May be vastly over-stated.
A study to be released today looking at long-term trends in test scores and academic success argues that widespread reports of U.S. boys being in crisis are greatly overstated and that young males in school are in many ways doing better than ever.
Using data compiled from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally funded accounting of student achievement since 1971, the Washington-based think tank Education Sector found that, over the past three decades, boys’ test scores are mostly up, more boys are going to college and more are getting bachelor’s degrees.
This is certainly good news, and I don’t see why it should be surprising, given that more people in general are going to college and getting bachelor’s degrees.
Although low-income boys, like low-income girls, are lagging behind middle-class students, boys are scoring significant gains in elementary and middle school and are much better prepared for college, the report says. It concludes that much of the pessimism about young males seems to derive from inadequate research, sloppy analysis and discomfort with the fact that although the average boy is doing better, the average girl has gotten ahead of him.
And there’s the sticking point: If girls start to surpass boys, we panic.
The income issue is an important one, though, and one that is not sufficiently dealt with.
“There’s no doubt that some groups of boys — particularly Hispanic and black boys and boys from low-income homes — are in real trouble,” Education Sector senior policy analyst Sara Mead says in the report. “But the predominant issues for them are race and class, not gender.”
Black and Hispanic boys test far below white boys, the report notes. The difference between white and black boys in fourth-grade reading last year was 10 times as great as the improvement for all boys on that test since 1992. Still, the report notes, the performance of black and Hispanic boys is not getting worse. The average fourth-grade reading scores for black boys improved more than those of whites and Hispanics of both sexes.
We need to deal with the race and class issues, and focus on improving education in low-income neighborhoods.
And about those evil feminists who make it their job to hurt men and boys:
The “boy crisis,” the report says, has been used by conservative authors who accuse “misguided feminists” of lavishing resources on female students at the expense of males and by liberal authors who say schools are “forcing all children into a teacher-led pedagogical box that is particularly ill-suited to boys’ interests and learning styles.”
“Yet there is not sufficient evidence — or the right kind of evidence — available to draw firm conclusions,” the report says. “As a result, there is a sort of free market for theories about why boys are underperforming girls in school, with parents, educators, media, and the public choosing to give credence to the explanations that are the best marketed and that most appeal to their pre-existing preferences.”