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Boys' problems in school need attentionhttp://www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnLeo/2006/07/03/boys_problems_in_school_need_attention http://tinyurl.com/sypap By John Leo Monday, July 3, 2006 How do you get your opinions on Page One of The Washington Post? Do you phone the editor and say, "Here's what I think ..." No. You type up your thoughts and label them a "report" or "study." Reports and studies are authoritative. So they have a shot at the front page, even if they lack report-like qualities such as fresh evidence and independent research. This has just happened to "The Truth About Boys and Girls," a few debunking thoughts about the education of boys by...

Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women. --snip-- Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees.

"If I take a class and never study, I can still get a B," said Scott Daniels, a 22-year-old at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "I know that if I'd applied myself more, I would have had better grades." On each campus, many young men concluded that the easy B was good enough .. At Greensboro, where more than two-thirds of the students are female, and about one in five is black, many young men say they are torn between wanting quick money and seeking the long-term rewards of education. "A lot of my friends made good money working...

Where the Boys Aren't By Christina Hoff Sommers Posted: Monday, July 3, 2006 Education Sector, a new Washington think tank established this year by the Bill & Melinda Gates and other leading foundations, describes itself as an "honest broker of evidence in key education debates." But its first big study, "The Evidence Suggests Otherwise: Truth About Boys and Girls," is deficient in this virtue. Resident Scholar Christina Hoff Sommers The report, written by policy analyst Sara Mead, denies that American boys are in trouble academically. "The real story," says Ms. Mead, "is not bad news about boys doing worse; it's...

Westside seeking a way for both sexes to excel in the classroom By Victor Alvis Dalton Daily Citizen Education will be a lot less “icky” for several Whitfield County students when school resumes this fall. Westside Middle School plans to teach about 175 volunteer students — almost a third of the school — in gender-based classes of either all-girls and all-boys. Several students said they are looking forward to the change. “I wanted to do it so nosy boys will stay out of my business,” said Emma Jones, 13, a rising seventh-grader. “They stink like cologne.” Classmate Kirby Parm has...

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Despite extensive outreach programs and dire predictions about their futures, there is a minority group growing ever smaller on college campuses. It seems no matter what anyone says or does, the trend cannot be reversed. Fewer and fewer of them attend college. The minority group? Men. ... When some women hear that college administrators are trying to get more men onto campus, the rhetoric begins to fly. Feminists say women need to be encouraged to attend college, to graduate, to move into white-collar jobs. After all the work to gain an equal academic playing field for women, they ask, do...

In the new millennium, articles describing the intellectual differences between the genders have been altogether too commonplace. As a result, it wasn’t difficult to presage from the cover of Newsweek’s most recent issue where the editors were going with a headline like “The Boy Crisis.” In fact, once inside, the featured piece, “The Trouble With Boys,” turned into just another in a long line of “exposes” depicting girls as being smarter than boys. After a pleasant introduction, author Peg Tyre began her laundry list of male deficiencies: “By almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group...

In a recent column about a UC Davis freshman who shot himself, I included a statistic from the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Boys commit 86 percent of all adolescent suicides. Eighty-six percent. The number floored me, particularly as the mother of a son. Yet not a single e-mail, phone call or letter about the column mentioned the striking statistic. It occurred to me that if 86 percent of adolescent suicides were girls, there would be a national commission to find out why. There'd be front-page stories and Oprah shows and nonprofit foundations throwing money at sociologists and...

Senior: School discriminates against boys MILTON, Mass. (AP) -- A senior boy at Milton High School has filed a federal civil rights complaint contending that his school discriminates against boys by making it easier for girls to succeed academically. Doug Anglin, in his complaint filed last month with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, claimed girls faced fewer restrictions from teachers and boys are more likely to get punished. "The system is designed to the disadvantage of males," Anglin, 17, told The Boston Globe. "From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down,...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 24, 2006, 8:28 a.m. Biology’s Revenge Christina Hoff Sommers was right. The surest way to get attention in American society is to become a crisis. Boys are now on their way to achieving this dubious but indispensable distinction with the new cover of Newsweek, "The Boy Crisis." It is to be hoped that the crisis establishes a simple truth that is astonishing anyone ever forgot — boys and girls are different. Or as Newsweek puts it, "Boys are biologically, developmentally and psychologically different from girls — and teachers need...

In the new millennium, articles describing the intellectual differences between the genders have been altogether too commonplace. As a result, it wasn’t difficult to presage from the cover of Newsweek’s most recent issue where the editors were going with a headline like “The Boy Crisis.” In fact, once inside, the featured piece, “The Trouble With Boys,” turned into just another in a long line of “exposes” depicting girls as being smarter than boys. After a pleasant introduction, author Peg Tyre began her laundry list of male deficiencies:

Spend a few minutes on the phone with Danny Frankhuizen and you come away thinking, "What a nice boy." He's thoughtful, articulate, bright. He has a good relationship with his mom, goes to church every Sunday, loves the rock band Phish and spends hours each day practicing his guitar. But once he's inside his large public Salt Lake City high school, everything seems to go wrong. He's 16, but he can't stay organized. He finishes his homework and then can't find it in his backpack. He loses focus in class, and his teachers, with 40 kids to wrangle, aren't much...

    First lady Laura Bush and a growing number of physicians, educators and psychologists say Americans need to wake up and see that boys lag far behind girls in school, and then demand that something be done.     Mrs. Bush, mother of two grown daughters, speaks at conferences and in interviews about the declining status of boys in today's learning environment. She has charged that boys are being overlooked.     "I think we need to pay more attention to boys. I think we've paid a lot of attention to girls for the last 30 years ... but we have actually neglected boys," Mrs....

"It's too bad that male sports are being eliminated on most college campuses. Except for Texas, USC, and a few other places, radical feminism rules in the athletic departments at the expense of popular male sports. Feminists oppose anything that is all-male or all-female unless it's gay marriage. They won't be able to ban the Rose Bowl anytime soon, but the Feminist Majority Foundation posts this warning on its website: "By encouraging boys to become aggressive, violent athletes, and by encouraging girls to cheer for them, we perpetuate the cycle of male aggression and violence against women." Meanwhile, the feminists...

IN THE 1990's, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys. Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught - literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of...

Here's a thought that's unlikely to occur to twelfth--grade girls as their college acceptances begin to trickle in: After they get to campus in the fall, one in four of them will be mathematically unable to find a male peer to go out with. At colleges across the country, 58 women will enroll as freshmen for every 42 men. And as the class of 2010 proceeds toward graduation, the male numbers will dwindle. Because more men than women drop out, the ratio after four years will be 60--40, according to projections by the Department of Education. The problem isn't new-women...

[...] Today, Souvaine chairs the Tufts University computer science department, which has more female professors than male. But few younger women have followed in her generation's footsteps. Next spring, when 22 computer science graduates accept their Tufts diplomas, only four will be women. Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. [...] When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist.[...]The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant...

In his welcome Washington Post "Outlook" piece, “Disappearing Act: Where Have the Men Gone? No Place Good,” Michael Gurian reports that colleges and universities across the country are “grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male.” The author of books on the compelling brain research that reveals significant sex differences in learning styles notes that men make up only 43 percent of college students. Gurian laments that we have failed to react to a “significant crisis” that damages the life prospects of millions of young men. He marshals the evidence of boys in trouble and effectively demands attention...

In the 1990s, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys. Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured. They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught -- literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of...