How the Schools Shortchange Boys - In the newly feminized classroom, boys tune out.

Since I started teaching several years ago, after 25 years in the movie business, I’ve come to learn firsthand that everything I’d heard about the feminization of our schools is real—and far more pernicious to boys than I had imagined. Christina Hoff Sommers was absolutely accurate in describing, in her 2000 bestseller, The War Against Boys, how feminist complaints that girls were “losing their voice” in a male-oriented classroom have prompted the educational establishment to turn the schools upside down to make them more girl-friendly, to the detriment of males.

As a result, boys have become increasingly disengaged. Only 65 percent earned high school diplomas in the class of 2003, compared with 72 percent of girls, education researcher Jay Greene recently documented. Girls now so outnumber boys on most university campuses across the country that some schools, like Kenyon College, have even begun to practice affirmative action for boys in admissions. And as in high school, girls are getting better grades and graduating at a higher rate.

As Sommers understood, it is boys’ aggressive and rationalist nature—redefined by educators as a behavioral disorder—that’s getting so many of them in trouble in the feminized schools. Their problem: they don’t want to be girls.

Take my tenth-grade student Brandon. I noted that he was on the no-pass list again, after three consecutive days in detention for being disruptive. “Who gave it to you this time?” I asked, passing him on my way out.

“No,” I corrected him. “You said”—and here I mimicked his voice—“ ‘Why do we have to do this crap anyway?’ Right?”

Brandon recalls one of those sweet, ruby-cheeked boys you often see depicted on English porcelain.

He’s smart, precocious, and—according to his special-education profile—has been “behaviorally challenged” since fifth grade. The special-ed classification is the bane of the modern boy. To teachers, it’s a yellow flag that snaps out at you the moment you open a student’s folder. More than any other factor, it has determined Brandon’s and legions of other boys’ troubled tenures as students.

Brandon’s current problem began because Ms. Waverly, his social studies teacher, failed to answer one critical question: What was the point of the lesson she was teaching? One of the first observations I made as a teacher was that boys invariably ask this question, while girls seldom do. When a teacher assigns a paper or a project, girls will obediently flip their notebooks open and jot down the due date. Teachers love them. God loves them. Girls are calm and pleasant. They succeed through cooperation.

Boys will pin you to the wall like a moth. They want a rational explanation for everything. If unconvinced by your reasons—or if you don’t bother to offer any—they slouch contemptuously in their chairs, beat their pencils, or watch the squirrels outside the window. Two days before the paper is due, girls are handing in the finished product in neat vinyl folders with colorful clip-art title pages. It isn’t until the boys notice this that the alarm sounds. “Hey, you never told us ’bout a paper! What paper?! I want to see my fucking counselor!”

A female teacher, especially if she has no male children of her own, I’ve noticed, will tend to view boys’ penchant for challenging classroom assignments as disruptive, disrespectful—rude. In my experience, notes home and parent-teacher conferences almost always concern a boy’s behavior in class, usually centering on this kind of conflict. In today’s feminized classroom, with its “cooperative learning” and “inclusiveness,” a student’s demand for assurance of a worthwhile outcome for his effort isn’t met with a reasonable explanation but is considered inimical to the educational process. Yet it’s this very trait, innate to boys and men, that helps explain male success in the hard sciences, math, and business.

The difference between the male and female predilection for hard proof shows up among the teachers, too. In my second year of teaching, I attended a required seminar on “differentiated instruction,” a teaching model that is the current rage in the fickle world of pop education theory. The method addresses the need to teach all students in a classroom where academic abilities vary greatly—where there is “heterogeneous grouping,” to use the ed-school jargon—meaning kids with IQs of 55 sit side by side with the gifted. The theory goes that the “least restrictive environment” is best for helping the intellectually challenged. The teacher’s job is to figure out how to dice up his daily lessons to address every perceived shortcoming and disability in the classroom.

After the lecture, we broke into groups of five, with instructions to work cooperatively to come up with a model lesson plan for just such a classroom situation. My group had two men and three women. The women immediately set to work; my seasoned male cohort and I reclined sullenly in our chairs.

“Are the women going to do all the work?” one of the women inquired brightly after about ten minutes.

“This is baloney,” my friend declared, yawning, as he chucked the seminar handout into a row of empty plastic juice bottles. “We wouldn’t have this problem if we grouped kids by ability, like we used to.”

The women, all dedicated teachers, understood this, too. But that wasn’t the point. Treating people as equals was a social goal well worth pursuing. And we contentious boys were just too dumb to get it.

Female approval has a powerful effect on the male psyche. Kindness, consideration, and elevated moral purpose have nothing to do with an irreducible proof, of course. Yet we male teachers squirm when women point out our moral failings—and our boy students do, too. This is the virtue that has helped women redefine the mission of education.

The notion of male ethical inferiority first arises in grammar school, where women make up the overwhelming majority of teachers. It’s here that the alphabet soup of supposed male dysfunctions begins. And make no mistake: while girls occasionally exhibit symptoms of male-related disorders in this world, females diagnosed with learning disabilities simply don’t exist.

For a generation now, many well-meaning parents, worn down by their boy’s failure to flourish in school, his poor self-esteem and unhappiness, his discipline problems, decide to accept administration recommendations to have him tested for disabilities. The pitch sounds reasonable: admission into special ed qualifies him for tutoring, modified lessons, extra time on tests (including the SAT), and other supposed benefits. It’s all a hustle, Mom and Dad privately advise their boy. Don’t worry about it. We know there’s nothing wrong with you.

To get into special ed, however, administrators must find something wrong. In my four years of teaching, I’ve never seen them fail. In the first IEP (Individualized Educational Program) meeting, the boy and his parents learn the results of disability testing. When the boy hears from three smiling adults that he does indeed have a learning disability, his young face quivers like Jell-O. For him, it was never a hustle. From then on, however, his expectations of himself—and those of his teachers—plummet.

Special ed is the great spangled elephant in the education parade. Each year, it grows larger and more lumbering, drawing more and more boys into the procession. Since the publication of Sommers’s book, it has grown tenfold. Special ed now is the single largest budget item, outside of basic operations, in most school districts across the country.

Special-ed boosters like to point to the success that boys enjoy after they begin the program. Their grades rise, and the phone calls home cease. Anxious parents feel reassured that progress is happening. In truth, I have rarely seen any real improvement in a student’s performance after he’s become a special-ed kid. On my first day of teaching, I received manila folders for all five of my special-ed students—boys all—with a score of modifications that I had to make in each day’s lesson plan.

I noticed early on that my special-ed boys often sat at their desks with their heads down or casually staring off into space, as if tracking motes in their eyes, while I proceeded with my lesson. A special-ed caseworker would arrive, take their assignments, and disappear with the boys into the resource room. The students would return the next day with completed assignments.

They assured me that they did. I became suspicious, however, when I noticed that they couldn’t perform the same work on their own, away from the resource room. A special-ed caseworker’s job is to keep her charges from failing. A failure invites scrutiny and reams of paperwork. The caseworkers do their jobs.

Brandon has been on the special-ed track since he was nine. He knows his legal rights as well as his caseworkers do. And he plays them ruthlessly. In every debate I have with him about his low performance, Brandon delicately threads his response with the very sinews that bind him. After a particularly easy midterm, I made him stay after class to explain his failure.

“You were supposed to modify that test,” he countered coolly. “I only had to answer nine of the 27 questions. The nine I did are all right.”

His argument is like a piece of fine crystal that he rolls admiringly in his hand. He demands that I appreciate the elegance of his position. I do, particularly because my own is so weak.

Yet while the process of education may be deeply absorbing to Brandon, he long ago came to dismiss the content entirely. For several decades, white Anglo-Saxon males—Brandon’s ancestors—have faced withering assault from feminism- and multiculturalism-inspired education specialists. Armed with a spiteful moral rectitude, their goal is to sever his historical reach, to defame, cover over, dilute . . . and then reconstruct.

In today’s politically correct textbooks, Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Charles Dickens, even though both women are second-raters at best. But even in their superficial aspects, the textbooks advertise publishers’ intent to pander to the prevailing PC attitudes. The books feature page after page of healthy, exuberant young girls in winning portraits. Boys (white boys in particular) will more often than not be shunted to the background in photos or be absent entirely or appear sitting in wheelchairs.

The underlying message isn’t lost on Brandon. His keen young mind reads between the lines and perceives the folly of all that he’s told to accept. Because he lacks an adult perspective, however, what he cannot grasp is the ruthlessness of the war that the education reformers have waged. Often when he provokes, it’s simple boyish tit for tat.

A week ago, I dispatched Brandon to the library with directions to choose a book for his novel assignment. He returned minutes later with his choice and a twinkling smile.

“I got a grrreat book, Mr. Garibaldi!” he said, holding up an old, bleary, clothbound item. “Can I read the first page aloud, pahlease?”

“Ah, Joseph Conrad,” he replied, consulting the frontispiece. “Can I? Huh, huh, huh?”

Brandon eagerly stood up before the now-alert class of mostly black and Puerto Rican faces, adjusted his shoulders as if straightening a prep-school blazer, then intoned solemnly: “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ ”—twinkle, twinkle, twinkle. “Chapter one. . . .”

Boys today feel isolated and outgunned, but many, like Brandon, don’t lack pluck and courage. They often seem to have more of it than their parents, who writhe uncomfortably before a system steeled in the armor of “social conscience.” The game, parents whisper to themselves, is to play along, to maneuver, to outdistance your rival. Brandon’s struggle is an honest one: to preserve truth and his own integrity.

Boys who get a compartment on the special-ed train take the ride to its end without looking out the window. They wait for the moment when they can step out and scorn the rattletrap that took them nowhere. At the end of the line, some, like Brandon, may have forged the resiliency of survival. But that’s not what school is for.

I've been perusing that site - it would seem that all the logical fallacy examples seem to come from the conservative side. That doesn't invalidate his logic, but it is telling that he never presents a liberal logical fallacy.

(Funny, he would call the above, "Arguing from the negative", and he would be right, but it still doesn't mean he's not a lib!) Who you gonna believe, logic or your lying eyes?

I've never understood why we should waste time on Shakespeare, for instance, when reading him requires that we acquire an entirely new vocabulary we will never use again for as long as we live.

First, because Shakespeare invented an estimated 10% of the words in his writings. Think about that - one word out of every 10 the man wrote, he came up with. That is amazing.

Second, because he is hands-down THE best writer the English language has ever had, and not reading Shakespeare is missing out on something wonderful.

I'd bet my next paycheck you have never read Shakespeare aloud. He was never meant to be read silently to oneself. He was meant to be spoken, declaimed, acted.

No competitive play on the playground. No running, even. Many schools do not permit their charges out on the playground at all.My wife teaches and notes the same things that this writer notes. Part of the problem is that discipline is outlawed so that Ritalin has become necessary to control normal boys. All that is one reason that we are no longer producing the numbers of scientists that we once did. We remain nr. one in science because we sill import the cream of other countries' schools but that is diminishing now, too.

"The only time the children sit in on IEPs is when they are transitioning out of high school." (comment# 94)

"I'm on a list serve with hundreds of parents of special needs children in other schools across the nation, and none of us would dream of taking our children into an IEP meeting until they are older."

According to my sister, a special ed teacher in New Jersey, the kids can be involved with an IEP at 14 years old.

No competitive play on the playground. No running, even. Many schools do not permit their charges out on the playground at all.My wife teaches and notes the same things that this writer notes.

As I wrote above, our 6th grade son is entering a military school this year. They do military style PT and play dodgeball for fun. Dodgeball!

My wife, a Chinese-born naturalized citizen, informed me that our girl would only be considered an above-average student in China!

I kept telling my kids, "There's someone in China who wants your job. And will do it for a dollar an hour. Finish your homework! NOW!" It worked a whole lot better after our oldest finished a Rotary Exchange in Mexico. The pictures were enough, actually.

I was reading your post just as Dianne Sawyer was bemoaning the fact that our poor daughters are totally underdiagnosed for ADD and are Ritalin-deprived.

When I was a youngin being able the read was the only criterion for promotion from kindergarten to first grade. Today, a high school senior is lucky to have a vocabulary of 2,000 words. Our NEA schoolteachers are stupid as fenceposts, our children aren't competing now and it's getting worse.

Christina Hoff Sommers was absolutely accurate in describing, in her 2000 bestseller, The War Against Boys, how feminist complaints that girls were “losing their voice” in a male-oriented classroom have prompted the educational establishment to turn the schools upside down to make them more girl-friendly, to the detriment of males...
What was the point of the lesson she was teaching? One of the first observations I made as a teacher was that boys invariably ask this question, while girls seldom do. When a teacher assigns a paper or a project, girls will obediently flip their notebooks open and jot down the due date. Teachers love them. God loves them. Girls are calm and pleasant. They succeed through cooperation...
Boys will pin you to the wall like a moth. They want a rational explanation for everything...
“This is baloney,” my friend declared, yawning, as he chucked the seminar handout into a row of empty plastic juice bottles. “We wouldn’t have this problem if we grouped kids by ability, like we used to.”

Somewhere in those quotes is a common thread that reaffirms my belief that the 19th Amendment was a disaster for this republic.

You know, I'm not sure I believe any of this. With arts programs on the outs, and sometimes even athletics, and not enough activity for all that young energy, I don't think demasculization is an issue.

Have you listened to any teenagers talk about school these days?

The one disagreement I have with the article is that there ARE girls in Special Ed nowadays, and they hold their placement as some sort of badge of honor, like being considered stupid is cool.

There are a number of boys who do well in school; the really smart kids always do well. The special ed kids get advantages, too, like modified assignments. The ones in the middle get the squeeze, though. They are just shunted along, unless they happen to get a fabulous teacher. But from what our daughters friends say, they are few and far between.

One of the reasons we homeschooled our younger two, starting in middle school, was because our daughter was beginning to exhibit signs of abject boredom. She approaches education much like boys; she wants to know the point, and she's not interested in fluff. I guess having a brilliant Dad and 3 brothers helped, but I'm not much of an education fluff person, either, so she gets it honestly. We sent our youngest son back to school for his first two years of high school, but it was an all boys school, and there was not a hint of fluff, anywhere, but we decided that we enjoyed the freedom of homeschooling, so he'll finish his last two years at home. It will be great having him home again. He's our youngest, and, as are his older siblings, is just fun to be around.

For the ones that didn't want to learn anything and just wanted to argue, they got to write a paper to explain why the concept was important. Of course, they rarely did and got a 0 for it.

I applaud the teachers who do things like this - they are teaching the students something - maybe not the canned lesson plan they had in mind, but an important lesson.

And, BTW, you often have to learn a lot about the subject to decide whether it is important. Sneaky, but it works with students who learn better on their own than just memorizing what the teacher says.

I wrote more than a few of those papers when I was in school. It wasn't that I didn't want to learn - it was just that I wanted to know why. I even got an A on a paper where I concluded that it wasn't important. :-)

Good for you to do the papers! Most of my students that got them assigned didn't even bother.

BTW, I only assigned the papers after the student became argumentative about why we were studying the concept. I warned them all that if they wanted to know why we were studying something, I would answer to the best of my ability to how it could relate to their future studies or goals. But I had many who had no future goals! They would argue after my explanation that, for example, they would never need polar coordinates in physics because they were going to major in art. So, they got assigned a paper and a recommendation to drop Advanced Math and take something easier. (The hint that it was too much for their meager abilities usually got some to try harder, and others did drop - to my relief!)

When people asked "How long are you going to homeschool?" (I bet you're familiar with the question), we always said, "We're committed to this year, and then we'll re-evaluate our options."

That's a good, nonconfrontational answer! If you want to stir up the pot sometime, tell them you'll homeschool until your public schools shape up. Maybe a school board member will be listening in.

So this was my big beef with our school district this past year. My daughter has brain damage, and we took her to a neuropsychologist, learning specialist and a speech therapist to get a very good evaluation of her strengths and weaknesses. Everyone agrees that her strength is in math and her weakness is in speech.

However, the evaluation also showed that my daughter has auditory memory problems (1%), very poor phonemic awareness (9%), and some other poor word attack skills. She's already starting to slip in her reading level. She just finished 3rd grade, and I would estimate her reading level to be around 3.5.

The only thing the school district offered to do (besides speech) was to modify her homework. They did not want to bring up her phonemic awareness, to work on her auditory memory, or to work on her word attack skills. There are some very reputable programs to help kids like my daughter (lindamood-bell) and others, but the district just wants to give her easier school work.

I was furious!!!!!! We're putting her in private. We can't afford lindamood-bell, but we are getting he in a reading program that uses the Orton-Gillingham multi-sensory reading.

I want my daughter to be remediated. I don't want her to just be given easier homework. It would be one thing if all methods had been exhausted, and my daughter couldn't learn. However, the district has tried zero methods with her. They don't want to remediate her at all.

I hope my daughter does well in private school. Plus, it will be in a Christian environment.

>Ummm, no ... my concern is for little guys (i.e. K-6) who are stuck in a system that continually implicitly and explicitly runs contrary to their wiring them.<

Well, my delusions are rooted in real world observations of well, inept men still getting ahead because they are men, and being told, to my face, that women don't need raises because some male (father or husband) is supporting them.

Harridan feminists who want all the advantages without doing the work make me crazy, too. I have NO use for them. But...underlying all of these tears for the poor, poor boys, who WILL be hired before better qualified women and who WILL go farther doing less than passed-over women, is a thread of misogyny.

I hear a lot of stories about women advanced beyond their capabilities, but I've reported to a lot of men who had no business running anything, in terms of training, character, and experience, and only one flako female who actually was technically competent, but personally made everyone around her crazy.

A lot of those women in college are wasting their time, because they're not going to get hired because less qualified men will always be hired first, on balance, unless a female is needed for display purposes.

The truth is, we cannot afford to throw away any talent.

Maybe you should be quicker to assign the papers. I got totally sucked into a scam by one of my HS teachers who said we could either learn the material, or write a paper showing why it was irrelevant.

The latter choice is appealing - you can make the teacher look silly, you think. But you have to learn a lot more than just the basic course material to even try.

Many students don't have a concept of "goals". but they for sure do know about "challenges".

The teacher showed the entire class this old disney film with the crazy duck professor. It was how geometry was all over our lives in the real world. (in buildig things, how to play pool etc.)

Are you thinking of "MathMagic"? That is an awesome way to interest kids in the real world applications of Math. My favorite part was at the end, when they showed a galaxy spinning in space, and the narrator said, quoting Galileo, I think, "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the Universe."

Not surprising that it might not be shown in classrooms today, for that reason, alone.

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