Letters to the Editor
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Anything but acknowledge a crisis for boys
Lynn Harris said:
"The study's conclusion states clearly -- before discussing the matter of gender, which it does in terms of race -- that "it is important for policymakers and the public to understand that only about 70 percent of all students and a little more than half of Hispanic and African-American students graduate from high school." So why don't these titles or headlines trumpet the "race gap"? If they did, at the very least, anyone with "gender gap" fatigue might be prompted to actually read nment over the last few decades, whereas despite aggreswhat follows."
Seems as if some people on Broadpage would do anything but but spend serious time thinking about the educational crisis for boys. Why would anyone have "gender gap" fatigue when it comes to talking about education?
First, the race gap is well known, is studied abundantly, as it should be and has been for a long time. Few people challenge that there is a crisis in education among minorities, but as Broadsheet has demonstrated, that there is a crisis in education of boys is under-recognized, under-addressed, and in many cases simply denied by a great number of people (I'll refrain from saying which ones). It's just that there is a new phenomenon on the block which is attracting attention for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which, is that fully 1/2 of all children are male.
Anyhow, the answer to your question is simple (why all this attention recently?), but it requires some mathematical understanding:
(1) A broad-based comparison of students from many different schools takes into consideration many factors which are out of the control of school districts themselves and that are not primarily a direct result of the child's race per se, but secondary factors such as socioeconomic status and educational attainment of families attending schools.
(2) In contrast, comparison between male & female graduation rates generally controls for all of these factors, because brothers and sisters generally come from the same socioeconomic background, live in the same neighborhoods, and attend the same schools.
(3) Therefore, the difference between graduation rates between girls and boys must reflect some difference other than the factors most strongly associated with school dropout (e.g. socioeconomic status, native language, neighborhood, single parent vs. two parent family setting).
(4) One question to ask, even though these boys & girls grow up in basically the same families, with presumably basically the same access to economic resources, with essentially the same parents, and attending the same schools, why is there such a vast difference in their peformance:? And specifically, why have boys failed to make any headway in imporoving educational attainment over the past 20 years? Obviously, this must be something intrinsic to the way boys learn, or it may be something intrinsic to the way they are taught. Most other factors are essentially controlled.
Notwithstanding this fact, two other patterns have arisen in the study of minority primary education that you didn't mention. First, among minority groups, the gap between male and female graduation rates is even greater than it is among whites, and the gap is expanding (e.g. it's a problem that is getting worse, not better). Also, graduation rates for minority females have been making steady progress towards greater levels of attainment. In contreast, despite programs to improve the educational attainment of minorities overall, the educational attainment of minority boys has either stood still, or in some cases, such as the case of african american boys, actually worsened over the past decade or so.
Which means, so far as education of boys is concerned, both minority boys and otherwise, there is wrong that has not garnered much attention or constructive problem-solving.