It’s a fair question. District administrators, school leaders, and especially teachers are disproportionately women, and it is not hard to imagine that schools could develop blind spots about what boys need to succeed.
The data certainly point toward something going awry. Boys graduate from high school at lower rates, earn lower grades, and are much less likely to attend college than girls. The gender gap in bachelor’s degree attainment is wider today—15 percentage points in favor of women—than it was in the opposite direction when Title IX was passed in 1972, when the gap was 13 percentage points in favor of men.
To put it lightly, boys are not thriving in school.
It is easy to imagine how boys might get inadvertently left behind. Take reading as an example. Boys are interested in boy-oriented topics—competition, fighting, adventure, even violence. These topics may be less appealing to the overwhelmingly female elementary teaching workforce, which could subtly steer students toward different kinds of books. Some boys might learn the wrong lesson: reading is boring.
But maybe they would like reading if they were reading the right things.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m speculating. But it does not take much imagination to see how a school environment poorly matched to boys’ interests and dispositions could cause them to check out. Whatever the explanation, the larger pattern in the data is clear: boys are falling behind.
What can be done?
I would welcome education technocrats taking a more thoughtful approach to designing schools, including greater recognition of how boys’ needs are overlooked. But I am more optimistic about addressing this problem through school choice. If parents have options, the fact that some schools are a poor fit for boys would be less of a concern. But most parents in Missouri have just one option: their residentially zoned public school.
With a more robust school-choice system, parents could choose schools that better serve their sons. More recess. Comic books. More opportunities to build things and work with their hands. Not every boy would want these things, of course, but that’s precisely the point of choice.
This was the first thought that came to mind when I read a recent uplifting story about The Foundry. From the Foundry’s website:
The first and most tangible prong of The Foundry’s mission is to teach practical skills to boys. Boys 9-17 are divided into groups according to age or skill level and taught basics like the names of tools, how to safely use them, how to fix faucets, how to jump start a car and how to grill burgers.
I am not aware of any hard evidence on The Foundry’s effectiveness. But the anecdotes are compelling, and I can see how it could be a great fit for some boys. More broadly, we should push for policies that give families access to a richer array of educational options built around different ideas about what children need.
Instead, for most Missouri families, it is still the local public school or bust. And the data are telling us that, for too many boys, the current system is a bust.
