Hold boys back to move them ahead
Every spring I read the stories in this newspaper about high school graduation classes; these stories trumpet the academic achievements of the very top students – the valedictorians and the salutatorians.
The stories are interesting in at least two aspects. First off, I’m eager to see where the kids at the top of their respective classes are headed next. Which colleges will they attend?
Second, the stories are interesting for the purely anecdotal fact that overwhelmingly the very highest academic achievers are girls. Oh, sometimes a boy sneaks in there. But for the most part the valedictorians and the salutatorians are female.
Good for the girls, not so good for the boys. There was a time when the reverse was true: I once had the chance to look over Uniontown High School yearbooks from the 1920s. You guessed it: boys were tops academically back then.
It’s fairly certain that girls in the long-ago underperformed for the simple reason that stellar grades were not a top priority. Educating females was not highly valued, as educated females were not in high demand. The Ivy League schools, for instance, which a surprising number of Uniontown boys were headed off to, were closed to women in those days, as were many other institutions of so-called higher learning.
(Women-only elite colleges such as Radcliffe and Sarah Lawrence had excellent reputations but failed to match the eminence of men-only Harvard and Yale.)
Alice Christy, a Uniontown High School graduate in the years around World War I, matriculated at prestigious Mt. Holyoke College, from where she continued to contribute to her high school’s literary magazine, The Maroon and White. The fact that the magazine existed suggests the rigor and serious nature of high school education in Christy’s day.)
The question is not so much why boys did better then, but why they’ve fallen on such hard times now, and what might be done about it. Enter Richard V. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution specializing in questions of gender equity and the author, in this month’s Atlantic magazine, of “Redshirt The Boys,” adopted from his recent book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.”
According to Reeves, having boys and girls ages 4 to 5 start school at the same time puts boys at a disadvantage. “Once boys begin school,” he writes, “they almost immediately start falling behind girls.”
Why should this be so? Reeves’ answer is that boys are wired differently than girls: there is a “maturity gap” between the sexes.
“The maturity gap is now demonstrated by neuroscience. Brain development follows a different trajectory for boys than it does for girls. But this fact is entirely ignored in broader educational policy, even as boys fall further behind girls in the classroom.”
Reeves’ examination of the data suggests that “on almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgrad, boys and young men now lag well behind their female classmates.”
Grading is a routine measure of academic achievement. “The most common high school grade for girls is now an A; for boys it is a B…. Boys are more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading, and science.
“In the United States, almost 1 in 5 boys does not graduate from high school on time, compared with 1 in 10 girls.” Girls are now far more likely than boys to attend college, and to graduate.
“Among many of the parents that I know, a shorthand explanation has developed to explain the struggles of an adolescent child to stay on track, especially academically, ‘He’s a boy.'”
Undoubtedly, you’ve heard the same explanation, most of the time offered in utter warmth but sometimes in barely concealed, dismissive contempt – the latter by folks pleased to see the ascendancy of girls over boys, the stronger sex over the weaker.
Reeves, who calls himself a “feminist,” insists boys should be helped not only for their own good, but for the benefit of all, including the women they will eventually hook up with.
He recommends that parents and educators collaborate to delay the start of the classroom experience of most boys. Common in elite private schools, the practice of “redshirting” public school boys should become widespread, Reeves says, arguing this simple tweak will have long-term beneficial consequences.
Richard Robbins is the author most recently of “Troubled Times: The Struggle for Wages, Recognition, and Power in the Age of Coal and Coke.” He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.