Boys and School: The Disconnect

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Boys are having a hard time in school. At least far too many are. Compared to girls, they tend to get lower grades, receive fewer academic awards, and do less homework. They may get into trouble more and are more likely to be placed in special-ed classes and get held back a grade. Fewer aspire to go to college, fewer enroll, and more drop out before graduating.

The problem is not a matter of smarts, as IQ and standardized tests show. Nor is the problem limited to lower-class or minority boys. The problem seems to be that boys simply fail to engage in school with the same level of effort.

In recent decades, this growing gap between boys’ and girls’ educational qualifications has become a public issue and topic of policy debate. Books on on the “boy crisis” bear titles like Why Boys Fail, Boys Adrift, and The Trouble with Boys and draw on the work of educators, psychologists, economists, and others who have been trying to puzzle out what is happening and why. The academic studies stress various contributing factors, from the decline of historically male occupations to changes in specific school policies.

One of the striking takeaways from this literature is the impact of the educational strategy of introducing literacy skills to children at younger and younger ages. Some attribute this strategy to the accountability standards for teachers, such as the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the Race to the Top program. These interventions have had the effect of “educationalizing” early care and kindergarten. Others note the increasing parental investment in giving their young children an academic “edge.” The intuition is that “earlier is better,” both in preparing kids for a college-track curriculum and for a rapidly changing and competitive world.

But for children, especially boys, the focus on early reading is almost certainly wrong.

Kindergarten Is the New First Grade

Beginning in the late 1990s, kindergarten underwent a substantial change. Drawing on a comparison of kindergarten classrooms in 1998 and 2010, education scholar Daphna Bassok and colleagues found very different academic expectations. In 2010, public school kindergarten teachers were far more likely than earlier to believe that academic instruction should begin prior to kindergarten and that most children will leave their classrooms knowing how to read. They devoted more time to advanced literacy and math content, “with particularly large increases in time spent on ‘challenging’ topics previously considered outside the scope of kindergarten.” There was more teacher-directed instruction, greater use of textbooks, workbooks, and worksheets, and “striking increases” in the use of standardized tests.

Despite the much higher percentage of kids in full-day kindergarten, the study also found that the attention to literacy and math crowded out other subjects. Teachers spent substantially less time in 2010 on art, music, science, and child-selected activities. They were also far less likely to divide the classroom into activity centers (arts areas, dramatic play areas, etc.), suggesting a decline in hands-on and exploratory learning opportunities. And although time for recess and PE did not decrease, the shift to fullday meant that the number of hours in school was far longer.¹ In a typical day, kids have less time available for free play.

Whether the shift to literacy instruction and academic content is developmentally appropriate or beneficial for long-term student learning is a subject of debate. But there is no question of the extra demands this places on children just 4 or 5 years of age. In addition to the cognitive task of reading itself, they are required to sit still, listen, and concentrate longer, to follow more instructions, develop and use more fine motor skills, and even take tests. And they have to learn with less independence, free exploration, and hands-on experience.

Though unintended, there is a sorting process at work here. In fact, rather than show the benefit of early reading and math, the studies finding this exposure to be a strong predictor of later school performance may simply be confirming the sorting and its enduring consequences. Pushing the academic pressure downward doesn’t hurt every boy, but it does appear to set up many for failure.

Educational Sorting

Growing evidence suggests that boys, especially, are often not developmentally ready for early reading.² The new academic demands and behavioral requirements can be very frustrating for them. They can undermine boys’ motivation and lead to their being labeled with a learning disability. They begin with fewer reading skills than girls, and even in kindergarten boys are more likely than girls to have negative attitudes toward school and get lower grades.³

Boys can get caught in a downward and self-reinforcing spiral. The problem may actually begin at home. Some studies report more parental teaching activities—reading, playing action games, and teaching letters and numbers—with girls, starting at very young ages. These differences in time investments potentially lay the basis for girls’ advantage with skills captured by cognitive tests at ages 4-5.⁴

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This teaching difference probably would likely make little difference if early education didn’t place so much emphasis on cognitive abilities. After all, boys’ relatively poor performance in early education is not exactly new—see Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. As it is, parental teaching may add to the academic, social, and behavioral skills and attributes that are rewarded in preschool and kindergarten and constitute an important basis for subsequent sorting.

Extending earlier research, sociologist Dennis Condron, drawing on a large representative sample, showed that first-grade teachers rate, on average, the academic skills of male students less favorably than female students, and boys as having poorer social and behavioral skills than girls across the board. These teacher evaluations, in turn, play a key role in the common practice of separating kids into different skills-based groups for reading instruction. In the assignments, girls typically receive higher placements.⁵

These early placements, as other studies find, have a negative impact on the self-evaluations of students with low group placement and are associated with reduced levels of effort. Other research has documented how boys’ less compliant behavior factors into their grades. Teachers as early as kindergarten reward positive attitudes and good behavior with higher marks. In one study, the researchers found that teachers graded boys less favorably than girls even when their test scores were comparable. This misalignment, they showed, was due to boys’ relative lack of “noncognitive skills,” such as attentiveness, eagerness to learn, and ability to sit still.⁶

As Condron and many other scholars have noted, these early negative experiences often have an enduring impact on boys’ school performance in terms of behavioral problems, lower grades, and college aspirations. While poor performance in early education is certainly not the only factor affecting boys’ future success, it has become more determinative of later outcomes.

Inappropriate Demands

Importantly, these studies do not attribute greater parental teaching to a preference for girls. They do not regard teacher perceptions and actions toward boys as a form of bias. The problem is not some intentional handicapping. Schools are expecting a cognitive and behavioral readiness for academic work that many boys are developmentally unprepared to meet (and, of course, many girls too). And once the sorting starts, they are caught in a feedback loop that often leads to chronic underachievement. Earlier is not always better. It can often be harmful.