The invisible crisis: educational achievement continues to decline among boys and young men

The evidence is growing that boys and young men are lagging girls and young women in many important educational measures.

Some of the details:

1. 57% of students in post-secondary education are women.
2. Girls enrolled in gifted and talented education programs outnumber boys enrolled, e.g., 8.1% of girls participated in gifted and talented education programs in 2009 compared to 7.4% of boys.
3. By a large margin, girls are much less likely than boys to be held back one year. In 2009-2010 across all grade levels, 61% of the students held back for academic reasons were boys and only 39% were girls.
4. A greater percentage of girls in 7th or 8th grade (20%) are taking Algebra I compared to boys (18%), and girls of every race/ethnicity are passing Algebra I at a higher rate than their male peers.

The really interesting thing to me is that very few people are talking about it. There’s literally a crisis going on here, and almost nobody is talking about it. And even fewer even know about it, which is a separate issue worth discussing all by itself.

Why is that? Well, maybe because our “leaders” in politics, the media, and various lobbying groups have other agendas, and are too deeply invested in goals that are in direct opposition to seeing that boys and young men thrive. While girls and young women are on the rise in nearly every way we can measure, in education, sports, and careers, it is often at the expense of boys and young men. This is not a healthy situation, for anybody.

Ask yourself why politicians, the media, and various special-interest groups demand that we obsess over how rough everything is for women, gays, and minorities, but completely ignore whether we as a nation are meeting the needs of our boys and young men. Because we are not meeting those needs, when you look into the trends and the numbers.

Boys and young men that are not doing well in school means that as they transition into adulthood, they are much more likely to suffer long-term problems with careers, income, relationships, and just about everything else. This is already happening, and is known as “failure to launch”, according to several experts who have studied this issue. 

Yet, nothing. Near-total silence. Somebody want to explain this? A cynical person might say that politicians, the media, and various special-interest groups are actually glad that boys and young men are lagging, because they are so wrapped up in outdated politics from the 1960s built on the corrosive idea that gains for one group of people must necessarily come at the expense of another group of people. Class warfare, in other words.

Actually, a realistic person might say that. Such as myself. Right here, right now.

I have three sons and obviously I want them to succeed in life – actually, you want them to succeed in life too, even if you don’t know why – and it would be swell if we as a nation could take a look around and understand what we are doing different in our culture and our schools that disrupts what should be so natural and simple: allowing boys and young men to flourish naturally. Holding up the virtues of masculinity in our culture once again would help, and I’m far from the first to suggest that.

While we obsess over counting calories expended in gym class to protect the physical health of our boys and girls, and we obsess over the emotional and mental health of our girls, we essentially ignore the mental health needs of our boys.

No media coverage, no national conversation, no questions at presidential debates. This means we either assume they have no needs at all, or that the needs they do have are not as important as the needs of others.

The first is obviously false. Are we ready as a nation to admit to ourselves that we actually believe that the needs of our boys and young men are not as important as the needs of others?

What we’re doing now is not working. We as a nation and as a culture are in the middle of a failure of leadership that impacts boys disproportionately, and we are accountable. Let’s start there.

Bill McBride on learning to tune out gloom and doom

Why do I change my views? I don’t know, I just go where the data leads me. I think a better question for some of the other people is why they didn’t change theirs? And I think the answer is they tend to be bearish all the time. You’ve been around long enough to know that there’s a whole industry of gloom and doom, the ZeroHedge mentality kind of guys. I’m almost 60 years old. All my life there’s been people telling me that the world’s gonna end for this and that reason in the next few years….

via Bill McBride Of Calculated Risk – Business Insider

Remarks: Going where the data leads you . . . what a concept! Where I come from, we call that “rationality”.

As for tuning out gloom and doom, yep. Heard it all before, way too many times. Never seems to happen. I’ll just let it ride, and save the emotional energy, thank you very much.

… Not gonna do it …

Pew Survey on students’ ability to focus in the digital age

A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project report surveyed 2,462 middle and high school Advanced Placement and national writing project teachers and concluded that: “Overwhelming majorities agree with the assertions that today’s digital technologies are creating an easily distracted generation with short attention spans, and today’s students are too ‘plugged in’ and need more time away from their digital technologies.”

Two-thirds of the respondents agree with the notion that today’s digital technologies do more to distract students than to help them academically. Mind you, we are talking about teachers who typically teach the best and brightest students and not those who we would generally think of as highly distractible.

[...]

We also looked at whether these distractors might predict who was a better student in general. Not surprisingly, those who stayed on task longer and had well-developed study strategies were better students. The worst students were those who consumed more media each day and had a preference for switching back and forth between several tasks at the same time.

One additional result stunned us: If the students checked Facebook just once during the 15-minute study period, they had a lower grade-point average. It didn’t matter how many times they looked at Facebook; once was enough. Not only did social media negatively impact their temporary focus and attention, but it ultimately impacted their entire school performance.

This is both unsurprising and a disaster in slow motion. We really, really have to get a grip on technology in our lives, and learn to recognize when too much is not enough.

via Driven to distraction: How to help wired students learn to focus | eSchool News.

Believe it or not: old-school teaching methods work best

Research shows, over and over again, that traditional teaching methods work best to prepare children for the future. But these methods are out of favor at public schools across the nation, which have almost completely abandoned them in favor of trendy methods taught in Education schools, built on unproven assumptions and theories, including social justice, that have little or nothing to do with actual education of children.

Which is, after all, the whole point, right? Can we get everybody to sign off on that one: whatever system works best to prepare children for a future in the world we live in is, by definition, at least one of the primary goals of an educational system. Agreed?

So with all that in mind, this is a must read: Why Kids Should Learn Cursive, Math Facts, Word Roots.

It explains how and why there are subtle advantages to learning early in school, advantages that pay off huge into the future, when you teach children Greek and Latin roots of words, among other traditional but long-since retired concepts.

Suzanne Kail’s experience is instructive. As soon as she began teaching her students the Greek and Latin origins of many English terms — that the root sta means “put in place or stand,” for example, and that cess means “to move or withdraw” — they eagerly began identifying familiar words that incorporated the roots, like “statue” and “recess.” Her three classes competed against each other to come up with the longest list of words derived from the roots they were learning. Kail’s students started using these terms in their writing, and many of them told her that their study of word roots helped them answer questions on the SAT and on Ohio’s state graduation exam. (Research confirms that instruction in word roots allows students to learn new vocabulary and figure out the meaning of words in context more easily.)

(emphasis mine)

This effect, where learning something at any given age prepares you to learn better, faster and easier in the future, is called the Matthew Effect. And because education systems built upon that concept quickly show impressive results, especially in third grade, it is apparently the one key guiding principle that should illuminate any education discussion.

If kids do not learn to read well in third grade, they cannot read to learn later.

The article goes on to describe the same type of advantages with memorizing math facts, learning cursive writing, rhetoric and argumentation, and reading aloud. I won’t quote it all here – please go read the article, it’s only one page long.

Again: the Matthew Effect. Learn about it (bing, google). I have written about it on this site when describing the work of E.D. Hirsch (search site), who shows convincingly that the ability to learn by reading is largely dependent on background knowledge in the form of facts and content. In other words, you need existing context in your brain in order to organize and understand what you read.

We all like to talk a good game on Education. So are we serious, or not? Because if we are, and by extension, if we are serious about the future of our children, we need to grab the reins on education and undo the damage done by misguided education theories, especially social justice theory led by leading lights such as unrepentant-terrorist-turned-esteemed-education-professor William Ayers, and class warfare Marxist theory led by communist-apologist-turned-major-America-History-textbook-writer Howard Zinn. Shorter version: we are allowing former 60s radicals to destroy our children’s intellectual development – and therefore, their future – from within the educational mainstream.