photo by Eric Johnson

Grand Meadow Superintendent Joe Brown talks Friday afternoon about the growing education gap between boys and girls in school in certain areas. According to the book "Boys Adrift," boys seem to be falling behind in education standards. With him is his wife, Robin Brown, a state legislator and teacher in the Albert Lea School District.

Why are boys failing?

Grand Meadow Schools examining gender education

By Katie Johnson (Contact) | Austin Daily Herald

Published Monday, August 3, 2009

GRAND MEADOW — In Grand Meadow Public Schools this year, 10 of its 13 grades will have a male majority.

And those boys are falling behind.

In a move seldom seen in modern day classrooms, the district is trying to address boys’ underachievement by teaching the way they believe boys should be taught: separate from girls.

Four seventh and eighth grade classes — art, vocal music, industrial technology and physical education — will be completely gender-segregated this fall.

Why such a dramatic change in how teachers teach?

They are reading a book: “Boys Adrift, The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Men,” by gender education expert Dr. Leonard Sax.

“It talks about young men and the changes we have seen in the past 10, 15 years,” said Ward Brossoit, middle school science and math teacher and president of the teachers’ union. Twenty of the district’s 30 teachers have now read the book.

“It talks about the BPA (Bisphenol A) and the toxic bottles and how it affects the brain,” Brossoit said. “It’s pretty interesting.”

Sax addresses five factors contributing to the decline of boys’ performance in school: video games; changing teaching methods; prescription drugs, such as those for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; endocrine disruptors, including chemicals found in plastic bottles that may lower testosterone levels; and devaluation of masculinity.

Brossoit said he has seen the changes in boys in his 22 years of teaching.

“Boys used to be completely different; their drive was to be good at everything they did,” he said.

Today, he believes, “They have this laid back, ‘I don’t care’ attitude. Boys are maturing later than before, and they’ve always been behind.

“I have a son that’s 21, and I’ve seen that happen,” he said.

Joe Brown, superintendent of Grand Meadow, is excited about the potential these changes have in his district, which for unknown reasons — they have ruled out open enrollment or a “males-only” environment — has a disproportionate ratio of boys. And these boys are exhibiting declining test scores frequently below state average and often significantly lower than their female classmates.

“Almost every one of our discipline problems is male; almost all of our special education population is male; almost all of our underperforming students are male,” Brown said.

In Grand Meadow last school year, boys did score proficiently in math over girls by 1 percent, but it was still 9 percent below state average. Proficient girls excelled over boys by 14 percent in reading.

“Science scores (for both genders) need to improve,” Brown said.

Grand Meadow is one of six schools in the state that requires four years of math and four years of science in high school, and students in grades 7-8 have one and a half hours of both math and language arts every day, requirements implemented after Brown began with the district about four years ago. He is hoping the outcome of the curriculum will be seen in years to come.

Brown references Sax’s theory that video games’ “unrealistic” themes lead boys to believe there are no consequences to their actions; you can just start the game over.

“It’s not normal to go around shooting people,” Brown said. “Yet, boys love competition. It’s training boys to think there are no consequences. Girls are more centered in realism.”

He also said boys are maturing at a slower rate than before, although they have always been behind girls.

According to “Boys Adrift,” the widening gap in maturity development could be the cause of the consumption of BPA, a chemical found in plastic bottles. Lax theorizes this causes boys to develop slower mentally, and girls to mature faster physically.

In a July article in the Pioneer Press of St. Paul, the newspaper reports on a Maplewood elementary school piloting gender separation in a first grade class after adopting the “Boys Adrift” theories.

“This is so new, to my knowledge we might be the only other school (in Minnesota addressing gender gaps),” Brown said. “Boys and girls are different and they learn at different rates.

“It’s really coming to a head right now,” he explained. “Just seeing the recent standardized test scores … you’re seeing it across the state. Even though we are a small, rural community it’s not any different than Rochester or Minneapolis.”

Brown, his wife, state Rep. Robin Brown (DFL-Moscow Township), and possibly other staff are attending a National Association for Single Sex Public Education conference in Atlanta in October. Robin Brown, an art teacher in Albert Lea, sits on the Higher Education committee at the capitol and is also a proponent of the gender education.

Joe Brown said he could not give examples as to how teaching will be different in the four junior high classes — he’s leaving that up to his teachers.

He also said he is not concerned the gender separation will raise concerns in the community about political incorrectness. A town meeting to discuss the changes will be scheduled this month.

“Grand Meadow is very open to change and innovation,” Brown said. “When I look at the gap in test scores, I know there is a problem that needs to be addressed.”

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Comments

Posted by vasresearch (anonymous) on August 4, 2009 at 7:35 a.m. (Suggest removal)

I have listened with interest to a lecture by Dr. Sax and commend him for his insights. There are however other causes of male literacy failure besides segregating the sexes. Our work investigates the underlying science behind whole word processing. We find that memory storage (VAS level) significantly determines infants' capacity to process whole words. We also find that infant males develop this facility almost a year later than girls. Teaching strategies that emphasise whole word guessing and prediction from sentence meaning therefore discriminate against male infants and the resultant error patterns usually become locked in by the age of 9. Whole Language thereby discriminates against male literacy. This conclusion explains the longitudinal Clackmananshire Study which found that male/female differences disappeared in their Phonics-first group.
Further information can be found at www.vasresearch.com.
Byron Harrison
Research Director.

Posted by mayfieldga (anonymous) on December 5, 2009 at 4:05 p.m. (Suggest removal)

The problems is sociological, beginning in the very early years of life and continuing through life.

This is the reversal - In the nineteenth century, we lived in a very physical world and one that required much strength and courage for boys and later men. This created a form of treatment from a young age to create this strength.
1. Boy children even less than a year old were (and are) given more aggressive treatment to make them tough to compete in the big physical world. This along with other neglects creates higher muscle tension that hurt handwriting skills and create more activity in general as a stress relief from that aggression they receive.
2. Boys were (and are) not given kind, stabilizing, nurturing, mental, emotional, social, verbal, interaction and other kind, caring treatment for fear of coddling the Male child, again to make them tough.
3. Boys were (and are) by design not given love, honor, respect unless they display some form of achievement, status, image, etc. All of this was designed to make boys tough. This induces boys to go outside academic areas to achieve feelings of self-worth not given in school.
Girls on the "other hand" are now reaping a windfall of many fine information age skills. The much protection and care girls receive from infancy onward create lower average stress, ease of nature (less need for activity for stress relief), and lower muscle tension that makes handwriting easier, more neat, and more rewarding. The much kind, positive, stabilizing, verbal and other social interaction increase their mental, emotional, social, verbal, and academic skills along with a feeling of love and support as they use that instilled social knowledge in a school setting with teachers. Since girls were (and are) given love, honor, respect, (no need to be tough) simply for being girls, they have an almost assurance of good treatment in society through adulthood. This protection also allows for much more freedom of expression to both vent, gain further support, and more care. This is why girls mature faster than boys. These differences have been socially created.

Now in the information age and as society has become more unstable, more information dependent, and there is massive support for girls, girls are surging ahead big time. Recently there is much more allowed aggression allowed upon Males as more instability allows the valve of aggression on Males to increase, but the valve of protection is still left in place for girls. To top even that, boys have to generate their own feelings of self-worth, for they are only given love, honor, and respect only on condition of sufficient achievement. Boys who are not succeeding in the classroom do not receive the essentials of self-worth; therefore, they must generate a sense of self-worth through other areas such as sports, video games, etc.

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