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The Trouble With Boys
They're kinetic, maddening and failing at school.
Now educators are trying new ways to help them
succeed.
Jan. 30, 2006 issue - 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.
Some scholars, notably Christina Hoff Sommers, a
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, charge
that misguided feminism is what's been hurting
boys. In the 1990s, she says, girls were making
strong, steady progress toward parity in schools,
but feminist educators portrayed them as
disadvantaged and lavished them with support and
attention. Boys, meanwhile, whose rates of
achievement had begun to falter, were ignored and
their problems allowed to fester (click here for
related essay).
Boys have always been boys, but the expectations
for how they're supposed to act and learn in school
have changed. In the last 10 years, thanks in part
to activist parents concerned about their
children's success, school performance has been
measured in two simple ways: how many students are
enrolled in accelerated courses and whether test
scores stay high. Standardized assessments have
become commonplace for kids as young as 6.
Curricula have become more rigid. Instead of
allowing teachers to instruct kids in the manner
and pace that suit each class, some states now tell
teachers what, when and how to teach. At the same
time, student-teacher ratios have risen, physical
education and sports programs have been cut and
recess is a distant memory. These new pressures are
undermining the strengths and underscoring the
limitations of what psychologists call the "boy
brain"—the kinetic, disorganized, maddening
and sometimes brilliant behaviors that scientists
now believe are not learned but hard-wired.
When Cris Messler of Mountainside, N.J., brought
her 3-year-old son Sam to a pediatrician to get him
checked for ADHD, she was acknowledging the
desperation parents can feel. He's a high-energy
kid, and Messler found herself hoping for a
positive diagnosis. "If I could get a diagnosis
from the doctor, I could get him on medicine," she
says. The doctor said Sam is a normal boy. School
has been tough, though. Sam's reading teacher said
he was hopeless. His first-grade teacher complains
he's antsy, and Sam, now 7, has been referring to
himself as "stupid." Messler's glad her son doesn't
need medication, but what, she wonders, can she do
now to help her boy in school?
For many boys, the trouble starts as young as 5,
when they bring to kindergarten a set of physical
and mental abilities very different from girls'. As
almost any parent knows, most 5-year-old girls are
more fluent than boys and can sight-read more
words. Boys tend to have better hand-eye
coordination, but their fine motor skills are less
developed, making it a struggle for some to control
a pencil or a paintbrush. Boys are more impulsive
than girls; even if they can sit still, many prefer
not to—at least not for long.
Thirty years ago feminists argued that classic
"boy" behaviors were a result of socialization, but
these days scientists believe they are an
expression of male brain chemistry. Sometime in the
first trimester, a boy fetus begins producing male
sex hormones that bathe his brain in testosterone
for the rest of his gestation. "That exposure wires
the male brain differently," says Arthur Arnold,
professor of physiological science at UCLA. How?
Scientists aren't exactly sure. New studies show
that prenatal exposure to male sex hormones
directly affects the way children play. Girls whose
mothers have high levels of testosterone during
pregnancy are more likely to prefer playing with
trucks to playing with dolls. There are also clues
that hormones influence the way we learn all
through life. In a Dutch study published in 1994,
doctors found that when males were given female
hormones, their spatial skills dropped but their
verbal skills improved.
In elementary-school classrooms—where
teachers increasingly put an emphasis on language
and a premium on sitting quietly and speaking in
turn—the mismatch between boys and school can
become painfully obvious. "Girl behavior becomes
the gold standard," says "Raising Cain" coauthor
Thompson. "Boys are treated like defective
girls."
Two years ago Kelley King, principal of Douglass
Elementary School in Boulder, Colo., looked at the
gap between boys and girls and decided to take
action. Boys were lagging 10 points behind girls in
reading and 14 points in writing. Many more boys
than girls were being labeled as learning disabled,
too. So King asked her teachers to buy copies of
Gurian's book "The Minds of Boys," on boy-friendly
classrooms, and in the fall of 2004 she launched a
bold experiment. Whenever possible, teachers
replaced lecture time with fast-moving lessons that
all kids could enjoy. Three weeks ago, instead of
discussing the book "The View From Saturday,"
teacher Pam Unrau divided her third graders into
small groups, and one student in each group
pretended to be a character from the book. Classes
are noisier, Unrau says, but the boys are closing
the gap. Last spring, Douglass girls scored an
average of 106 on state writing tests, while boys
got a respectable 101.
Primatologists have long observed that juvenile
male chimps battle each other not just for food and
females, but to establish and maintain their place
in the hierarchy of the tribe. Primates face off
against each other rather than appear weak. That
same evolutionary imperative, psychologists say,
can make it hard for boys to thrive in middle
school—and difficult for boys who are failing
to accept the help they need. The transition to
middle school is rarely easy, but like the juvenile
primates they are, middle-school boys will do
almost anything to avoid admitting that they're
overwhelmed. "Boys measure everything they do or
say by a single yardstick: does this make me look
weak?" says Thompson. "And if it does, he isn't
going to do it." That's part of the reason that
videogames have such a powerful hold on boys: the
action is constant, they can calibrate just how
hard the challenges will be and, when they lose,
the defeat is private.
When Brian Johns hit seventh grade, he never
admitted how vulnerable it made him feel. "I got
behind and never caught up," says Brian, now 17 and
a senior at Grand River Academy, an Ohio boarding
school. When his parents tried to help, he rebuffed
them. When his mother, Anita, tried to help him
organize his assignment book, he grew evasive about
when his homework was due. Anita didn't know where
to turn. Brian's school had a program for gifted
kids, and support for ones with special needs. But
what, Anita asked his teachers, do they do about
kids like her son who are in the middle and
struggling? Those kids, one of Brian's teachers
told Anita, "are the ones who fall through the
cracks."
It's easy for middle-school boys to feel
outgunned. Girls reach sexual maturity two years
ahead of boys, but other, less visible differences
put boys at a disadvantage, too. The prefrontal
cortex is a knobby region of the brain directly
behind the forehead that scientists believe helps
humans organize complex thoughts, control their
impulses and understand the consequences of their
own behavior. In the last five years, Dr. Jay
Giedd, an expert in brain development at the
National Institutes of Health, has used brain scans
to show that in girls, it reaches its maximum
thickness by the age of 11 and, for the next decade
or more, continues to mature. In boys, this process
is delayed by 18 months.
Middle-school boys may use their brains less
efficiently, too. Using a type of MRI that traces
activity in the brain, Deborah Yurgelun-Todd,
director of the cognitive neuroimaging laboratory
at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., tested the
activity patterns in the prefrontal cortex of
children between the ages of 11 and 18. When shown
pictures of fearful faces, adolescent girls
registered activity on the right side of the
prefrontal cortex, similar to an adult. Adolescent
boys used both sides—a less mature pattern of
brain activity. Teenage girls can process
information faster, too. In a study about to be
published in the journal Intelligence, researchers
at Vanderbilt University administered timed
tests—picking similar objects and matching
groups of numbers—to 8,000 boys and girls
between the ages of 5 and 18. In kindergarten, boys
and girls processed information at about the same
speeds. In early adolescence, girls finished faster
and got more right. By 18, boys and girls were
processing with the same speed and accuracy.
Scientists caution that brain research doesn't
tell the whole story: temperament, family
background and environment play big roles, too.
Some boys are every bit as organized and assertive
as the highest-achieving girls. All kids can be
scarred by violence, alcohol or drugs in the
family. But if your brain hasn't reached maturity
yet, says Yurgelun-Todd, "it's not going to be able
to do its job optimally."
Across the nation, educators are reviving an old
idea: separate the girls from the boys—and at
Roncalli Middle School, in Pueblo, Colo.,
administrators say, it's helping kids of both
genders. This past fall, with the blessing of
parents, school guidance counselor Mike Horton
assigned a random group of 50 sixth graders to
single-sex classes in core subjects. These days,
when sixth-grade science teacher Pat Farrell
assigns an earth-science lab on measuring crystals,
the girls collect their materials—a Bunsen
burner, a beaker of phenyl salicylate and a spoon.
Then they read the directions and follow the
sequence from beginning to end. The first things
boys do is ask, "Can we eat this?" They're less
organized, Farrell notes, but sometimes, "they're
willing to go beyond what the lab asks them to do."
With this in mind, he hands out written
instructions to both classes but now goes over them
step by step for the boys. Although it's too soon
to declare victory, there are some positive signs:
the shyest boys are participating more. This fall,
the all-girl class did best in math, English and
science, followed by the all-boy class and then
coed classes.
One of the most reliable predictors of whether a
boy will succeed or fail in high school rests on a
single question: does he have a man in his life to
look up to? Too often, the answer is no. High rates
of divorce and single motherhood have created a
generation of fatherless boys. In every kind of
neighborhood, rich or poor, an increasing number of
boys—now a startling 40 percent—are being
raised without their biological dads.
Psychologists say that grandfathers and uncles
can help, but emphasize that an adolescent boy
without a father figure is like an explorer without
a map. And that is especially true for poor boys
and boys who are struggling in school. Older males,
says Gurian, model self-restraint and solid work
habits for younger ones. And whether they're
breathing down their necks about grades or
admonishing them to show up for school on time, "an
older man reminds a boy in a million different ways
that school is crucial to their mission in
life."
In the past, boys had many opportunities to
learn from older men. They might have been paired
with a tutor, apprenticed to a master or put to
work in the family store. High schools offered boys
a rich array of roles in which to exercise
leadership skills—class officer, yearbook
editor or a place on the debate team. These days,
with the exception of sports, more girls than boys
are involved in those activities.
In neighborhoods where fathers are most scarce,
the high-school dropout rates are shocking: more
than half of African-American boys who start high
school don't finish. David Banks, principal of the
Eagle Academy for Young Men, one of four all-boy
public high schools in the New York City system,
wants each of his 180 students not only to graduate
from high school but to enroll in college. And he's
leaving nothing to chance. Almost every Eagle
Academy boy has a male mentor—a lawyer, a
police officer or an entrepreneur from the school's
South Bronx neighborhood. The impact of the
mentoring program, says Banks, has been "beyond
profound." Tenth grader Rafael Mendez is
unequivocal: his mentor "is the best thing that
ever happened to me." Before Rafael came to Eagle
Academy, he dreamed about playing pro baseball, but
his mentor, Bronx Assistant District Attorney
Rafael Curbelo, has shown him another way to
succeed: Mendez is thinking about attending college
in order to study forensic science.
Colleges would welcome more applications from
young men like Rafael Mendez. At many state
universities the gender balance is already tilting
60-40 toward women. Primary and secondary schools
are going to have to make some major changes, says
Ange Peterson, president-elect of the American
Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions
Officers, to restore the gender balance. "There's a
whole group of men we're losing in education
completely," says Peterson.
For Nikolas Arnold, 15, a sophomore at a public
high school in Santa Monica, Calif., college is a
distant dream. Nikolas is smart: he's got an
encyclopedic knowledge of weaponry and war. When he
was in first grade, his principal told his mother
he was too immature and needed ADHD drugs. His
mother balked. "Too immature?" says Diane Arnold, a
widow. "He was six and a half!" He's always been an
advanced reader, but his grades are erratic. Last
semester, when his English teacher assigned two
girls' favorites—"Memoirs of a Geisha" and
"The Secret Life of Bees" Nikolas got a D. But
lately, he has a math teacher he likes and is
getting excited about numbers. He's reserved in
class sometimes. But now that he's more engaged,
his grades are improving slightly and his mother,
who's pushing college, is hopeful he will begin to
hit his stride. Girls get A's and B's on their
report cards, she tells him, but that doesn't mean
boys can't do it, too.
With Andrew Murr, Vanessa Juarez, Anne
Underwood, Karen Springen and Pat Wingert www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc
In
gender wars, advocates for boys battle
back
Potential Future Show on Oprah
A number of you have asked how to contact the Oprah
Winfrey show in order to share stories and
solutions with others. It does seem that now is a
good time to click on www2.oprah.com/email/email_landing.jhtml
and write your story of your son's struggle. You
might ask Oprah to do a show on how to best care
for and teach the minds of boys. You have a lot of
power, and Oprah cares a lot about kids.
Video
Watch clips from the PBS documentary 'Raising
Cain'
Newsweek on Air
Society: The Trouble with Boys
Guests: Karen Springen, NEWSWEEK Chicago
Correspondent; Lionel Tiger, Charles Darwin
Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University;
author of "The Decline of Males," (St. Martin's,
1999)
• Audio
clip
| Complete
show
| Podcast
NBC Video
(Click right Side Bar at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965522/site/newsweek/?GT1=7538
)
• More boys struggling in school
Jan. 22: After years spent closing the
achievement gap for girls, now boys are struggling.
While they're holding their own on math and science
tests, boys are falling behind girls in reading and
writing. Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and NBC News
reports. - Nightly News
• What's happening to your son's
education?
Jan. 23: NBC's Peter Alexander reports on why
boys are falling behind in school. Then, "Today"
show host Matt Lauer talks with Peg Tyre, editor of
Newsweek, about the issue. - Today show
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what bloggers are saying about this Newsweek
article
Related Books: Adolescence,
Fathers
& Sons plus
Angry
Young Men: How parents, teachers and
counselors can help "bad boys" become good
men, Aaron Kipnis
Bad
Boys, Bad Men: Confronting antisocial
personality disorder, Donald
Black
Beating
the Odds: Raising academically
successful African American males,
Freeman Harbowski, Kenneth Maton
& Geoffrey Grief.
Boys
Will Be Boys: Raising our sons for courage,
caring and community, Paul Kivel
Lost
Boys: Why our sons turn violent and how
we can save them, James
Garbarino
The
Men They Will Become: The nature and nurture
of male character, Eli Newberger
The
Mind of Boys, Kathy Stevens and Michael
Gurian
Raising
a Son: Parents and the making of a healthy
man, Don & Jeane Elium
Raising
Cain: Protecting the emotional life of
boys, Dan Kindlon & Michael
Thompson
Real
Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of
Boyhood, William Pollack
Taking
the Bully by the Horns, Kathy Noll
with Dr. Jay Carter
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Ways to Raise a Boy's Emotional
Intelligence: An indispensable guide for
parents, teachers and other concerned
caregivers, Will Glennon
The
War Against Boys: How misguided feminism is
harming our young men, Christina
Hoff Sommers
The
Wonder of Boys: What parents, mentors
and educators can do to shape boys into exceptional
men, Michael Gurian
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