely to smoke a joint to help him cope with his day ahead

He will spend seven to eight hours sitting on a hard plastic chair with an attached desk which is probably way to small for his body (my son, 6’ 3” and 220 pounds couldn’t convince his high school administration to give him a chair and desk that fit his body – even with a doctor’s note. He was forced to sit for hours and learn (?) in the same sized chairs as his much smaller female classmates).

If the previous 11 years haven’t completely killed this 17 year old boy’s ability to sit and pay attention in the average classroom, he now has to try and focus on complex information while 20 or so seventeen year old girls dressed like Jessica Simpson vie for his attention. As soon as school is over, he heads for his part-time job that will keep him up until 11:00PM. Afterwards, he might smoke another joint to help him fall asleep.

Wonder why boys aren’t faring so well in our current academic environment?

There are no easy answers or simple solutions to the current state of affairs for boys in the educational system. One thing is for sure, if we don’t pay attention to the problem and start experimenting with alternative ways of educating boys, more and more will fall through the cracks. The loss to the individual boys and the cost to society are too great to be ignored.

Someone has to speak out for boys and start doing something different.

In Part Four of this series, I will present one proposal for improving the educational process for boys. I will focus on the idea of same gender classrooms and schools for boys and girls. There are encouraging results from classes and schools who have experimented with same gender education. Unfortunately certain groups are fighting to keep this idea out of mainstream education.

Stay tuned.

If you are aware of alternative ways of approaching education for boys or are involved in such programs, share your experience. What is working, what isn’t? What kinds of resistance have these programs met, and from whom?
 

Robert A. Glover, Ph.D. © 2005