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Whitmire: New data on how far boys are falling behind

Blog Entry by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post

Published March 12, 2010

By Richard Whitmire, former president of the National Education Writers Association, who writes the Eduation Week blog, "Why Boys Fail."

Ask anyone about President Obama’s track record and you’ll hear the same: Not much movement on global warming, the domestic economy or health care. But there is one area in which Obama has already begun to move long-dormant mountains: education reform. He has steered billions of dollars into education, which Education Secretary Arne Duncan has doled out in a carrot-and-stick approach that has forced states to promise reforms that were long thought impossible. For example, several state legislatures were “persuaded” — okay, legally bribed — into peeling back excessive teacher-protection laws.

Ultimately, however, Obama will be measured by his bottom line goal: for the United States to have the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by the year 2020. Translated, that means jumping from the middle of the rankings of developed nations to the top in just 10 years. Unfortunately, that’s extremely unlikely to happen. What’s interesting is why. Usually, our failure to meet education goals is attributed to race, poverty, poor teaching and low academic standards. This time, those are lesser players. The culprit instead is politics.

In a report to be released next week the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy took a look at who is and isn’t passing state tests, and identified the nation’s biggest problem: males. The survey shows that girls tie with boys in math skills, which will come as a surprise to those who still cling to the stereotype that boys excel in math. The reading differences, meanwhile, are profound, with boys a full 10 percentage points behind girls. Boys are even farther behind in writing abilities. The twinned abilities to read accurately and write clearly are the currency of college success, regardless of the subject matter.

So what does this say about Obama’s 2020 goal? Already, women make up 62 percent of those earning two-year degrees in the United States. Women are doing their part; increasing those numbers would be difficult. Clearly, the only way to force the United States back into the global education competition is to buck up the boys. Unfortunately, at a time when the world has become more verbal — some standardized math tests give as much weight to a written explanation of how the answer was attained as to the answer itself — boys are faring badly at both reading and writing. Given those deficits, it appears unlikely substantially more males will enter the college pipeline or succeed once there.

Based on my book research, the biggest culprits behind the gender gaps are education reforms that wisely ramped up verbal skills in the earliest grades but unwisely failed to adjust reading and writing instruction for boys, who have always gotten a late start on those skills. The reform-minded governors intended to boost college readiness, but with boys, their good intentions backfired. Up until about 20 years ago, when students got a slower start on verbal skills, boys caught up by fourth or fifth grade. These days, many boys never quite catch up. They conclude that school is for girls and seek satisfaction in outlets such as video games, which in turn get blamed unfairly for causing the problem.

There is a solution here: Re-engineer how reading is taught in the very early grades so that boys don’t get left behind. I’ve seen schools radically revamp their approach to teaching reading so that boys don’t miss out, and girls emerge as strong as before. Seems like a straightforward task for the federal Department of Education to take on by conducting research to guide local school districts. Doing that, however, would bring objections from a group of women’s advocacy groups that fear school interventions designed to help boys could shift the agenda away from their priorities. They resist pro-boy initiatives by insisting that gender gaps are really racial gaps (a curious argument, considering that in major cities there are three times as many college-educated black women as men).

A fundamental political calculus is at play here. Eight million more women than men voted for Obama, which gives these groups considerable political leverage at a time when the President’s popularity is waning. That may explain why the administration has yet to address the one factor — boys lagging in school — that could make or break his 2020 goal. But the math is clear: If Obama doesn’t take that political risk and intervene on behalf of boys, his 2020 goal will never be met.