AAUW Education
Report Minimizes Boy Crisis in Our Schools
By Jeffery M. Leving and Glenn Sacks
Boys have trailed girls in most indices of
academic performance for at least two decades. In recent years,
boys’ educational struggles have finally been acknowledged and
explored in the mainstream media. This has resulted in an
unfortunate backlash from misguided women’s advocates. The latest
example of these advocates’ efforts to minimize or deny the boy
crisis in education is the American Association of University
Women’s highly-publicized new report “Where the Girls Are: The Facts
About Gender Equity in Education."
The AAUW says its report "debunks the myth of a
'boys crisis' in education," but the study provides little evidence
to support this contention. According to the Report’s own data,
girls get much better grades than boys, are far more likely to
graduate college, and are on the good side of a longstanding
“literacy gap.”
It is also true that girls are much more likely
than boys to graduate high school, and boys are far more likely than
girls to be disciplined, suspended, held back, or expelled. The vast
majority of learning-disabled students are boys, and boys are four
times more likely than girls to receive a diagnosis of
attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although more girls than
boys enroll in high level math and science classes, boys do score a
little better in math. However, girls’ advantage in reading is
several times as large.
Most of the AAUW report’s claims are superficial
and unconvincing. The Report tells us “the crisis is not specific to
boys; rather, it is a crisis for African American, Hispanic, and
low-income children.” Of course--low income and minority children do
not fare as well as children from more advantaged groups. But the
boys of any cohort are still behind the girls in most indices.
The Report reassures us that both sexes have
stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past
decade. This isn’t the point--the gender gap isn’t new, but has
existed for well over a decade.
The AAUW says the report’s “results put to rest
fears of a ‘boys’ crisis’ in education, demonstrating that girls’
gains have not come at boys’ expense.” This is another irrelevant
point. Nobody claims the boy crisis exists because of girls'
gains--the issue is that boys’ performance fell significantly behind
girls’, and has remained behind because we've failed to address
boys' problems.
This is not the first time a highly-publicized
study has claimed to debunk the boy crisis. In 2005, Duke University
announced its study on child wellbeing by telling the media
"American boys and girls today are faring almost equally well across
key indicators of education, health, safety and risky behavior."
Press reports followed suit, with headlines such as "Boys, girls
fare equally in U.S.: Study debunks both sides in long debate" and
"Boy-girl gender gap? Not so fast."
Yet the study showed nothing of the sort. Boys and
girls fared equally in six of the 28 categories studied by the
researchers — and girls fared better than boys in 17 of the
remaining 22. Even the few advantages the study found for boys were
modest. By contrast, many of girls’ advantages were very large.
The new AAUW report, unable to dispel the boy
crisis, falls back instead on the alleged wage gap, claiming,
"Perhaps the most compelling argument against a boys crisis is that
men continue to out earn women in the workplace.” They explain that
among all women and men working full time, year-round, median annual
earnings for women were 77 percent of men's earnings in 2005.
It has been amply demonstrated that the wage gap
is largely caused by the career sacrifices mothers make to care for
their children and the primary breadwinner role most fathers assume
when their children are born. The wage gap is very questionable in
and of itself, and certainly is of no relevance when discussing
gender and school performance.
The boy crisis is real. England has widely
acknowledged a similar crisis in its system, and has taken steps in
recent years to address the problem. The U.S. has not. Instead of
giving credence to the AAUW’s unfortunate sophistry, we instead need
to focus on how to change our educational system to address boys’
problems.
This column first appeared in
The Buffalo News (5/31/08).
Jeffery M. Leving is Chairman of the Illinois
Council on Responsible Fatherhood. His website is
www.dadsrights.com.
Glenn Sacks taught elementary school and high
school in Los Angeles Unified School District and others, and was
named to "Who's Who Among America's Teachers" three times. His
columns have appeared in dozens of America's largest newspapers. His
website is
www.GlennSacks.com.
Glenn Sacks' columns on men's and fathers' issues have appeared in
dozens of America's largest newspapers. Glenn can be reached via his
website at www.GlennSacks.com or via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
Copyright 2008 Glenn
Sacks, all rights reserved
