Boys flunk life 101
By Steve Israel, Times Herald-Record
The most profound open secret in our nation, one that will soon rip apart the fabric of our society, is this: Boys are in trouble. They are falling far behind girls in elementary school, in college, in life.
An 11th-grade boy now reads and writes at the level of an eighth-grade girl. Just three decades ago, there was no disparity.
Forty years ago, three-quarters of all college graduates were men. Now, less than half of graduates are male. If the spiral continues, and every statistical trend says it will, men will soon account for only one-third of all college graduates.
In the 1960s, nearly four-fifths of all graduate students in medical, law and divinity schools were men. Today, only two-fifths of those graduate students are men.
But the trouble with boys starts earlier and runs deeper than college or even high school, where just about all of the dropouts are boys. In grammar school, four of every five children taking medications like Ritalin for behavioral disorders are boys.
If this steep decline in achievement isn't reversed, men will fall irrevocably behind in life, say an increasing number of authorities who have been tracking this crisis.
Most boys in high school today will not attend college, so they won't be able to earn enough money to support a family - with or without a woman's help, writes Michael Gurian in the book, "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life." They will make less than half of what a college graduate earns today, he says.
Local educators might not know all the statistics, which come from sources like the U.S. Department of Education. But they know the problem is real.
"It's a huge problem, absolutely," says Linda Argentati, the director of guidance at Liberty High School in Sullivan County. "We've done a good job getting girls prepared for life, at the expense of boys."
Honors to her
Female valedictorians in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster County high schools outnumber males by nearly two to one. And in a major role reversal, more American girls now take algebra, chemistry and biology than boys.
In Pine Bush High School, a Theory of Knowledge honors class, which focuses on critical-thinking skills, has nine girls and two boys. The class is taught by a man whose daughter is one of three Pine Bush girls who entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year. No Pine Bush boys in that class got into MIT.
At Sullivan County Community College, where 63 percent of the students are girls, an honors history class has nine girls and two boys.
The inferior performance of boys is so common, girls in elementary schools have a saying to describe it: "Girls rule, boys drool."
Even male college students admit that boys are in trouble.
"I'm going to tell you right now, we ain't focused," says Roberto Stuyvesant, a Sullivan County Community College student.
Families' fears
At home, parents who grew up in a male-dominated society see girls forging ahead and boys falling behind.
The mother of a high school honors student with an "A" average and a "really bright" 19-year-old son who just flunked out of college calls her family's situation "a fact of life."
"She can focus, he can't," Sue Vincenzo of the northern Orange County hamlet of Circleville says, echoing a refrain heard from Monticello to Monroe.
The father of a female student at SUNY Orange is proud of his daughter, who's interested in a career in pediatrics, business or architecture. But her boyfriend?
He's out of work, not looking for a job and doesn't know what he wants to do.
"He's aimless," says the Orange County dad.
Girls don't need statistics to know boys are in trouble.
"My brother isn't stupid, he's just not motivated," is a refrain repeated by girl after girl.
"He'd rather play video or computer games than study," is usually their next sentence.
A 27-year-old male student at SUNY Orange knows firsthand the problem the directors of guidance counselors in Sullivan and Orange counties call "countywide concerns."
Toby Yeager has two sisters. One's a massage therapist. Another is studying forensic psychology.
"They always knew what they were doing," says the man who joined the Army right after Pine Bush High School, where he had to work through a "minor case" of attention deficit disorder. "I always struggled through everything."
What's changed?
Just a few decades ago, our nation had to pass laws to help women. Now educators are struggling to find ways to help men.
How did boys get in so much trouble?
To find out, the Times Herald-Record interviewed dozens of local and national educators, psychologists, anthropologists, parents and children.
They spoke of many factors, including the evolutionary blueprints of men and women, the structure of our schools, laws that created more opportunities for women and a society that now values the natural skills of girls more than those of boys.
Let's start with school, where boys get 70 percent of the D's and F's.
Boys don't get those grades because they're not as bright as girls. Educators and anthropologists say boys just aren't made to succeed in school.
Girls have the skills to do several things at once and the patience to solve problems, qualities that help them thrive in classrooms. Boys don't. They're more aggressive and single-minded, programmed to play violent video games like "Grand Theft Auto" rather than sit patiently in an English class.
"Schools are made for girls," says anthropologist Helen Fisher, who wrote the book, "The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They're Changing the World."
Or, as Gurian just wrote in a Washington Post column:
"The sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing, but-by-taking-notes-in-the-classroom is a worse fit for more boys that it is for most girls."
A scene from the first day of kindergarten is a perfect example.
An aide had just helped 5-year-old Bridget Hart to her classroom in the Sullivan West Elementary School in Jeffersonville. She acted like she'd been there all of her five years. She sat at a little desk and played colors with her new classmate, a girl. Bridget explained that blue was her favorite color even though her friend said it was for boys.
Meanwhile, outside, one of her boy classmates screamed as his father literally dragged him to class.
"Girls are socialized more to be nice people with social skills, and those behaviors are rewarded in school," says Regina Wagner, a Director of Guidance for Sullivan County BOCES.
But boys were always antsy. They were always the aggressive kids who were sent to the principal's office. But they succeeded in school, and life.
What changed to get boys in so much trouble?
Focus on focus
Until the late '60s, when men thrived, a single-minded focus and aggression were the tools needed for success. At the same time, women like SUNY Orange psychology professor Patricia Guallini were content to stay home and raise families. If they worked, an office job filing medical records was great, says Guallini, who did just that. But then came the late '60s and women's liberation. New opportunities - often legislated - opened up doors for women.
"We thought boys could take care of themselves, so we helped girls," says Kathy Stevens, co-author of "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life."
Teaching methods began to change to boost girls and hurt boys, say educators like Argentati of Liberty and Monroe-Woodbury Director of Guidance Don Przytula.
Math teachers who once gave credit for just the right answer now made kids show the process to that answer. That helped girls who were more verbal and less aggressive than boys. It hurt boys. In the early 1990s, Liberty High School even established a program to introduce girls to math and science at Sullivan County Community College.
Teachers also noticed that when they asked questions, boys' hands were always among the first to shoot up. So boys were the first to be called on. And usually, the smartest boy had the right answer.
But teachers learned that, if given time, girls would think through the problem to come up with answer. So the teachers counted to five before picking a hand. Sure enough, more women got it right. Today, those methods are still taught to prospective teachers.
Meanwhile, women like Guallini quit their office jobs, went to college and got new jobs. They left their old lives behind.
When they had children, they told their daughters that they could do whatever they wanted in life - the complete opposite of what their parents said to them.
"We were told 'You're a girl, don't take calculus,'" says Patty Ogden, 50, of Pine Bush, a dental hygienist. "Now we tell our kids you can do anything."
In the shadow of success
And as more opportunities in education and the workplace were created through legislation like Title IX and the Women's Educational Equity Acts of 1968 and 1994, the skills needed for success changed.
Think of it this way: Centuries ago, a man went out with a rock to slay a buffalo. He had to develop the physical skill to judge the distance between him and the animal. He had to learn to focus to kill the beast with one blow. This is what men did for thousands of years. They learned aggression and focus.
Meanwhile, a woman stayed home with her baby. She nursed her child. She watched for snakes. She taught her child to speak. When the man came home, she cooked the meat. She learned to do several things at once. She learned to communicate, to figure things out.
"Words were a woman's tools," says Fisher.
And a woman's tools are now needed to thrive in school and the world - a world that has changed so much, so quickly, that it relies less on physical strength and aggressiveness and more on processing information and cooperation.
"The world seems not cut out for men anymore," says Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics at the journalism think tank, Florida's Poynter Institute, where, if it weren't for affirmative action, nearly 80 percent of the fellowship students would be women.
McBride has a daughter in sixth grade and a son in fourth.
"It was smooth sailing for her, but he's in trouble every week," she says. "He's running in the hall, talking out of turn, getting up out of his seat."
Change continues
Still, this is not exactly a woman's world - yet.
Women earn about three-quarters of what men earn. And while about half of American managers are women, only 8 percent of the leaders of Fortune 500 companies are female, according to Catalyst, the organization that researches working women's issues.
Men still can make more money right out of high school working physical jobs as plumbers or electricians - although that's another reason girls like Colleen MacRae of Pine Bush go to college and end up earning more than their boyfriends.
But even as you read this, the world is changing. Women's salaries rose about 4 percent in 2004, twice the rate of men's. The Scholastic Aptitude Test for college just added an essay section, which will surely help girls, who are generally three years ahead of boys in reading and writing skills. That test almost guarantees that the rate of male college graduates will continue to sink to unprecedented lows.
Meanwhile, schools are cutting out or shortening recess, which traditionally has been a time for boys to release their pent-up aggression. With the divorce rate soaring and more mothers raising sons alone, boys will have fewer role models in a world where one of the most famous men on TV is Homer Simpson.
Some answers
As the performance of boys plummets, experts are barely grappling with solutions.
Some educators suggest forming groups of relatives and friends to nurture and educate boys. Others suggest creating same-sex classrooms because girls and boys learn so differently.
Argentati of Liberty tries to teach boys to be resilient, to bounce back like a Super Ball, not fall flat and splatter like an egg. When they have problems they should talk to friends, parents and teachers, instead of retreating into their shells.
Wagner of Sullivan BOCES says boys should be rewarded for academic success, not just athletic achievement.
Przytula of Monroe-Woodbury suggests more male role models in the classroom. That will take a tidal wave of change in a society where 90 percent of all elementary school teachers are female.
Toby Yeager, a 27-year-old SUNY Orange student, wants to teach kindergarten. He's not getting much encouragement.
"People look at me like I'm a pedophile," he says.
Meanwhile, women are gaining more power as men continue their decline in school and life.
"(A man) will be three times as likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless (as he is today)," author Gurian wrote in The Washington Post. Men will also commit more crimes than ever, he adds. And as men fall further behind women in school, work and life, it will literally be harder to find good husbands, says McBride of the Poynter Institute. She says she's already seen the trend with her 30-something-year-old female friends, who complain they're married to "slacker" men.
The implications, she and other experts say, are profound.
"Relationships between men and women will change, and so will the workplace," says McBride. "Maybe it will create a truly equitable society or maybe it will flip it and women will become so politically, socially and economically powerful, we'll get whiplash."
But it will be men who feel the pain.
The most profound open secret in our nation, one that will soon rip apart the fabric of our society, is this: Boys are in trouble. They are falling far behind girls in elementary school, in college, in life.
An 11th-grade boy now reads and writes at the level of an eighth-grade girl. Just three decades ago, there was no disparity.
Forty years ago, three-quarters of all college graduates were men. Now, less than half of graduates are male. If the spiral continues, and every statistical trend says it will, men will soon account for only one-third of all college graduates.
In the 1960s, nearly four-fifths of all graduate students in medical, law and divinity schools were men. Today, only two-fifths of those graduate students are men.
But the trouble with boys starts earlier and runs deeper than college or even high school, where just about all of the dropouts are boys. In grammar school, four of every five children taking medications like Ritalin for behavioral disorders are boys.
If this steep decline in achievement isn't reversed, men will fall irrevocably behind in life, say an increasing number of authorities who have been tracking this crisis.
Most boys in high school today will not attend college, so they won't be able to earn enough money to support a family - with or without a woman's help, writes Michael Gurian in the book, "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life." They will make less than half of what a college graduate earns today, he says.
Local educators might not know all the statistics, which come from sources like the U.S. Department of Education. But they know the problem is real.
"It's a huge problem, absolutely," says Linda Argentati, the director of guidance at Liberty High School in Sullivan County. "We've done a good job getting girls prepared for life, at the expense of boys."
Honors to her
Female valedictorians in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster County high schools outnumber males by nearly two to one. And in a major role reversal, more American girls now take algebra, chemistry and biology than boys.
In Pine Bush High School, a Theory of Knowledge honors class, which focuses on critical-thinking skills, has nine girls and two boys. The class is taught by a man whose daughter is one of three Pine Bush girls who entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this year. No Pine Bush boys in that class got into MIT.
At Sullivan County Community College, where 63 percent of the students are girls, an honors history class has nine girls and two boys.
The inferior performance of boys is so common, girls in elementary schools have a saying to describe it: "Girls rule, boys drool."
Even male college students admit that boys are in trouble.
"I'm going to tell you right now, we ain't focused," says Roberto Stuyvesant, a Sullivan County Community College student.
Families' fears
At home, parents who grew up in a male-dominated society see girls forging ahead and boys falling behind.
The mother of a high school honors student with an "A" average and a "really bright" 19-year-old son who just flunked out of college calls her family's situation "a fact of life."
"She can focus, he can't," Sue Vincenzo of the northern Orange County hamlet of Circleville says, echoing a refrain heard from Monticello to Monroe.
The father of a female student at SUNY Orange is proud of his daughter, who's interested in a career in pediatrics, business or architecture. But her boyfriend?
He's out of work, not looking for a job and doesn't know what he wants to do.
"He's aimless," says the Orange County dad.
Girls don't need statistics to know boys are in trouble.
"My brother isn't stupid, he's just not motivated," is a refrain repeated by girl after girl.
"He'd rather play video or computer games than study," is usually their next sentence.
A 27-year-old male student at SUNY Orange knows firsthand the problem the directors of guidance counselors in Sullivan and Orange counties call "countywide concerns."
Toby Yeager has two sisters. One's a massage therapist. Another is studying forensic psychology.
"They always knew what they were doing," says the man who joined the Army right after Pine Bush High School, where he had to work through a "minor case" of attention deficit disorder. "I always struggled through everything."
What's changed?
Just a few decades ago, our nation had to pass laws to help women. Now educators are struggling to find ways to help men.
How did boys get in so much trouble?
To find out, the Times Herald-Record interviewed dozens of local and national educators, psychologists, anthropologists, parents and children.
They spoke of many factors, including the evolutionary blueprints of men and women, the structure of our schools, laws that created more opportunities for women and a society that now values the natural skills of girls more than those of boys.
Let's start with school, where boys get 70 percent of the D's and F's.
Boys don't get those grades because they're not as bright as girls. Educators and anthropologists say boys just aren't made to succeed in school.
Girls have the skills to do several things at once and the patience to solve problems, qualities that help them thrive in classrooms. Boys don't. They're more aggressive and single-minded, programmed to play violent video games like "Grand Theft Auto" rather than sit patiently in an English class.
"Schools are made for girls," says anthropologist Helen Fisher, who wrote the book, "The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They're Changing the World."
Or, as Gurian just wrote in a Washington Post column:
"The sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don't-learn-by-doing, but-by-taking-notes-in-the-classroom is a worse fit for more boys that it is for most girls."
A scene from the first day of kindergarten is a perfect example.
An aide had just helped 5-year-old Bridget Hart to her classroom in the Sullivan West Elementary School in Jeffersonville. She acted like she'd been there all of her five years. She sat at a little desk and played colors with her new classmate, a girl. Bridget explained that blue was her favorite color even though her friend said it was for boys.
Meanwhile, outside, one of her boy classmates screamed as his father literally dragged him to class.
"Girls are socialized more to be nice people with social skills, and those behaviors are rewarded in school," says Regina Wagner, a Director of Guidance for Sullivan County BOCES.
But boys were always antsy. They were always the aggressive kids who were sent to the principal's office. But they succeeded in school, and life.
What changed to get boys in so much trouble?
Focus on focus
Until the late '60s, when men thrived, a single-minded focus and aggression were the tools needed for success. At the same time, women like SUNY Orange psychology professor Patricia Guallini were content to stay home and raise families. If they worked, an office job filing medical records was great, says Guallini, who did just that. But then came the late '60s and women's liberation. New opportunities - often legislated - opened up doors for women.
"We thought boys could take care of themselves, so we helped girls," says Kathy Stevens, co-author of "The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life."
Teaching methods began to change to boost girls and hurt boys, say educators like Argentati of Liberty and Monroe-Woodbury Director of Guidance Don Przytula.
Math teachers who once gave credit for just the right answer now made kids show the process to that answer. That helped girls who were more verbal and less aggressive than boys. It hurt boys. In the early 1990s, Liberty High School even established a program to introduce girls to math and science at Sullivan County Community College.
Teachers also noticed that when they asked questions, boys' hands were always among the first to shoot up. So boys were the first to be called on. And usually, the smartest boy had the right answer.
But teachers learned that, if given time, girls would think through the problem to come up with answer. So the teachers counted to five before picking a hand. Sure enough, more women got it right. Today, those methods are still taught to prospective teachers.
Meanwhile, women like Guallini quit their office jobs, went to college and got new jobs. They left their old lives behind.
When they had children, they told their daughters that they could do whatever they wanted in life - the complete opposite of what their parents said to them.
"We were told 'You're a girl, don't take calculus,'" says Patty Ogden, 50, of Pine Bush, a dental hygienist. "Now we tell our kids you can do anything."
In the shadow of success
And as more opportunities in education and the workplace were created through legislation like Title IX and the Women's Educational Equity Acts of 1968 and 1994, the skills needed for success changed.
Think of it this way: Centuries ago, a man went out with a rock to slay a buffalo. He had to develop the physical skill to judge the distance between him and the animal. He had to learn to focus to kill the beast with one blow. This is what men did for thousands of years. They learned aggression and focus.
Meanwhile, a woman stayed home with her baby. She nursed her child. She watched for snakes. She taught her child to speak. When the man came home, she cooked the meat. She learned to do several things at once. She learned to communicate, to figure things out.
"Words were a woman's tools," says Fisher.
And a woman's tools are now needed to thrive in school and the world - a world that has changed so much, so quickly, that it relies less on physical strength and aggressiveness and more on processing information and cooperation.
"The world seems not cut out for men anymore," says Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics at the journalism think tank, Florida's Poynter Institute, where, if it weren't for affirmative action, nearly 80 percent of the fellowship students would be women.
McBride has a daughter in sixth grade and a son in fourth.
"It was smooth sailing for her, but he's in trouble every week," she says. "He's running in the hall, talking out of turn, getting up out of his seat."
Change continues
Still, this is not exactly a woman's world - yet.
Women earn about three-quarters of what men earn. And while about half of American managers are women, only 8 percent of the leaders of Fortune 500 companies are female, according to Catalyst, the organization that researches working women's issues.
Men still can make more money right out of high school working physical jobs as plumbers or electricians - although that's another reason girls like Colleen MacRae of Pine Bush go to college and end up earning more than their boyfriends.
But even as you read this, the world is changing. Women's salaries rose about 4 percent in 2004, twice the rate of men's. The Scholastic Aptitude Test for college just added an essay section, which will surely help girls, who are generally three years ahead of boys in reading and writing skills. That test almost guarantees that the rate of male college graduates will continue to sink to unprecedented lows.
Meanwhile, schools are cutting out or shortening recess, which traditionally has been a time for boys to release their pent-up aggression. With the divorce rate soaring and more mothers raising sons alone, boys will have fewer role models in a world where one of the most famous men on TV is Homer Simpson.
Some answers
As the performance of boys plummets, experts are barely grappling with solutions.
Some educators suggest forming groups of relatives and friends to nurture and educate boys. Others suggest creating same-sex classrooms because girls and boys learn so differently.
Argentati of Liberty tries to teach boys to be resilient, to bounce back like a Super Ball, not fall flat and splatter like an egg. When they have problems they should talk to friends, parents and teachers, instead of retreating into their shells.
Wagner of Sullivan BOCES says boys should be rewarded for academic success, not just athletic achievement.
Przytula of Monroe-Woodbury suggests more male role models in the classroom. That will take a tidal wave of change in a society where 90 percent of all elementary school teachers are female.
Toby Yeager, a 27-year-old SUNY Orange student, wants to teach kindergarten. He's not getting much encouragement.
"People look at me like I'm a pedophile," he says.
Meanwhile, women are gaining more power as men continue their decline in school and life.
"(A man) will be three times as likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless (as he is today)," author Gurian wrote in The Washington Post. Men will also commit more crimes than ever, he adds. And as men fall further behind women in school, work and life, it will literally be harder to find good husbands, says McBride of the Poynter Institute. She says she's already seen the trend with her 30-something-year-old female friends, who complain they're married to "slacker" men.
The implications, she and other experts say, are profound.
"Relationships between men and women will change, and so will the workplace," says McBride. "Maybe it will create a truly equitable society or maybe it will flip it and women will become so politically, socially and economically powerful, we'll get whiplash."
But it will be men who feel the pain.