Lost boys

While girls surge ahead in all subjects at school, boys are lagging behind. Is "girl power" to blame? Do boys need their own dose of "empowerment"?

By Amy Benfer

Feb 5, 2002 | The first panicky calls for the empowerment of girls in education came slightly more than a decade ago, inciting a national response of extraordinary scope and intensity. Bombarded by the impassioned claim that girls were shortchanged at school, Americans mobilized without delay, inviting the media to publicize the alarming plight of girls, while pushing public and private schools to institute permanent changes to end discrimination in the classroom. By 1994, a federal law -- the Gender Equity in Education Act -- specifically banned discrimination against girls in school.

From the beginning, critics of the empowerment movement claimed that creating special programs for girls was sexist. Later, other researchers -- most prominently Diane Ravitch, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former assistant secretary of education, and Christina Hoff Sommers, author of the 1992 book "Who Stole Feminism" and "The War Against Boys" -- began to question whether there had ever been a "girl crisis" in the first place. These critics painted the feminist leaders of the girl empowerment movement as adult women who were somewhat hysterically looking for evidence of patriarchal coercion where none existed, in order to correct inequities that had been solved by the previous generation.

Critics of empowerment efforts didn't dispute that girls at one point had been discriminated against in education, but claimed that by 1990, those inequities had largely been erased, and that girls had already begun to overtake boys in many academic and social areas. As Ravitch told a New York Times reporter, "It might have been the right story 20 years earlier, but coming out when it did, it was like calling a wedding a funeral."

Regardless of exactly when it began to happen, it appears now that American girls have made outstanding progress in academic achievement. Some researchers credit the empowerment movement; others say it was superfluous. But what is certain is that recent studies indicate that girls have significantly bridged historical gender gaps in math and science scores (and in some studies, have eliminated them entirely) and have held on to their historical advantage over boys in reading and writing skills.

At the same time, according to those studies, boys have not made the same progress in eliminating their side of the gender gap. Suddenly, the debate among researchers is focused on the boys: Are they behind because of the girl empowerment movement? Are they being shortchanged in the classroom simply because they are boys?

Just last month, the results of a study that tested 15-year-old students in 32 industrialized nations reflected that girls score much higher than boys in reading and [in most countries, including the United States] are on par with the boys in math and science. Authors of the report, issued by PISA (the Program for International Assessment, a French-based international consortium of educational researchers), called the reverse gender gap "striking."

Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Center for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, a Washington-based think tank, and a higher education policy analyst for Postsecondary Education Opportunity, based in Iowa, says that in his 30-year career devoted to eliminating gender imbalances in education, he has witnessed a troubling shift.

"Right around 1990, it hit me that girls had made extraordinary progress between 1970 and 1990," he says. "For me, it was one of those 180-degree reversals: Now I believe that boys are the ones with a gender disadvantage in education. They are where the girls were 25 years ago."

According to the U.S. Department of Education, American girls have been ahead of boys in reading in studies for every year on record, beginning in 1969. But as girls move ahead in math and science, the reverse gender gap, which has shown up on dozens of local and national studies, becomes all the more pronounced.

(The most pressing and intractable educational gaps in the United States are still undeniably those of race and socioeconomic status. American students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are particularly vulnerable to educational discrimination and underachievement: On the PISA study, American students recorded the highest gap out of all participating countries between students in the top and bottom quarter of wealth.)

A study released in June by the U.S. Department of Education indicated that the average 16-year-old boy has the reading skills of an average 14-year-old girl. Equally dramatic gaps have show up in local studies in Boston, Chicago and New York. On the last Regents exam in New York City, 70 percent more girls than boys had exemplary scores in reading and writing; 45 percent more boys than girls scored well below grade level. There were no gender gaps reported on the math or science sections of the exam. (Of the dozen or so articles that appeared in the New York Post lamenting the dismal performance of New York City students, the question of gender was never raised, outside of reporting the raw data.)

Additional studies show that girls, on average, also have better grades in high school and college and are more likely to be enrolled in accelerated or advanced-placement classes. Boys are much more likely to be held back, diagnosed with a learning disability or put in a remedial or special education class. College admission and graduate rates for girls have soared since 1950. They now constitute the majority of college students and college graduates. And girls earned 57.2 percent of the bachelor's degrees awarded in 2000; boys earned 42.8 percent.

Next Page: Many of the leaders in the movement to empower boys are actively fighting each other

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