The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  Before Ms. Jarrett or the secretary of education or other education officials join Ms. Greenberger and her colleagues at the National Women’s Law Center in their pursuit of absolute equality, they need to consider Aviation High School in the larger context of American education and American life.

  Boys and Girls in the Classroom

  In 2000, the Department of Education (DOE) published a long-awaited report on gender and education entitled Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women.9 The research was mandated by Congress under the Gender Equity in Education Act of 1993.10 Women’s groups such as the National Women’s Law Center and the American Association of University Women lobbied heavily for the 1993 law and DOE study. Their own research showed that girls were being massively shortchanged and demoralized in the nation’s schools. The AAUW, for example, called the plight of adolescent young women “an American tragedy.”11 It was because of such claims that Congress was moved to pass the Gender Equity in Education Act, categorizing girls as an “underserved population” on a par with other discriminated-against minorities. Hundreds of millions of dollars in grants were awarded to study the plight of girls and to learn how to overcome the insidious biases against them. Parents throughout the country observed Take Your Daughter to Work Day; the Department of Health and Human Services launched a self-esteem enhancing program called Girl Power!; and, at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, members of the American delegation presented the educational and psychological deficits of American girls as a pressing human rights issue.12

  In 2000, women’s groups eagerly awaited the DOE study. It promised to be the most thorough assessment of gender and education yet. Solid and unimpeachable statistics from the federal government would be a great boon to their campaign on behalf of the nation’s young women.

  But things did not go as planned. The shortchanged-girl movement rested on a lot of unconventional evidence: controversial self-esteem studies,13 unpublished reports on classroom interactions,14 and speculative, metaphor-laden theories about “school climates” and female adolescent malaise.15 Here, for example, is a typical pronouncement: “As the river of a girl’s life flows into the sea of Western culture, she is in danger of drowning or disappearing.”16 Those portentous words were uttered in 1990 by feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, a leader of the shortchanged-girl movement. The picture of confused and forlorn girls struggling to survive would be drawn again and again, with added details and increasing urgency. By 1995, the public was more than prepared for psychologist Mary Pipher’s bleak tidings in her bestselling book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. According to Pipher, “Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. . . . They crash and burn.”17

  The DOE’s Trends in Educational Equity report was based on more straightforward criteria: grades, test scores, and college matriculation. By those standards, girls were doing far better than boys. The DOE’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) analyzed forty-four concrete indicators of academic success and failure. About half of the indicators showed no differences between boys and girls. For example, “Females are just as likely as males to use computers at home and at school,” and “Females and males take similar mathematics and science courses in high school.” Some favored boys: they do better on math and science tests, and they enjoy these subjects more and demonstrate greater confidence in their math and science abilities than girls. Trends in Educational Equity found that the math and science gaps were narrowing, but they still singled them out as areas of concern. On the whole, however, girls turned out to be far and away the superior students. According to the report, “There is evidence that the female advantage in school performance is real and persistent.”18 As the study’s director, Thomas Snyder, told me almost apologetically, “We did not realize women were doing so well.”

  A few sample findings:

  • “Female high school seniors tend to have higher educational aspirations than their male peers.”

  • “Female high school seniors are more likely to participate in more after-school activities than their male peers, except for participation in athletics.”

  • “Female high school students are more likely than males to take Advanced Placement examinations.”

  • “Females have consistently outperformed males in reading and writing.”

  • “Differences in male and female writing achievements have been relatively large, with male 11th graders scoring at about the same level as female 8th graders in 1996.”

  • “Females are more likely than males to enroll in college.”

  • “Women are more likely than men to persist and attain degrees.”

  Figure 1: Average GPA of 12th Graders, by Sex

  Source: US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, High School Transcript Study (HSTS), 2000, 1998, 1994, 1990.

  Contrary to the story told by the girl-crisis lobby, the new study revealed that by the early 1990s, American girls were flourishing in unprecedented ways. To be sure, a few girls may have been crashing and drowning in the sea of Western culture, but the vast majority were thriving in it: moving ahead of boys in the primary and secondary grades, applying to college in record numbers, filling the more challenging academic classes, joining sports teams, and generally outperforming boys in the classroom and extracurricular activities. Subsequent studies by the Department of Education and the Higher Education Research Institute show that, far from being timorous and demoralized, girls outnumber boys in student government, honor societies, and school newspapers. They also receive better grades,19 do more homework,20 take more honors courses,21 read more books,22 eclipse males on tests of artistic and musical ability,23 and generally outshine boys on almost every measure of classroom success. At the same time, fewer girls are suspended from school, fewer are held back, and fewer drop out.24 In the technical language of education experts, girls are more academically “engaged.”

  Figure 2: Percentage of High School Sophomores Who Arrive at School Unprepared, by Sex

  Source: National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2007, Indicator 22.

  If all the data from the Department of Education had to be condensed into a single anecdote, it could be this one about a parent-teacher conference in a middle school in New Jersey in 2010:

  A sixth-grade boy, whose mother asks he be identified as Dan, squirms as his teacher tells his parents he’s not trying hard enough in school. He looks away as the teacher directs his parents to a table of projects the class has done on ancient Greek civilization. Some projects are meticulous works of art, with edges burned to resemble old parchment. Dan’s title page is plain and unillustrated, and he’s left an “e” out of “Greek.” “You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t try,” says Dan’s father as they leave the classroom. “I don’t understand,” says Dan’s mother, whose two older daughters got straight A’s in school without her intervention.25

  But Don’t Boys Test Better?

  Boys do appear to have an advantage when it comes to taking tests like the SAT. They consistently attain higher scores in both the math and verbal sections, though girls are well ahead in the recently added essay section.26 But according to the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT, the boys’ better scores tell us more about the selection of students taking the test than about any advantage boys may enjoy. Fewer males than females take the SAT (46 percent of the test takers are male) and far more of the female test takers come from the “at risk” category—girls from lower-income homes or with parents who never graduated from high school or never attended college. “These characteristics,” says the College Board, “are associated with lower than average SAT scores.”27

  There is another factor that skews test results. Nancy Cole, former president of the Educational Testing Service, calls it the “spread” phenomenon. Scores on almost any intelligence or achievement test are mor
e widely distributed for boys than for girls—boys include more prodigies and more students of marginal ability. Or, as the late political scientist James Q. Wilson once put it, “There are more male geniuses and more male idiots.” The boys of marginal ability tend not to take the SAT, so there is no way to correct for the high-achieving males who show up in large numbers.

  Suppose we were to turn our attention away from the highly motivated, self-selected two-fifths of high school students who take the SAT and consider instead a truly representative sample of American schoolchildren. How would girls and boys then compare? Well, we have the answer. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, mandated by Congress in 1969 offers the best measure of achievement among students at all levels of ability. Under the NAEP program, 120,000 to 220,000 students drawn from all fifty states as well as District of Columbia and Department of Defense schools are tested in reading, writing, math, and science at ages nine, thirteen, and seventeen. In 2011, eighth-grade boys outperformed girls by 1 point in math and 5 points in science. But in 2011 and 2007 respectively (the most recent year for this data), eighth-grade girls outperformed boys by 9 points in reading and 20 points in writing. (Ten points are roughly equivalent to one year of schooling.28)

  The math and science gap favoring boys has been intensely debated and analyzed. In 1990, at the beginning of the shortchanged-girl campaign, young women were even further behind. (Seventeen-year-old females, for example, were then 11 points behind males in science.) It is likely that the women’s lobby was helpful in drawing attention to the girls’ deficits and in promoting effective remedies. But what is hard to understand is why the math and science gap launched a massive movement on behalf of girls, and yet a much larger gap in reading, writing, and school engagement created no comparable effort for boys. Just as hard to explain is the failure by nearly everyone in the education establishment to address the growing college attendance gap. Today, women in the United States earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of PhDs.

  Figure 3: Percentage of All College Degrees* Female vs. Male, 1966–2021

  *(Includes associate’s, bachelor’s, and doctor’s degrees)

  Graph by Mark Perry (University of Michigan and American Enterprise Institute). Data from Department of Education, ECLS-K (Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten, 1998–1999 cohort).

  According to DOE projections, these male-female disparities will only become increasingly acute in the future. As a policy analyst for the Pell Institute once quipped, only half in jest, “the last male will graduate from college in 2068.”

  Where Have all the Young Men Gone?

  Trends in Educational Equity was a serious study carried out by an unimpeachable source—highly regarded, apolitical statisticians at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. But it flatly contradicted the shortchanged-girl thesis. Yes, it showed that young women needed special attention in certain areas such as their performance on standardized math and science tests; at the same time, it exposed the folly of calling them “underserved” or “shortchanged.” How did the women’s groups react?

  Initially, they ignored it. But so did most journalists, educators, and public officials. The Education Department wasn’t comfortable with its own findings and gave them little publicity. (One official told me, off the record, that some of the staff worried that it would deflect attention away from worthy women’s causes.) A few months after the study appeared, I asked its director, Thomas Snyder, why the Department of Education had not alerted the public to its findings. After all, the misleading AAUW report How Schools Shortchange Girls generated hundreds of stories by journalists and newscasters across the country. Shouldn’t Trends in Equity in Education have received more publicity? “We were probably more guarded than necessary,” he said, “but we are a government agency. . . . In retrospect, we should have done more.”

  So what finally slowed down the girl-crisis parade? Reality struck. The “left the ‘e’ out of ‘Greek’ ” phenomenon became impossible to ignore. Teachers observed male fecklessness and disengagement before their eyes, day after day in their classrooms. Parents began noticing that young women were sweeping the honors and awards at junior high and high school graduations, while young men were being given most of the prescriptions for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.29 College admissions officers were baffled, concerned, and finally panicked over the dearth of male applicants. A new phrase entered the admissions office lexicon: “the tipping point”—the point at which the ratio of women to men reaches 60/40. According to insider lore, if male enrollment falls to 40 percent or below, females begin to flee. Officials at schools at or near the tipping point (American University, Boston University, Brandeis University, New York University, the University of Georgia, and the University of North Carolina, to name only a few) feared their campuses were becoming like retirement villages, with a surfeit of women competing for a tiny handful of surviving men. “Where Have All the Young Men Gone?” was a major attraction at a 2002 meeting of the National Association of College Admission Counseling.

  Throughout the 2000s, stories of faltering schoolboys appeared in almost every major magazine and newspaper in the country. My own book The War Against Boys was published in 2001, accompanied by a cover story in The Atlantic, “Girls Rule: Mythmakers to the Contrary, It’s Boys Who Are in Deep Trouble.” These were followed a few years later by articles in Newsweek, BusinessWeek, The New Republic, and U.S. News & World Report. Programs such as 60 Minutes and 20/20 dramatized the plight of boys, as did data-filled books such as Why Boys Fail and The Trouble with Boys.30 In addition to this steady flow of news stories and books, various state commissions and policy centers issued reports on the precarious state of schoolboys.31 In 2006, for example, the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy, a nonpartisan Massachusetts think tank on education, released Are Boys Making the Grade? Initially, its researchers wondered if the media stories about disadvantaged boys were exaggerated. They asked, “[I]s the picture as one-sided as the media portray?” Their final answer: a resounding, unequivocal yes. “The gender gap is real and has a negative effect on boys.”32 With obvious surprise at their own findings, the Rennie researchers reported, “In Massachusetts, the achievement of girls not only exceeds the achievement of boys in English language arts at all grade levels, girls are generally outperforming boys in math as well.”33 The study concluded, “Boys are struggling in our public schools.” It suggested several reforms such as more experimentation with single-sex classrooms, a heightened focus on male and female learning styles in teacher training programs, and special attention to black, Hispanic, and other subgroups of boys.

  The same year, 2006, the California Postsecondary Education Commission (a group of business leaders, educators, and public policy experts that advises the governor) published The Gender Gap in California Higher Education. It showed women from all major ethnic groups moving well ahead of men throughout the University of California (UC) system.34 In the professional schools, once dominated by men, women were earning 57 percent of degrees in law, 62 percent in dentistry, 73 percent in optometry, 77 percent in pharmacy, and 82 percent in veterinary medicine. Just like Thomas Snyder in the Department of Education and the Rennie researchers in Massachusetts, the California Postsecondary Education Commission authors seemed both surprised and alarmed by their findings. “The magnitude of the issue [of male disadvantage] is large.”35 And they noted the potential harm the growing gap could wreak in the US workforce and in the nation’s “competitiveness in the global economy.”36

  By the middle of the 2000s, the precariousness of boys and young men in American schools was one of the most thoroughly documented phenomena in the history of education. Groups like the National Women’s Law Center and the AAUW might have been expected to return to the drawing board to look for ways to address the special needs of girls, while acknowledging the considerable vulnerabilities of boys. That
did not happen.

  The Empire Strikes Back

  In 2008, Linda Hallman, the AAUW executive director, announced her organization’s determination to continue to “break through barriers” for women and girls and not to allow “adversaries” to obstruct their mission:

  Our adversaries know that AAUW is a force to be reckoned with, and that we have “staying power” in our dedication to breaking through the barriers that we target. . . . We ARE Breaking through Barriers. We mean it; we’ve done it before; and we are “coming after them” again and again and again, if we have to! All of us, all the time.37 [AAUW emphasis.]

  This powerful and influential organization saw the new focus on boys as part of an organized backlash against the gains of women. A few weeks before Ms. Hallman’s declaration of war, the AAUW issued a 103-page study refuting the idea that boys were disadvantaged. According to Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education, the boy crisis was a hoax. This study, said Ms. Hallman, “debunks once and for all the myth of the ‘boys’ crisis’ in education.”38 She described it as “the most comprehensive report ever done on the topic.”39 As we shall see, it did not come close to Trends in Educational Equity, or dozens of other studies, in objectivity, soundness, or comprehensiveness. But it did garner masses of publicity, including respectful treatment in places such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.40 On its blog, the AAUW urged its more than 100,000 members around the country to “Build Buzz on Where the Girls Are.” There was no buzz machine behind the research on boys. What did the AAUW find?

  Chapter 1 of Where the Girls Are begins with a comment on the motives of authors (this author included) who write about the plight of boys: