The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  The debate between traditionalists and progressives over how to teach language skills is an old one. Particularly frustrating, however, is that this debate has proceeded for decades in the United States without anyone taking serious notice of the fact that American boys are significantly less literate than girls. In an annual survey of college freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, students are asked how many hours per week they spent reading for pleasure during the preceding year. The 2010 results were consistent with other years: 36 percent of males answered “none.” Among females, the figure was 22 percent.35 Surely this pattern is worth attention; surely the question of “best practices” in teaching reading and writing should consider what works best for boys.

  The federal government, state departments of education, and women’s groups have spent many millions of dollars addressing a surreal self-esteem problem that allegedly afflicts girls more than boys. But in the matter of basic literacy, where we have a real and alarming difference between boys and girls, initiatives to close the gap are nowhere to be found. In education circles, it is acceptable to say that boys are psychologically distressed and in need of rescue from their emergent masculinity, but it is not acceptable to say that our schools are failing to teach boys how to read and write. The women’s lobby is one thing, but it is dismaying that those professionally responsible for the education of our children should be so heedless of the needs of boys.

  The Wider Background

  A frieze on the façade of Horace Mann Hall of Columbia Teachers College celebrates nine great education pioneers. Among them are Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), and Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852). Few Americans know much about the profound influence that these eighteenth-century German and Swiss theorists have had on American education. Froebel, for example, is credited with inventing the concept of a kindergarten. The German word kindergarten literally means a garden whose plants are children. Froebel regarded children as fragile young plants and the ideal teacher as a gentle gardener:

  To young plants and animals we give space, and time, and rest, knowing that they will unfold to beauty by laws working in each. We avoid acting upon them by force, for we know that such intrusion upon their natural growth could injure their development. . . . Education and instruction should from the very first be passive, observant, protective, rather than prescribing, determining, interfering. . . . All training and instruction which prescribes and fixes, that is interferes with Nature, must tend to limit and injure.36

  Froebel wrote these words almost two hundred years ago, but his plant child metaphor continues to inspire American educators. In the most straightforward sense, the plant metaphor is profoundly antieducational; after all, you can’t teach a plant—all you can do is help it develop. Progressive educators oppose “interference” with the child’s nature and look for ways to release its creative forces. Teachers are urged to build on the “natural curiosity children bring to school and ask the kids what they want to learn.”37 All this is antithetical to classical education and, if the British and Australian reformers are right, antithetical to the needs of many boys. Consider the contents of a leading American teacher-training book.

  Best Practice: Today’s Standards for Teaching and Learning in America’s Schools is a 2005 summary of the “state-of-the art of the teaching methods.”38 Its authors, three university curriculum experts, base their recommendations on what “good teachers do.” Their list of “Best Practices” reflects what they say is the “unanimous” opinion of leading education experts and teaching associations.39 Many of them are the opposite of what the British headmasters recommend for boys:

  • “LESS rote memorization of facts and details.”

  • “LESS emphasis on competition and grades in school.”

  • “MORE cooperative, collaborative activity; developing the classroom as an interdependent community.”

  • “LESS whole-class, teacher-directed instruction.”40

  According to Best Practice, these recommendations are the expression of an “unrecognized consensus” stemming from a “remarkably consistent, harmonious vision of ‘best educational practice.’ ”41 That vision may work for many students, but as the British and Australians have found, it is clearly not working for millions of disengaged boys. Referring to such boys, New York Times writer David Brooks says:

  Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.42

  The British are heeding Brooks’s counsel. Along with the Australians, they are developing a new academic discipline: male-specific pedagogy. There is no such broad-based effort in the United States. Although there are signs of hope at some vocational and technical schools such as Aviation High School (recounted in chapter 1), these efforts are now themselves at risk.

  Our Tinkerers, Ourselves

  Sumitra Rajagopalan, an adjunct professor of biomechanics at McGill University, has developed a program for teenage boys in Montreal, where one in three male students drops out of high school. Rajagopalan explains that the male students she met were bored by their classroom instruction and starved for hands-on activities. She was shocked to find that many had never held a hammer or screwdriver before. At first they fumbled around, but they quickly gained competence. Under Rajagopalan’s supervision, the boys have now built a solar-driven Sterling engine from Coca-Cola cans and straws. “[B]oys are born tinkerers,” she said. “They have a deep-seated need to rip things apart, decode their inner workings, create stuff.”43

  There are millions of languishing young men in the United States just like the ones Rajagopalan is trying to help. In their 2011 Pathways to Prosperity report, Harvard education researchers note the dismal prospects of underachieving young men and suggest that a revival of vocational education in secondary schools may be a partial solution to their problem.44 They cite several such programs and suggest we use them as a model for education reform. The Massachusetts system is singled out for special mention.

  Massachusetts has a network of twenty-six academically rigorous vocational-technical high schools serving 27,000 male and female students. Students in magnet schools such as Worcester Technical, Madison Park Technical Vocational, and Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical take traditional academic courses but spend half their time apprenticing in a field of their choice. These include computer repair, telecommunications networking, carpentry, early childhood education, plumbing, heating, refrigeration, and cosmetology. In former times, vocational high schools were often dumping grounds for low achievers. Today, in Massachusetts, they are launching pads into the middle class. The Massachusetts program is so successful it has become known as the “Cadillac of Career Training Education (CTE).”45

  Blackstone Valley Tech in Upton, Massachusetts, should be studied by anyone looking for solutions to the boy problem. It is working wonders with girls (who comprise 44 percent of the student body), but its success with boys is astonishing.46 According to a study of vocational education by the commonwealth’s Pioneer Institute, “[O]ne in four Valley Technical students enter their freshman year with a fourth-grade reading level.”47 The school immerses these students in an intense, individualized remediation program until they read proficiently at grade level. Like Aviation High, otherwise disaffected students put up with remediation as well as a full load of college preparatory courses (including honors and Advanced Placement classes), because otherwise they could not spend half the semester apprenticing in diesel mechanics, computer repair, or automotive engineering. One hallmark of the school is the novel way it combines academics with job
training. As the Pioneer Institute report explains, “[P]roportions might be reinforced in auto shop with algebra problems asking students to figure the rate at which a car is burning oil or losing tire tread, and a machine shop instructor might ask students for daily written reflections of their work.”48

  These Massachusetts technical high schools have long waiting lists (seven hundred students applied for three hundred places in the Blackstone Valley Class of 2015).49 The Pioneer Institute calls the Massachusetts technical school program “a true American success story.”50 And the success can be measured in concrete results. According to the Harvard Pathways report,

  These [Massachusetts] schools boast a far lower dropout rate than the state average, and have some of the state’s highest graduation rates. Well over half of the graduates go on to postsecondary education. Perhaps most remarkably, in 2008, 96% of students at these high schools passed the state’s rigorous MCAS high-stakes graduation test, surpassing the average of students at more conventional comprehensive high schools.51

  Not only do schools like Aviation High and Blackstone Valley Tech help their students secure a better life, they also address a looming national skills shortage. As the New York Times reported in 2010, “domestic manufacturers . . . are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.”52 But they cannot find them. Countries like Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have sophisticated programs to prepare their young people for today’s job market. The United States is lagging behind. “[W]hile we have been standing still, other nations have leapfrogged us,” say the Pathways authors.53

  The Women’s Lobby Strikes Back

  Despite their success and promise, vocational academies like Aviation High School and Blackstone Valley Tech face harsh opposition from the women’s lobby. In a 2007 report, the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education (NCWGE) condemned high school vocational training schools as hotbeds of “sex segregation.”54 (The NCWGE is a consortium of more than fifty groups that lobby for girls’ rights in education; members include the AAUW, the National Women’s Law Center, the ACLU, NOW, the Ms. Foundation, and the National Education Association.) Girls and boys enroll in these programs in roughly the same numbers, but they tend to pursue different fields. According to one NCWGE report, “Girls are largely absent from traditional male courses, comprising only 4% of heating, A/C and refrigeration students, 5% of welding students, 6% of electrical and plumber/pipefitter students and 9% of automotive students.”55 At the same time, they account for 98 percent of students enrolled in cosmetology, 87 percent of child-care students, and 86 percent of health-related fields.56 Such enrollment patterns, they say, “reflect, at least in part, the persistence of sex stereotyping and sex discrimination.”57

  But what if they reflect preferences? What if girls are not that interested in refrigeration or welding, compared to early childhood education or nursing? We can all agree that career and technical programs should do what they can to attract and engage female (and male) students in nontraditional occupations. Electricians can earn more than child-care workers. The girls should know this—indeed, they probably know it all too well. According to Alison Fraser, a curriculum specialist at Blackstone Valley Tech (and author of the Pioneer Institute study on Massachusetts programs), recruiting more girls into nontraditional fields (“nontrads” for short) is an overwhelming preoccupation at schools like hers. “It is all we think about,” Fraser told me. She describes Blackstone Valley Tech girls, pressured to sign up for auto body and machine shop programs, who then come to her in tears saying they just don’t want those careers. Says Fraser,

  We do everything we can to promote nontraditional fields. We bring in successful women welders and electricians; we counsel the girls and their parents about the benefits of traditional male fields. We force them to explore fields outside their interests. But we cannot force them into a career they don’t want (Fraser’s emphasis).58

  Why are vocational schools going to such lengths to persuade girls to become welders rather than nurses? Because state and federal equity officials require them to. Under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, first enacted in 1984, the US Department of Education disburses $1.1 billion annually through the states to secondary schools and colleges for vocational and technical training. The act requires schools to take aggressive measures to persuade young women to enter nontraditional fields. Career and technical schools live in fear that with too few “nontrads,” they will fall short of their “Perkins number”—an illusive, nonspecific, and ever-changing gender quota. As Fraser told me, it is not enough to get girls to explore new areas, we have to “get them to sign up, and get them to stay there.” And the requirements are about to become even tougher—moving toward precisely defined gender goals and quotas.

  In April 2012, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent out a “Blueprint” for reforming the Perkins Act when it is reauthorized in 2013. “This is not a time to tinker with [Career and Technical Education],” said the secretary, “it is time to transform it.”59 One proposed transformation is equity for women and girls. “This commitment,” explains the Duncan Blueprint, “stems from the fact that the everyday educational experience of women . . . violate[s] the belief in equity at the heart of the American promise.”60 To fulfill the commitment, the Perkins Act will “ensure equity in access, participation and outcomes” by providing “wrap around supports” (my emphasis).61 Such vagueness will be more than enough for the girl-power lobby to set up shop at the heart of Perkins Act grant making and enforcement.

  The National Women’s Law Center is already prepared to wrap around. It has developed state-by state litigation guides—Tools of the Trade: Using the Law to Address Sex Segregation in High School Career and Technical Education. The toolkit informs readers that the “data show a stark pattern of under-representation of girls in non-traditional CTE course in every region of the country.”62 To wit:

  • In Massachusetts, “120 girls are enrolled in electrician courses, compared to 1,717 boys”; and “1,605 girls are enrolled in cosmetology courses, compared to 36 boys.”63

  • In Maryland, “189 girls are enrolled in automotive courses, compared to 2,425 boys.”64

  Interested parties are advised: “Contact the National Women’s Law Center if you want to take action to address the under-representation of female students in CTE in your school or state.”65 Note the use of under-representation as a synonym for discrimination. The new Perkins Act will further empower the women’s lobby to threaten schools like Aviation and Blackstone Valley with lawsuits.

  Why pursue this course? Instead of spending millions of dollars in a dubious effort to change aspiring cosmetologists into welders, education officials should concentrate on helping young people, male and female, enter careers that interest them. “What we do not need,” said Alison Fraser from Blackstone Valley Tech, “is having the state say, you have to force these round pegs into square holes.”66

  The Perkins Act is not the only reason pressure is increasing on Alison Fraser and her colleagues to change their students’ preferences. On the fortieth anniversary of the Title IX equity law in June 2012, the White House announced that the Department of Education would be adopting a new and more rigorous application of Title IX to high school and college technology, engineering, and science programs. According to the White House press release, “The Department of Education will announce the revision of its Title IX Technical Assistance presentation, made available nationwide to state and local education agencies across the country, to include information on how institutions receiving federal financial assistance are also required to ensure equal access to educational programs and resources in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.” President Obama explained the rationale in a Newsweek op-ed:

  Let’s not forget, Title IX isn’t just abou
t sports. From addressing inequality in math and science education to preventing sexual assault on campus to fairly funding athletic programs, Title IX ensures equality for our young people in every aspect of their education. It’s a springboard for success: it’s thanks in part to legislation like Title IX that more women graduate from college prepared to work in a much broader range of fields, including engineering and technology. I’ve said that women will shape the destiny of this country, and I mean it.

  It is admirable for President Obama to encourage young women to shape our country’s destiny—but that is already happening. It is our underachieving young men that destiny is leaving behind, and they are being discouraged rather than encouraged by our political elites.

  Introducing divisive gender politics into schools like Aviation High and Blackstone Valley Tech is the last thing we should be doing. While it is true that fewer young women than men enter fields like engineering, aviation, and automobile repair, young women are soaring in areas such as biology, psychology, and veterinary medicine.67 In 2010, women held 64 percent of seats in graduate programs in the social sciences, 75 percent in public administration, 78 percent in veterinary medicine, and 80 percent in health sciences.68 Will the federal government demand Title IX investigations in those female-dominated programs? Will our high schools and colleges be taken to task for doing a far better job educating girls than boys? Not likely. There is no National Coalition for Boys in Education, no lobby promoting changes in the Perkins Act or Title IX to help them. And, unlike in England and Australia, no political leader has spoken out publicly on their behalf.