The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do

Peg Tyre has written a remarkable book about a problem that many of us have sensed (but failed to articulate and complain about) for years: our young boys are being shortchanged from the first day that they enter a school building. Not too many years ago the concern in public education was how to prepare girls to grow into women able to compete with their male counterparts in the work world. That was a legitimate concern and, much to the credit of this country, a tremendous, and very successful, effort was made to correct the problem. But as always seems to happen, the pendulum continued to swing their way long after females had achieved educational equality. The momentum created to correct the initial problem was so strong that it eventually placed male students at a disadvantage, a new problem just as serious as the one it corrected. I have personally observed much of what Peg Tyre describes in "The Trouble with Boys." For what it is worth, I can offer anecdotal evidence of my own that the problem Tyre describes is a serious one. I am the father of two daughters, both elementary school teachers now, and the grandfather of one granddaughter and two grandsons, all of whom are elementary school students. Because I am convinced that learning to read well, and as soon as possible, is the key to anyone's future, I encouraged my daughters to become readers and have done the same for their children. It is in observation of their children that I first became aware of just how different so many little boys are from little girls when it comes to their early schooling. According to Tyre, the problem for little boys begins as early as preschool because they are physically and mentally less mature than little girls their age. Boys at this age are less verbal than girls, a deficit that makes it more difficult for them to learn to read, and they have less well developed fine motor skills, making it more difficult for them to control a pencil or a paintbrush. But their biggest problem is the great difficulty they have in sitting still for long periods of time, a tendency that almost guarantees that they will be disciplined at a much higher rate than girls and that they will learn at a slower pace. The physical disadvantage faced by young boys has become more and more exaggerated in recent years because of the emphasis on starting our children into preschool programs at younger and younger ages. Little boys find themselves labeled early on as troublemakers and poor students by teachers that simply do not recognize or understand the handicaps the boys are facing in the classroom. As a result, boys are almost five times as likely to be expelled from preschool and are twice as likely to be placed under medication for some type of attention deficit disorder. And, of course, this makes them much more likely to hate school and learning. Too many of them tune out, barely skating by academically and staying in school mainly because of sports programs and the girls t

Here's a great companion to Michael Thompson's Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. While this "report card on our sons" was hardly "surprising" to this community college teacher, Peg Tyre provides lots of facts and figures to support the growing realization among educators that too many young men are not reaching their potential. In too many classrooms, girls are productively engaged, earning good grades and getting what they need from their education while boys are either absent or disengaged and failing. Tyre's examples are illuminating, her breadth of information is convincing and her conclusions are reasonable. The style of language is quite engaging and accessible, so that the facts and figures area easily understandable for parents as well as teachers. Well, done, Ms. Tyre! Here's hoping your elucidation of this problem will prompt more work toward its solution. Wouldn't it be great if those boys would read it and see it as a wake-up call? Janet Gingold author of Finch Goes Wild, a novel about a middle school boy who turns his life around

As an experienced male elementary public-school teacher, I find this book outstanding, even if I disagree with some of it. Instead of repeating other reviewers, let's elaborate on some specific issues. To begin with, Tyre professes objectivity, and denies having any agenda (p. 13). She categorically rejects the notion that concerns about boys are a form of anti-feminism, or some kind of backlash against female successes. Boys in general, not only poor and minority ones, undergo learning difficulties, and the problem has only gotten progressively worse in recent decades. The wealthy Wilmette Public School system, of suburban Chicago, is presented as a model of a school system that systematically investigated and remedied the unique problems of males. Tyre is at times an iconoclast. She sees boys' playing with finger-guns as normal. She questions the high frequency of ADHD diagnoses, but doesn't go as far as suggesting that ADHD is nonexistent (p. 110). She deplores the replacement of traditional play-centered pre-K and K curriculum with academics, and other manifestations of the cram-school phenomenon. She doesn't believe that children, especially boys, are sufficiently developed for academics before 1st grade, and contends that children in play-based classes catch up with their academic-based counterparts by third grade (pp. 74-75). Tyre is a strong advocate of phonics-based learning-to-read over the look-say method. Manipulatives should be emphasized. She recounts an experiment wherein the children were allowed to use magnetic letters which they could rearrange to make new sounds (p. 147). The children came out well ahead of grade level in reading and spelling. Astonishingly, the boys did better than the girls in this female stronghold. Are little boys really more physically active than little girls, or is this a culturally-based perception? Attached sensors demonstrate that boys are, on average, more active than girls, but the difference in averages is not great. The extremes, however, are prominent. The most active individuals in class are almost always boys, and the least active ones are usually girls. (p. 68). This is largely hormonal. For instance, pregnant women with high testosterone levels are likely to give birth to girls that are tomboys. Besides unfailingly providing rough-and-noisy recess, schools should allow boys to move around, and to stand at their desks, when they wish, instead of sitting all the time. Oversize pencils should be given to those with graphomotor challenges. Various other boy-friendly strategies are mentioned. These include providing mentors to boys, encouraging boys to do mathematical studies of sports players, letting boys solve math problems with classwide card games (p. 215), welcoming stories and writing that have grandiose, goofy, gory, and good-vs.-bad-guy themes, etc. Tyre doesn't think that advances in the study of brain neurology translate into a direct understanding of the learning process.

Peg Tyre has written a revealing and somewhat alarming book on the condition of boys in our schools and society. The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School and What Parents and Educators Can Do is insightful. Quite simply, in society's rush in the 1980s and 1990s to support our girls both socially and educationally we have apparently put the boys at a disadvantage. Among the many points Tyre makes, boys mature on a variety of scales later than girls. In our rush to improve standardized test grades, activities such as recess have been virtually cut from the daily school activities. Boys are genetically designed to run, throw, explore, and test their abilities. In modern America, this has normally been achieved through physical play some of which occurred at school. Among other things, this allowed the boys to burn off that abundant energy. In our current educational environment the morning and afternoon recesses have been scrapped so that additional study time could be found. The normal physical play at lunch has also been eliminated in most schools. This one factor has aggravated boys' natural restlessness and caused problems with their ability to pay attention. Our response has been to drug them. Insane! But Peg Tyre also points out that male educators are in woefully short supply as teachers during the elementary grades. Boys may lack positive male role models in their personal lives due to the national plague of absentee fathers and this is aggravated when male role models are missing at school. Peg Tyre isn't the only game in town on this subject though her book is quite good. If you're interested in additional materials on the plight of boys, checkout the following: Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Leonard Sax Bring Up Boys by James C. Dobson The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens Also, if you want information what little boys used to be interested in read The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden. An editorial point. This is an intelligent country in which most teachers and principals are dedicated to the proper education of their students. Certainly we can find a way to meet the needs of both boys and girls without short changing anyone. Peace always.

Ever since women got the right to vote in 1920, they've been on the march. In less than a century, they've muscled their way into the same jobs traditionally reserved for men --- and they're already earning 70% of a man's salary for that work. Why, at this rate, they'll..... Stop! Hold the presses! At this rate, girls will grow up to be a ruling class. And today's boys will grow up to work in auto-body shops (not that there's anything wrong with that) and dream of advancing to the manager slot at Burger King (ditto). Why? Because boys are falling behind in school --- and not just because they develop a little slower, read a little later, blah blah blah. The system is failing boys, Peg Tyre says. A feminized curriculum, behavior norms that disadvantage boys, schools with few men on the faculty, a misguided belief that kids are ready to learn at an earlier age --- Tyre rolls out a laundry list of reasons. I take Peg Tyre very seriously. First, because she's been there --- she is the mother of two boys. At Newsweek, where she covered education, she wrote a story about boys falling behind in school. It struck a nerve --- parents of boys tended to think only their lads were not doing well --- so she dug more and wrote this book. I'm the father of a girl, and while I'd like her to have every advantage, what's happening now may not be good for anyone. Just one of Tyre's conclusions: "At all but the very highest income levels, our country is bifurcating into two groups: educated women and less educated men. That division will have massive implications for the way our children live their lives --- their opportunities, their career choices, what they do, who they marry, how they raise their children, if they can afford to retire." Strong stuff. You want to push back. Well, here are some facts: -- Boys get expelled from preschool at nearly five times the rate of girls. -- Boys are prescribed medicine for attention-related disorders at twice the rate of girls. -- Kids no longer get to "play" in preschool. But "children who attend preschools that emphasize direct instruction experience more stress at school....[in one study] the boys who fell farthest behind girls were the ones who had attended the academic preschools." -- Since 1992, girls have been taking more science and math courses and doing better in them than boys. "In most schools," Tyre writes, "classrooms where AP courses are taught look like a branch of a local sorority." -- "39% of all first-graders get 20 minutes a day or less of recess....by fourth grade, nearly half of our students get less than twenty minutes a day." What replaces gym and music and art and free play? No Child Left Behind --- rote learning for a national test, arguably the most uncreative way of learning imaginable. How does this play out? Boys revere sports, not school. And they pay the price of this sorry focus. The suicide rate for boys aged 5 to 14 is three times higher than the suicide rate for girls; betwe