Pay closer attention: Boys are struggling academically
continued
Increasingly, success requires verbal skills, which everyone agrees come more naturally to girls. Industrial-age jobs that required minimal verbal skills are disappearing, replaced by information-age jobs that range from filing insurance claims to law. Even in technical fields, verbal skills are at a premium. An auto mechanic or TV repairman now needs to master complex technical manuals.
School reformers eventually spotted the need and reacted strongly, setting standards and writing tests that demand verbal skills. The SAT and ACT required for college applicants, for instance, now have an essay component.
This puts boys at a huge handicap, and schools haven't begun to adapt.
One hint of the inadequacy can be found in research done by Michael Gurian, author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently. He surveyed the course offerings of schools of education throughout the country. His discovery: 99% of universities and teacher colleges do not offer a course on the biological differences between how girls and boys learn. So teachers enter classrooms unprepared to turn boys into successful readers.
Other factors also come quickly into play, setting off a downward spiral that looks something like this: At home, dads read to their daughters and throw footballs to their sons. In elementary school overwhelmingly female teaching staffs naturally teach in ways that connect better with girls. Fidgety boys are quickly defined as suffering from reading disabilities. In middle school, teachers — still unattuned to the boys' disadvantages — take no action to correct swelling reading gaps.
That brings boys to the pivotal ninth grade, the first year when they run up against the heavily verbal, college-track curriculum that school reforms demand of most schools. And the boys flounder.
The trend holds through the remaining school years: Girls shine; boys fade.
Some responses suggested by researchers appear easy. Assign boys books that they find more appealing, for example. And bring them along gradually, so they don't quit.
But in the end, the problem runs much deeper. It surely won't be fixed until educators first come to see that it exists.
USA Today:
Posted 12/2/2004 8:42 PM Updated 12/2/2004 9:10 PM
