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.

The charters in our area are doing great, except it is very hard to get into them. We're on the wait list for one of them. We don't think we'll get in so we're going private.

The thing with the charter we're on the wait list for is that it was created by it's school district. The school district was having declining enrollment and some other issues. Instead of closing schools, they turned one of them into a charter. It did great, and attracted kids from outside of the neighborhood. The district was so happy, that they have turned several other schools into charters. All of them are doing great!

It is such a contrast to my district. My district actively opposes any charters that are proposed. When facing declining enrollment, they just up and close schools (my daughters included). It is such a horrible school district!

‘Why do we have to do this crap anyway?'

That's an apt question. Maybe we need to examine the assumptions about public schools - that kids need to sit still and be regulated by bells and buzzers from near-toddlerhood to the time when they can vote. Maybe what is being taught is not relevant to anything in the kid's real life. I've heard it said that public high schools cram two years of learning into a four-year package. Can the same be said for the lower grades? We haven't always had this particular model of public education - and people before that learned how to support themselves and there was no such thing as an ADHD diagnosis until very recently. Just how did our nation manage?

Forcing meritorious art that they hate "for their own good" today at the expense of turning them off literature forever afterwards is not a win for education.

I agree. As I said in an earlier post, Shakepeare's intended audience was not incarcerated teenagers. People paid to see Shakespeare's plays, and those of other popular playwrights of his day, because they enjoyed them. The Elizabethan theater scene was "American Idol" meets "Survivor" crossed with "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." As it were.

The great novels of the past, of various eras and nations, were popular, read voluntarily by the general public. They were not forced on prisoners of the state.

In my opinion, if literature is worthy of being described as "classic," it will attract uncoerced readers in every generation.

I don't know for sure if schools make money on special ed.

I can tell you as a parent of a child with a real special need (lots of brain damage as evidenced in an MRI) that my daughter and many others like her are shortchanged.

It seems the only way to really get the correct services for our children is to sue the school districts.

I think special ed needs to be totally retooled. For example, when a kid needs speech therapy. Well, the speech therapist works for the district. It kind of sets up a conflict of interest. The kid needs lots of therapy, and the district doesn't want to pay for the therapy.

I wouldn't even mind paying for some services on my own if they could be offered at school so that I don't have to drive my daughter all around after school to different therapies. Why not have a reading specialist at a school sight that a parent could hire. Why not have a speech therapist that the parent could pay for one on one therapy for.

There is so much wasted money on lawyer fees. I would much rather that money go to the kids.

"A book you didn't want to read leaves your head the day the assignment is done and you will never consider it again - or consider reading it again either."

Wow, is that ever wrong. I can't count the number of people I've talked to - friends, family, coworkers - who talk about books they hated in school, only to rediscover them years later and finally "get it". A great example is "Moby Dick". Teenagers should never read that book; it goes right over their heads. It's not a book about whales; it's a book about what obsession can do to you.

There isn't a sixteen-year-old alive who understands that; there isn't a forty-six year old who doesn't.

Some people never DO consider reading those books again. They tend to be non-readers in any case, which includes far too much of our adult population.

Those are some excellent proposals. I read recently that our county's school system absorbs over 60% of all county tax expenditures.

I don't think tax reductions would make private education affordable for absolutely everyone, but certainly for most. For the poorest, churches and private scholarships could pay. For example, there was an interesting article recently about how the Diocese of Wichita offers tuition-free Catholic schools to every active Catholic family in the diocese.

Sometimes you don't know what you like. I think it is important to teach the classics.

My 7th grader son is not liking the books he has to read in school. I've been trying to get him to read some classics on his own. He finally read Tom Sawyer, and loved it. Now, he has Huckleberry Finn. I've bought a few other classics for him to read: Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and some others. He hasn't started those yet because he is re-reading Harry Potter.

I wish that there were more literature choice at his school: a sci-fi/fantasy class, a classic novel, or a romantic novel class. My daughters would love a sci-fi/fantasy class as much as my son.

Teenagers should never read that book; it goes right over their heads. It's not a book about whales; it's a book about what obsession can do to you.

Many other great novels are similarly NOT, shall we say, oriented to the emotional level of teenagers.

A neuropsychologist that has tested my daughter told me that on average a elementary aged child only reads an average of 8 minutes a day in school. That is totally ridiculous.

My children read more than that in the bathroom every day! I'm always having to collect library books from behind the toilet and under the bathmat ("I don't know who left that there, Mom! I wasn't reading int the bathroom!"). It's annoying.

That is totally ridiculous.

That is ridiculous. Do you ever wonder why public school children, I'd say past the 4th grade, are curious about so very little? Do you suppose the curiosity has been bored out of them by their public school experiences? They aren't graduating high school as educated learners so much as they seem to be on auto-pilot.

My 4th grade gifted daughter was soooo bored last year. She said that dad and I had taught her the math already, and that all she did was write paragraphs. The thing with the writing is that it was very specific, and it wasn't creative. My daughter now says she hates to write, and it first grade she used to write these very creative stories. They were multi-pages long and very entertaining. Now, she doesn't do that anymore because she thinks she doesn't like to write.

And she's probably not looking forward to the 5th grade either. That's a shame, but it illustrates that one size does not fit all when it comes to education. Kids (boys and girls) learn differently and after a while, the rote of the public system becomes numbing. I don't have the links but I've read that it takes about 100 hours to teach someone to read and write. So then the question becomes, "What next?" I shudder when I hear about school boards wanting to extend the school year for the entire year. Kids need more time away from classrooms, not less, so they can unlearn some of the bad attitudes and habits they pick up at the local PS.

My daughter is actually looking forward to school because she will be going to a small, private Christian school. It has art, music, PE, science, and Bible. There is so much more variety that I'm sure she will love it.

Yes, I think private scholarships and aid would work fine, as they have for decades in colleges. Also, even renters should realize savings from property tax reductions, since apartment owners' costs would be reduced. And of course everyone benefits if sales taxes and/or local income taxes are cut (the amount depending on the State).

Teenagers should never read that book; it goes right over their heads.

There isn't a sixteen-year-old alive who understands that; there isn't a forty-six year old who doesn't.

And yet this is exactly the kind of classic material which is forced on teenagers in school. They don't comprehend it, they don't enjoy it, and the very best you can hope for is that in 20 years later they won't be too stubborn to read it again.

Some people never DO consider reading those books again. They tend to be non-readers in any case, which includes far too much of our adult population.

There would be many fewer non-readers if early reading experiences were made fun. The classics aren't.

"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."

Thank you! That's my point: that all children, boys in particular, need to run and play and expend all that energy so they can concentrate in school! All this fear of lawsuits is stupid. I had scabs on both knees all through childhood and I wasn't even a tomboy!

I think this happened to me - I don't like Dickens, or Melville or Tolstoy - BORING. It seemed to me that school literature courses always picked the most boring possible books and short stories (imagine someone finding a boring Thurber story...). The only story I remember, that I liked was "The Most Dangerous Game."
If kids have to read "classics" they ought to let them read Doyle, Wren, Wells, Verne, Henty, Buchan, and the like.

The fact that Literature class was boring didn't stop me from making A's or B's, though!

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