🎓 Education

⬅️ Hub: Boy Crisis MOC

The school gender gap, missing male teachers, redshirting.

Teachers

Education

• Schools favor traits like sitting still and organization, which align more with girls’ development. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the same infractions (five times if Black), derailing their educational paths.
• 70% of valedictorians are female, and women dominate tertiary education (60% of US college enrollment), while vocational programs like woodshop have disappeared, limiting paths for boys not suited to academic tracks.
• A suggestion from Richard Reeves is to “redshirt” boys—delay their school entry to age six—since 70% of girls are ready at five, but fewer boys are.

1. Deficit
   1. In the United States, by eighth grade, 41 percent oI girls are at least “proficient” in writing, while only 20 percent oI boys are. D. Salahu-Din, H. Persky, and J. Miller, The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2007, NCES 2008468, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, (Washington, DC, and Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), table A-9. Average scores and achievement-level results in NAEP writing for eighth-grade public school students, by gender and state. 2007.
   2. In one generation, young men have gone from 61 percent of college degree recipients to a projected 39 percent; young women, from 39 percent to a projected 61 percent.
   3. The number of boys who said they didn’t like school has increased by 71 percent since 1980. In 1980 only 14 percent of boys said they did not like school very much at all; by 2001 that figure had increased to 24 percent. See University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, Monitoring the Future (study), 1980–2001; cited in NCES, “How Do You Feel About School?” Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women: 2004, fig. 13, p. 4.
   4. In a study of boys and girls in the United States at the primary level, when it comes to standardized tests versus grades, “Boys who perform equally as well as girls on reading, math, and science tests are graded less favorably by their teachers.” C. Cornwell et al., “Non-cognitive Skills and the Gender Disparities in Test Scores and Teacher Assessments: Evidence from Primary School,” Journal of Human Resources 48 (Winter 2013): 236–64.
   5. Original chart developed by Thomas G. Mortenson, Senior Scholar, Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, Washington, DC. Digest of Education Statistics, 2016, Table 318.10, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_318.10.asp.
   6. The Drop-Out, Left-Out Cycle
      1. In neighborhoods where marriage is scarce, fathers are scarce, and more than half of boys don’t finish high school. 8 The boy drops out.
      2. The less education a young man has, the more likely he is to be unemployed or underemployed. He’s left out of the workplace.
      3. Women who desire children think of an uneducated young man as undesirable, and an unemployed man as “another child”—hardly marriage material. He’s left out of marriage and fathering.
      4. Some of the women with whom he nonetheless has sex become pregnant, and raise children without him. Thus, we’re back to step one: the left-out dad and the drop-out son.
   7. nationwide girls make up 70 percent of valedictorians, 14 while boys get 70 percent of Ds and Fs.
2. Our schools are perpetuating the boy crisis in a second way. Girls learn emotional intelligence as part of the socialization to be female. For boys there is an ever-widening gap between the heroic intelligence that it took our sons to be respected as men in the past and the emotional intelligence needed for your son’s future. Yet few schools are teaching communication skills and empathy training to help boys make that transition.
3. boys’ IQs have dropped about 15 points since the 1980s.
   1. 12 year old boys IQ same as 9 year old in 1970s
4. 70 Largest Developed Nations: Boys have fallen behind girls in reading and writing
5. Dropped out 10% more
6. Open: degrees-1.png 7e5f403d0b52c14b0bdc928b5e67f85e_MD5.jpeg

   Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.19 (file not included in this release)

   In the U.S., for example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students.6 Male students also struggle more with online learning

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.21 (file not included in this release)

Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be “school ready” at age 5, for example, controlling for parental characteristics. This is a much bigger gap than the one between rich and poor children, or Black and white children, or between those who attend preschool and those who do not. A 6 percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to a 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.22 (file not included in this release)

girls now account for two-thirds of high schoolers in the top 10%, ranked by GPA, while the proportions are reversed on the bottom rung.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.23 (file not included in this release)

By now it should not be a surprise to learn that boys are less likely than girls to graduate high school. In 2018, 88% of girls graduated from high school on time (i.e., 4 years after enrolling), compared to 82% of boys. The male graduation rate is only a little higher than the 80% among poor students.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.24 (file not included in this release)

States are required by federal law to report high school graduation rates by race and ethnicity, proficiency in English, economic disadvantage, homelessness, and foster status. These kinds of data are invaluable for assessing trends for the groups at greatest risk of dropping out. But oddly, states do not have to report their results by sex. Getting the numbers cited above required scouring the data for each state.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.27 (file not included in this release)

biggest difference is not in how female and male brains develop, but when. The key point is that the relationship between chronological age and developmental age is very different for girls and boys. From a neuro-scientific perspective, the education system is tilted in favor of girls.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.28 (file not included in this release)

The gender gap widens further in higher education. In the U.S., 57% of bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to women, and not just in stereotypically “female” subjects: women now account for almost half (47%) of undergraduate business degrees, for example, compared to fewer than one in ten in 1970. Women also receive the majority of law degrees, up from about one in twenty in 1970.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.28 (file not included in this release)

Women are earning three out of five master’s degrees and associate’s degrees, and the rise has been even more dramatic for professional degrees. The share of doctoral degrees in dentistry (DDS or DMD), medicine (MD), or law ( JD or LLB) being awarded to women has jumped from 7% in 1972 to 50% in 2019. The dominance of women on campus shows up in nonacademic areas too. In 2020, the law review at every one of the top sixteen law schools had a woman as editor-in-chief.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.31 (file not included in this release)

Almost every college in the U.S. now has mostly female students. The last bastions of male dominance to fall were the Ivy League colleges, but every one has now swung majority female.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.31 (file not included in this release)

admissions officers. “once you become decidedly female in enrollment,” writes Jennifer Delahunty, Kenyon College’s former dean of admissions, “fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.” In a provocative New York Times opinion piece, plaintively headlined “To All The Girls I’ve Rejected,” she said publicly what everyone knows privately: “Standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.”52

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.33 (file not included in this release)

But getting more men to college is just the first step. They also need help getting through college. With most students now going to some kind of college at some point, the big challenge is completion. Here, too, there is a gender gap. Male students are more likely to “stop out,” that is, to take a detour away from their studies, and they are also more likely to “drop out” and fail to graduate at all. The differences are not trivial: 46% percent of female students enrolling in a public 4-year college have graduated 4 years later; for male students, the proportion is 35%. (The gap shrinks somewhat for 6-year graduation rates.)61

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.34 (file not included in this release)

The numbers from Chingos suggest that all else equal, an all-female four-year school would have a graduation rate 14 percentage points higher than an all-male school.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.34 (file not included in this release)

male students are at a higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group, including poor students, Black students, or foreign-born students.

Of Boys and Men _ Why the Modern Male Is S - Reeves, Richard copy, p.34 (file not included in this release)

One factor that gets too little attention in these debates is the developmental gap, with the male prefrontal cortex struggling to catch up with the female one well into the early twenties. To me, it seems clear that girls and women were always better equipped to succeed at college, just as in high school, and that this has become apparent as gendered assumptions about college education have fallen away.