7
Why Johnny Can’t, Like, Read and Write
There is a much-told story in education circles about a now-retired Chicago public school teacher, Mrs. Daugherty. She was a dedicated sixth-grade teacher who could always be counted on to bring out the best in her students. But one year she found her class nearly impossible to control. The students were noisy, unmanageable, and seemingly unteachable. She began to worry that many of them had learning disabilities. When the principal was out of town, she did something teachers were not supposed to: she went to his office and looked in a special file where students’ IQ scores were recorded. To her amazement, she discovered that a majority of the students were significantly above average in intelligence. A quarter of the class had IQs in the high 120s (124, 127, 129), several in the 130s, and one of the worst classroom culprits was in fact brilliant: he had an IQ of 145.
Mrs. Daugherty was angry at herself for having felt sorry for them and for expecting so little from them. Things soon changed. She increased the difficulty of the work, doubled the homework, and ran the class with uncompromising discipline. Slowly but perceptibly, the students’ performance improved. By the end of the year, this class of former ne’er-do-wells was among the best behaved and highest performing of the sixth-grade classes.
The principal was delighted. He was well aware of this infamous sixth-grade class and its less-than-stellar reputation, so at the end of the year he called Mrs. Daugherty into his office to ask what she had done. She felt compelled to tell him the truth. The principal listened attentively and immediately forgave her. He congratulated her. But then he said, “I think you should know, Mrs. Daugherty, those numbers next to the children’s names—those are not their IQ scores. Those are their locker numbers.”1
The moral of the story: Strict standards are good. Demanding and expecting excellence can only benefit the student. These were once truisms of education. Even today, setting and enforcing high standards for students is uncontroversial, at least as a general principle. Who would question the need for challenging work, high expectations, and strict discipline? The sad answer is that a lot of education experts are skeptical about what they see as old-fashioned pedagogy, and their theories have the effect of relaxing standards and expectations. Rousseauian romanticism, in the form of progressive education, remains a powerful force in American schools. The departure from structure, competition, discipline, and skill-and-fact-based learning has been harmful to all children—but it appears to have exacted an especially high toll on boys.
Knowledge Acquisition versus Jazz Improvisation
Progressive pedagogues pride themselves on fostering creativity and enhancing children’s self-esteem. Strict discipline and the old-fashioned “dry-knowledge” approach are said to accomplish the opposite: to inhibit creativity and leave many students with feelings of inadequacy. Progressives frown on teacher-led classrooms with fact-based learning, memorization, phonics, and drills. Trainees in the schools of education are enjoined to “Teach the student, not the subject!” and are inspired by precepts like “[Good teaching] is not vase-filling; rather it is fire-lighting.”2
In this “child-centered” model, the teacher is supposed to remain in the background so that students have the chance to develop as “independent learners.” Drill and rote have no place in a style of education focused on freeing “the creative potential of the child.” One prominent champion of progressivism, Alfie Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve and Punished by Rewards, suggests the modern cooperative classroom should resemble a musical jam session: “Cooperative learning not only offers instruments to everyone in the room, but invites jazz improvisation.”3
Child-centered, progressive education has been prevalent in American schools of education since the 1920s. According to University of Virginia education scholar E. D. Hirsch Jr., the “knowledge-based approach currently employed in the most advanced nations [has been] eschewed in our own schools for more than half a century.”4 With the exception of a brief period in the late 1950s and early 1960s (when the Soviet Union’s success with Sputnik generated fears that an inadequate math and science curriculum was a threat to national security), the fashion in education has been to downplay basic skills, knowledge acquisition, competitive grading, and discipline. This fashion has opened a worrisome education gap that finds American students falling behind their counterparts in other countries.5
In recent years, a growing number of British and Australian educators became convinced that progressive methods in education are a prime reason that their male students are so far behind the girls. There is now a concerted movement in both countries to improve boys’ educational prospects by going back to a traditional pedagogy. Many British educational leaders believe that the modern classroom fails boys by being too unstructured and permissive and hostile to the spirit of competition that so often provides boys with the incentive to learn and excel.
Why the special focus on boys in Britain and Australia? Leaders in both countries view widespread male underachievement as a threat to their national futures. The workplace has changed radically in the past few decades. Today, solid math and reading skills are prerequisites for success. Boys who lack them will face a bleak future, and nations with too many languishing males risk losing their economic edge. As Gavin Barwell, British MP, explained in a 2012 report on male literacy: “Literacy is a significant issue for us all . . . due to the demands of an increasingly complex workplace. We need to act to ensure all our children fulfill their potential and contribute to making the UK economy globally competitive.”6 Closing the boy achievement gap has been at the forefront of Britain’s and Australia’s national agendas for more than a decade.
By contrast, the looming prospect of an underclass of badly educated, barely literate American boys has yet to become a cause for open concern among American educators or political leaders. In a 1995 article in Science, University of Chicago education researchers Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell discussed the bleak employment outlook for the “generally larger number of males who perform near the bottom . . . in reading and writing.”7 That employment outlook is even bleaker today. In March 2010 the Center on Education Policy, an independent research center that advocates for public education, released a comprehensive, state-by-state analysis:
Consistent with other recent research, our analysis of state test results by gender suggests that the most pressing issue related to gender gaps is the lagging performance of boys in reading. . . . Researchers and state officials might investigate ways in which the school environment may be changed to better address the needs of boys.8
So far, neither state nor federal officials seem inclined to take that suggestion. That must change. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Lester Thurow has pointed out, “Within the developed world, the under-educated and under-skilled are going to be left out, or perhaps more accurately, thrown out of the global game.”9 How do we turn things around? The first thing we should do is to follow the example of the British and the Australians. Their efforts can be summarized in a few words: Bring back teachers like Mrs. Daugherty.
British and Australian Initiatives
In the mid-1990s, British newspapers were full of stories about the distressing scholastic deficits of the nation’s schoolboys. The Times of London warned of the prospect of “an underclass of permanently unemployed, unskilled men.”10 “What’s Wrong with Boys?” asked the Glasgow Herald.11 The Economist referred to boys as “tomorrow’s second sex.”12 In Britain, the public, the government, and the education establishment are well aware of the increasing numbers of underachieving young males and they started looking for ways to help them. They had a name for them—the “sink group”—and they called what ails them “laddism.”
A council of British headmasters and headmistresses organized a clearinghouse for information on effective classroom practices and programs for boys. Can Boys Do Better? is its 1997 summary of what works best for boys.13 Here is a partial list of t
he approaches that these practitioners deemed effective for boys:
• More teacher-led work
• A structured environment
• High expectations
• Strict homework checks
• Consistently applied sanctions if work is not done
• Greater emphasis on silent work
• Frequent testing
• Single-sex classes
The British headmasters called for “silent” (solitary) reflection and study and warned against collaborative learning. The headmasters advised schools to avoid fanciful, “creative” assignments, noting, “Boys do not always see the intrinsic worth of ‘Imagine you’re a sock in a dustbin.’ They want relevant work.”14 Nor are the British headmasters focused on students’ self-esteem. They know that boys do better than girls on self-esteem questionnaires—but that gender gap does not strike them as evidence that the girls are being shortchanged. As Peter Downes, a former Scottish headteacher, dryly notes: “Boys swagger . . . while girls win the prizes.”15 He urges teachers to be brutally honest with boys about what life has in store for them if they continue to underperform academically.
Coed public schools throughout Great Britain also began experimenting with all-male classes. In 1996, Ray Bradbury, the headteacher of Kings’ School in Winchester, was alarmed by the high failure rate of his male students. Seventy-eight percent of the girls were getting passing grades or better, compared with 56 percent of the boys. Bradbury identified the thirty or so boys he thought to be at risk for failure and placed them together in a class. He chose an athletic young male teacher he thought the boys would like. The class was not “child-centered”; the pedagogy was strict and old-fashioned. As Bradbury explained, “We consciously planned the teaching methodology. The class is didactic and teacher-fronted. It involves sharp questions and answers and constantly checking for understanding. Discipline is clear-cut—if homework isn’t presented, it is completed in a detention. There is no discussion.”16
Here is how one visiting journalist describes a typical class: “Ranks of boys in blazers face the front, giving full attention to the young teacher’s instructions. His style is uncompromising and inspirational. ‘People think that boys like you won’t be able to understand writers such as the Romantic poets. Well, you’re going to prove them wrong. Do you understand?’ ”17
The teacher found that the boys in his single-sex class actively supported one another with genuine team spirit. “When girls are present, boys are loath to express opinions for fear of appearing sissy.” He chose challenging but male-appropriate readings: “Members of my group are football mad and quite ‘laddish.’ In the mixed classes they would be turned off by Jane Eyre, whereas I can pick texts such as Silas Marner and the War Poets.” The initial results were promising. In 1996, the boys were far behind the girls. By 1997, after only a year in the special class, the boys had nearly closed the gap. As one of the boys said, “We are all working hard to show we can be just as successful as the other groups.”18
The authors of Can Boys Do Better? were careful not to claim too much. “It should be stressed that many of these strategies [to help boys do better] have only recently been implemented, and it is too early in many cases to fully evaluate their effectiveness.”19 However, a follow-up study by the National Foundation for Educational Research in 1999 (Boys’ Achievement, Progress, Motivation and Participation) supported the headmasters’ key propositions: “The following items all emerge as being important: highly structured lessons, more emphasis on teacher-led work, clear and firm deadlines, and short-term targets.”20 The same report noted that all-male classes and all-male schools may be “singularly well-placed to raise achievement among boys, as they could tailor their strategies directly to the needs of boys.”21
The British are now well into a second generation of research and activism on the boy gap. They have not solved the problem of male underachievement, but they are closing in on solutions. Addressing boys’ literacy is now at the top of the list—even for high government officials. In 2012, the Boys’ Reading Commission issued a major, evidence-based report on how to engage more boys with the written word. The commission included ten members of Parliament, suggesting how seriously the British take the problem to be. Among its recommendations:
• Every teacher should have an up-to-date knowledge of reading materials that will appeal to disengaged boys;
• Every boy should have weekly support from a male reading role model;
• Parents need access to information on how successful schools are in supporting boys’ literacy.22
To those who say that the main factor in literacy is social class, not gender, the report stated outright that “within like-for-like social class groupings, a gender gap of 10 percentage points is sustained.”23 And the report readily acknowledges sex differences: “It is clear from research, and to most people observing children, that there are cognitive differences between girls and boys.”24
The British learned long ago that phonics (teaching beginning readers to learn the relationship between symbols and sounds) works better for boys than the “whole language” approach (where children learn to read “naturally” by seeing words in context). The report cites a now-famous 2005 seven-year study in the Scottish town of Clackmannanshire, which found that “after receiving an early grounding in synthetic phonics, boys significantly surpassed girls in word reading, and stayed ahead through the end of primary school. The same was true for the children’s progress in spelling.”25 But phonics is only the first step. Further research revealed that though the phonics program taught boys the mechanics of reading, it did not improve their comprehension. For that, they need to be motivated to care about what they are reading. So the report stresses the importance of showing boys that reading is pleasurable.26
A color-coded chart in the commission report indicates children’s reading preferences: girls prefer fiction, magazines, blogs, and poetry; boys like comics, nonfiction, and newspapers. “Boys were significantly more likely than girls to read science-fiction/fantasy, sports-related and war/spy books.”27 Such findings will be unsurprising to many, but the report notes that in a survey of 1,200 primary school teachers in the United Kingdom, only one teacher could name a significant writer for boys.28 That was the reason for the commission’s arresting recommendation that teachers should actually have knowledge of reading materials of interest to boys.29
In 2002, the Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training published Boys: Getting It Right: Report on the Inquiry into the Education of Boys. The report notes that earlier government inquiries on gender equity focused only on the needs of girls. That has to change, says the committee. What is more, the committee dismissed prior reports that called for transforming boys’ masculinity. Like the British headmasters, the Australian committee members specifically rejected “the progressiveness of the 1970s” in favor of old-fashioned pedagogy.30 Among the committee’s recommendations:
• More structured activity;
• Greater emphasis on teacher-directed work;
• Clearly defined objectives and instructions;
• A return to the traditional phonics-based teaching of reading;
• More male role models.31
Australia has since launched an aggressive campaign on behalf of boys’ education. In 2006, for example, it initiated Success for Boys. This program provided grants to 1,600 schools to incorporate boy-friendly methods into their daily practice.32 In both England and Australia there are now websites and clearinghouses where teachers can find out what is working for boys. The British and Australians have not yet found a complete solution to the boy gap, but they are more than a decade ahead of us in the effort.
Back in the USA
American boys have a lot in common with their counterparts in England and Australia. In all three countries, boys are on the wrong side of an education gender gap. But there is one major difference: it is inconceivable tha
t reports on the US boy gap would emanate from the US Congress. A Success for Boys campaign would create havoc in the United States. The women’s lobby would rise in fury. The ACLU would find someone to sue. Legislators would face an avalanche of angry faxes, emails, petitions, and phone calls for taking part in a “backlash” against girls.
And imagine the uproar if the US Department of Education were to compile a list of boy-friendly reading materials, or even suggest that teachers might familiarize themselves with such things. That would be an affront to decades of “nonsexist” curriculum development. Mark Bauerlein, former director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts, and Sandra Stotsky, professor of education at the University of Arkansas, summed up “Why Johnny Won’t Read” in a 2005 Washington Post op-ed:
Unfortunately, the textbooks and literature assigned in the elementary grades do not reflect the dispositions of male students. Few strong and active male role models can be found as lead characters. Gone are the inspiring biographies of the most important American presidents, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs. No military valor, no high adventure. On the other hand, stories about adventurous and brave women abound. Publishers seem to be more interested in avoiding “masculine” perspectives or “stereotypes” than in getting boys to like what they are assigned to read.33
American legislators who followed the back-to-basics leadership of their British and Australian counterparts would enrage not only our women’s lobby but our education establishment as well. According to a 2007 report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (an education think tank), all the best evidence shows that students need focused instruction in phonics, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. But an overwhelming number of schools of education—85 percent!—refuse to instruct future teachers in these methods.34 Collaborative writing groups, creative self-expression, and “journaling”—soporifics for many boys—still take precedence.
The War Against Boys Page 17