Asher from Dreams Into Lighting emailed me this article, from the Hartford Courant:
While black, Hispanic and low-income children again lagged far behind others on statewide mastery test scores, another group of students also remained mired in a chronic – though often less noticed – achievement gap.
Boys continued to trail girls by substantial margins in reading and writing on the annual Connecticut Mastery Test. The pattern has persisted since Connecticut first started keeping track of scores by gender in 2000, and is consistent with longstanding patterns on national tests. […]
In writing, “Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds,” Kleinfeld wrote in a recent paper for the White House Conference on Helping America’s Youth. […]
“It’s a huge problem,” Kleinfeld said. The literacy gap between girls and boys “has been very large since the beginning of time,” she said. “Think back to Tom Sawyer and Becky.”
So wait, which is it – are boys currently falling behind, or has it always been this way?
Also, as I’ll show below, the evidence from the Connecticut Mastery Test shows that the boy crisis does not exist among “boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group.” On the contrary, the results are consistent with my belief that without racism and poverty holding them back, boys do just as well as girls.
Most boys develop verbal skills later than girls do and may not be ready for the intensive reading instruction that some schools are now demanding as early as kindergarten, she said.
For boys who lag, she said, one strategy would be to “keep them in kindergarten for two years, or keep them out of school until they’re ready.”
In addition, Kleinfeld and others say, boys’ reading habits are geared more toward non-fiction – subjects such as sports or adventure – while girls often prefer novels and short stories.
Three points:
1) Notice, once again, the boyhood-as-disability theme, which is common in “boy crisis” writings. This expert actually suggests that boys should be kept back a year or two – which means, except for those boys who manage to skip ahead at some point, boys wouldn’t graduate high school until they’re 19 or 20. That’s a pretty radical proposal. Has anyone considered that if boys have to wait until the age of 20 to graduate, the result might be more boys dropping out before graduation?
2) I don’t know what data Kleinfeld is using (and I doubt her work for the White House Conference on Helping America’s Youth was put through a rigourous peer-review process). But this is an article about the results from the Connecticut Mastery Test, and it’s not true that Connecticut Mastery Test found that “Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds.”
At this website, you can look at the Connecticut Mastery Test results for boys and girls from different towns. (To keep things simple for myself, I’m just going to report the results for 8th graders, but as far as I could tell by spot-checking things are similar at every grade level).
Let’s first check out Bridgeport, a town in which few families have much money, and the majority of students are either hispanic or black (or both). In Bridgeport, 45% of boys and 46% of girls are proficient in math, a basically identical result. But for reading, 45% of boys and 53% of girls are proficient. And in writing, 55% of boys and 75% of girls are proficient – a 20% difference. That’s pretty huge.
Poking around the site further, I can see that 88% of eighth graders in Bridgeport are black or hispanic, and 97% are poor enough to qualify for the discount lunch program.
Now let’s look at the results from Westport, a town in which 94% of eighth graders (or, at least, of eighth graders who took the Connecticut Mastery Test) are white, and less than 3% qualified for the discount lunch program.
In Westport, 97% of both boys and girls are proficient in math, 96% of boys and 97% of girls are proficient in reading, and 97% of boys and 99% of girls are proficient in writing. There is effectively no difference between Westport’s boys and girls, according to the Connecticut Mastery Test.
As it happened, I spent my 8th grade attending public school in Westport.1 All the boys read fiction (we read To Kill A Mockingbird that year, I think), and I can’t imagine that has changed – because I think Westport parents would scream bloody murder if the schools tried to shortchange their boys’ education that way. What the “boy crisis” mavens are proposing would not only fail to help boys, it would deprive them of an education in literature.
3) As I wrote in an earlier post, it’s clear there is a real crisis going on here. But it’s not a “boy crisis,” and there’s nothing deficient in boy’s brains that makes them biologically incapable of doing as well as girls, or of reading fiction.
There are way too many boys from indian, black, hispanic and low-income families who are not benefiting enough from school, and whose future is needlessly dim; it’s a tragedy for those boys and for our entire society if things keep going the way they’ve been. I wish I had the solution, but I don’t. Nonetheless, wrong analysis leads to wrong solutions. The people who are focusing on nonexistent inherent deficiencies in how boys learn, and pretty much ignoring class and race, are coming up with solutions that will be expensive and unhelpful at best, and actually harmful to boys at worst.
4. Finally, as big as the 20% difference in reading achievement between Bridgeport boys and girls is, let’s not overlook the much larger differences in achievement between children in Bridgeport and children in Westport. That’s the real crisis, and that should be our main focus.
[Crossposted on Creative Destruction, a dark and forbidding place avoided by wise hobbits.]
- Yes, I admit it, I grew up in Westport. The shame will follow me forever. [↩]
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Amp,
I don’t actually think there’s a “boy crisis” worth making an enormous fuss about. But OTOH your analysis seems a bit flawed, which makes me uncomfortable.
If you see (as we apparently do) a significant drop in male reading skills when there is no high-level education (measured by money), and when that drop is erased by a high level of educatio spending, the correct conclusion is NOT that there is “no gap.”
Why? Well, unless you plan to argue that boys and girls get unequal treatment in impoverished school systems (I haven’t seen much to support this) there IS a gap in the attainments by each sex. And this implies that boys ARE a “step behind,” so to speak.
Now, the data also show that this “step behind” can be compensated for in the face of an excellent school system. It is probably reasonable to assume that Westport is excellent at spotting, and helping, all students who are lagging behind their same-grade peers. Great! That is a good thing.
But this doesn’t mean the gap isn’t there. Think of it in reverse: Most people agree that women face significant discrimination in higher education. But can you make a school where that is less of an issue? Sure–one easy way is to have a school like Smith, but you’ll also see much less discrimination at school which openly concern themselves with such things. And (just like the “boy gap,”) the fact that is is possible to counterbalance the problem doesn’t mean that the problem is nonexistent.
So when you say:
…it’s clear there is a real crisis going on here. But it’s not a “boy crisis,”
this is not really supported by the data. You haven’t really provided an explanation for the significant sex-based difference in many schools.
I agree that your statement and there’s nothing deficient in boy’s brains that makes them biologically incapable of doing as well as girls, or of reading fiction. is true. But “incapable” is a straw man and you know it. There’s a lot of room between “different” and “incapable.” After all, “there’s nothing in society that makes it impossible for women to succeed” is also a true statement. And just like the “incapable” comparison, it hides the reality of the problem.
A few random comments.
If the Connecticut Mastery Test is like Virginia’s SOL’s, “proficient” is not the best measure in Westport. Proficient is a measure of basic competence (a “proficient” 12-th grader can read a newspaper reasonably well); in Westport, you would probably want to look at the equivalent of “exceeding expectations” (which means, can read Dickens or Austen comfortably).
My own experience of elementary school (there were two students in my class; the girl’s name was Lois): Lois was way ahead of me in first grade, somewhat ahead through 4th grade, about even through 6th grade, and behind by 8th grade. This was largely because she had learned to read in before 1st grade, and I had not. I was able to catch up, but it’s easy for me to see that in a larger school, I might not have. If boys develop later, but faster, than girls (which seems plausible), then starting too soon could well mean they become discouraged. (I see that with math students frequently; they weren’t ready for fractions, and most of their peers understood fractions but they didn’t; 5 years later, I’m tutoring them in algebra and the main reason they are struggling is that they never got fractions and assume they can’t do them.) This problem is fixable–but fixable doesn’t mean non-existent.
Kindly take a step back and review what she’s actually saying: that the crisis is primarily socio-economic rather than strictly gendered, not that there is no problem or that boys are doing as well as girls on all fronts. Why underprivileged boys are lagging behind underprivileged girls is hardly a mystery, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the curriculum: underprivileged boys are taught an opt-out coping mechanism. They’re encouraged to react to disappointment with disdain and an “it didn’t really matter anyway” attitude, as evidenced throughout the media forcefed to them. It’s what they self-report when they drop out of high school, decide not to pursue college, or become discouraged on the job hunt, everything the rest of us value and attribute our success to they will say is not worth it, even a kind of trick. Girls in the same bracket may be outperforming boys, but why are we paying more attention to the maximum 20% gap between underprivileged boys and girls than the nearly 50% gap between classes?
Privileged boys are doing a bangup job on reading and writing, why change the program that works for them when that isn’t the root cause of the problem? Apparently these boys don’t mind reading literature, so where is this absurdly limiting stereotype that boys can’t cope with fiction coming from? Worse still, why are activisit men defending such a narrow role for boys? If we want to make a difference, it sees logical to start trying to make the underprivileged scholastic experience more like the privileged one along with appropriate encouragement. If we succeed, the gap between boys and girls shrinks to a few points which is a lot easier to overcome then trying a social engineering experiment that presumes boys are innately inferior in certain skills.
The crisis is socioeconomic AND ALSO gendered. Why force a dichotomy when none needs to exist?
Girls in the same bracket may be outperforming boys, but why are we paying more attention to the maximum 20% gap between underprivileged boys and girls than the nearly 50% gap between classes?
I’m not “paying more attention” to it, i’m just frustrated if someone claims it doesn’t exist.
I think you probably can answer your own question, though, if you phrase it differently: “Why aren’t we spending much more money on schools?” Because it would cost a buttload of money. Personally, I’m all for higher taxes and better schools. But I’m probably in the minority in this country (though not on this blog, of course.)
And if you have the “reality” discussion rather than the “ideal” discussion, then your parameters change a bit: Even with all the research, and push towards schooling, and NCLB talk… we’re doing a piss-poor job educating non-rich students. This is a bad, bad thing for many reasons. I don’t think it’s going to change much, though–and I”m sorry about that.
This is the “reality” part: If we take away the deus ex machina “let them all attend school systems like Westport!” option, then you’re faced with a 20% gender gap in a lot of schools between girls and boys. That’s too large a gap to let slide without at least discussing it, don’t you think?
The fact that the boys’ score gap may be due to social factors (instead of biological) affects HOW you treat it. But it doesn’t affect WHETHER you treat the problem: We talk about social effects on girls all the time.
Kindly take a step back and review what she’s actually saying: that the crisis is primarily socio-economic rather than strictly gendered
She’s not. ““Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds”, not “boys are taking a worse hit than girls from socioeconomic disadvantages”. And the line about Tom Sawyer–you get the impression she’s never actually read the book.
Sam, looking at “exceeds goal level” rather than “proficient” doesn’t change things much, although it does open up a small gap in reading for the Westport 8th graders (88% for boys, 95% for girls). (I chose proficiency rather than goal level because without a full context, people tend to assume that if the kids in Bridgeport aren’t reaching “goal level” that means they’re illiterate.)
I guess it’s possible that the “boy discouragement effect” you’re talking about exists, Sam. But I’d like to see some empirical evidence of it.
Sailorman writes:
Good thing I never said that there’s “no gap.” (In this context, it’s misleading to put words I never said in quotation marks.)
I did say that the “boy crisis” doesn’t exist among boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group, and that’s true.
I also said “As I wrote in an earlier post, it’s clear there is a real crisis going on here. But it’s not a ‘boy crisis,’ and there’s nothing deficient in boy’s brains that makes them biologically incapable of doing as well as girls, or of reading fiction.” The link leads to a fuller discussion of this question, and these two sentences alone were not meant as a complete discussion.
But I don’t think “incapable” is a strawman – on the contrary, I think plenty of people have been arguing that boy’s brains are organized in a different way, which makes boys as a class incapable of achieving the same as girls as a class if taught in the same way. To quote Michael Guriun, a leading advocate of the “boy crisis” theory:
Maybe I used slightly hyperbolic language, but the claim that I made a “strawman” argument – that is, that I made up an argument that “boy crisis” theorists don’t actually make – is unfair and untrue.
It is possible that boy’s brains really are different and boy’s aren’t capable (on average) of learning as much as girls do when taught the same way. The data I provided here can’t eliminate that possibility (as I acknowledged in the earlier post I linked to).
You write:
The data doesn’t show that this “step behind” exists and is compensated for in excellent schools systems. (By the way, the “boy crisis” also doesn’t seem to exist among middle income kids in some ethnic groups, as I’ve pointed out in past posts.) That data is consistent with the story you’re telling, but (as I wrote in my post) it’s also “consistent with my belief that without racism and poverty holding them back, boys do just as well as girls.”
In other words, the data doesn’t prove either of our theories. It’s consistent with either theory. (But it’s not consistent with the belief that the “boy crisis” exists among all socioeconomic and ethnic groups.)
As it happens, I do think boys and girls – especially black, hispanic and indian, non-middle-class boys and girls – get unequal treatment in school (and at home). I think that there’s a “soft bigotry of low expectations” effect, in which parents, teachers and administrators see boys (especially non-white and/or lower class boys) as less capable of classroom learning than their female peers (“boys will be boys”), and less likely to go to college, and are thus more likely to allow non-white boys to slide. (The same effect used to exist for girls in math, but decades of feminism has changed expectations for how girls do at math, especially at middle school levels).
I don’t think it’s true that in school systems like Westport, boys are systematically given different educations than girls, or are given more remedial education than girls. Instead, I think Westport boys are treated pretty much the same as Westport girls – including being expected to sit in classrooms, to do homework, to attend first grade at the usual age, and to read novels, all things that “boy crisis” theorists have claimed hold boys back – and similar treatment leads to similar results.
(I also think this is why there’s basically no “boy crisis” among Asian and Jewish boys – in terms of academic achievement, there is no expectation among these groups that boys will not do as well at reading, or will be any less likely to go on to college.)
However, I do have to admit that the data is consistent with both your explanation and with my explanation.
Mythago, quoting Glimmering, wrote:
I think the “she” Glimmering was referring to is me (Ampersand), not the expert quoted in the newspaper article. (If I’m correct about that, then Glimmering doesn’t realize that I’m male, but that’s a pretty common error.)
Sailorman wrote:
Now, that really is a strawman argument. I never claimed that the 20% gap between underprivileged boys and girls “doesn’t exist”; on the contrary, I specifically pointed the gap out.
TheGlimmering wrote:
I agree with all of this, entirely.
In addition, I think the wage disparity between men and women also has something to do with the odds of pursuing college. Men with only a high-school education earn a lot more than women with only a high-school education. Ordinary economics should lead us to expect that boys will therefore be less likely to go on to college.
I’m not saying that’s the entire explanation for why women are more likely than men to go to pursue college – but unless we think that economic incentives don’t matter at all, it must be part of the explanation.
(I’m not assuming that you disagree with me on this, I’m just bouncing off your post.)
Amp: while I agree with your premise that the effects from race and wealth overwhelm the effect from gender, your use of statistics is a little suspect to me.
Another way of stating this is that the ratio of nonproficient boys to nonproficient girls in Bridgeport is 1.2 for reading, and 1.8 for writing.
In Westport, the ratio is 1.3 for reading and 3.0 for writing. The difference hasn’t disappeared – it’s widened. (Though statistical significance probably drops because of the smaller overall numbers.)
I’m not saying that this makes it a crisis, though; compare these male/female ratios with the ratios between Bridgeport and Westport. A boy from Bridgeport is 18.3 times as likely to be nonproficient in math or reading as a boy from Westport, and 15.0 times as likely to be nonproficient in reading. A girl from Bridgeport is 18.0 times as likely to be nonproficient in math, 15.7 times as likely to be nonproficient in reading, and 25.0 times (!) as likely to be nonproficient in writing. There’s your crisis.
My bad–I was trying to refer to the commonly used phrase “no gap” and should have realized it could easily be mistaken for an attribution. As you probably know, I always use italics or blockquotes when I mean to cite.
http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060718_illiterate_boys.html
Can I question whether the effects of race ‘overwhelm’ the effects of gender? I wouldn’t dispute that being black increases your risk of eductional disadvantage more than being male. But I think it’s an open question whether the effects of gender produce more educational disadvantage than the effects of race, after all more children are boys than are black. As an analogy: some pesticides are far more dangerous carcinogens than cigarettes, but cigarettes cause far more cancer because they are more widely distributed. It would be misleading to say the effects of these pesticides overwhelm the effects of cigarettes, it could also be misleading to say the effects of race overwhelms the effects of gender.
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jfpbookworm:
You are correct. See my rebuttal.
The fundamental problem here is that amp has a theory and used a poor study design and worse statistical techniques to try to prove out his point. While I think there is probably merit to a great deal of what everyone is saying here, unless someone is willing to put in the leg work to do the actual work to discover an answer, this is all speculation around a hot button topic.
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http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-07/uow-sng072108.php
From the report you cited:
Hm. The ACT is similar to the SAT. But here in Illinois it’s administered to all H.S. students, as the State uses it to evaluate the schools. I wonder if it shows any gender disparities, both in average and in distribution?