Educating the boys

Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Chait Barnett write in the Sunday Washington Post that "The Boy Crisis" is a myth. Most of the experts cited who agree with them are females. Nevertheless they do serve into a good point here and there.

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... The alarming statistics on which the notion of a crisis is based are rarely broken out by race or class. When they are, the whole picture changes. It becomes clear that if there is a crisis, it's among inner-city and rural boys. White suburban boys aren't significantly touched by it. On average, they are not dropping out of school, avoiding college or lacking in verbal skills. Although we have been hearing that boys are virtually disappearing from college classrooms, the truth is that among whites, the gender composition of colleges is pretty balanced: 51 percent female and 49 percent male, according to the National Education Association. In Ivy League colleges, men still outnumber women.

One group of studies found that although poor and working-class boys lag behind girls in reading when they get to middle school, boys in the wealthiest schools do not fall behind, either in middle school or in high school. University of Michigan education professor Valerie Lee reports that gender differences in academic performance are "small to moderate."

When it comes to academic achievement, race and class completely swamp gender. The Urban Institute reports that 76 percent of students who live in middle- to higher-income areas are likely to graduate from high school, while only 56 percent of students who live in lower-income areas are likely to do so. Among whites in Boston public schools, for every 100 males who graduate, 104 females do. A tiny gap.

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The Department of Defense offers a better model. DOD runs a vast network of schools on military bases in the United States and abroad for more than 100,000 children of service members. And in those schools, there is no class and race gap. That's because these schools have high expectations, a strong academic focus, and hire teachers with years of classroom experience and training (a majority with master's degrees). Of course, this solution costs money, and has none of the sex appeal of the trendy single-sex-school quick fix.

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The key is high expectations by both the teachers and the parents. When together the demand accomplisment, students can achieve it. It is no coincidence that Asians lead in performance. Asian parents are the most demanding. Low expectations yield low results where ever they are tried.