Education: Which gender has it worse?

"Have boys paid the price for the gains girls have made in the classroom?” asked Robert Tomsho in The Wall Street Journal. That’s been a burning issue in education in recent years, as a host of conservative critics has charged that schools have bent over backwards to accommodate the learning styles of girls. As a result, the critics say, teachers and administrators now discriminate against boys, insisting they read Jane Austen and write essays about their feelings. Now the American Association of University Women, which helped started this debate, has issued a rebuttal—a backlash against the backlash. In a new report, Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education, the AAUW concedes that girls are now performing better than boys in school, graduating high school at higher rates, and making up a majority of college admissions. But because both sexes have shown classroom improvement in recent years, the group says, females haven’t succeeded at the expense of males. “There is in fact no boys’ crisis,” said AAUW executive director Linda Hallman. “We are blowing the myth out the door.”

Sorry, said USA Today in an editorial, but the boy crisis is no myth. Starting in elementary school, girls do significantly better on verbal tests and get better grades, with the gap widening as the years go by; boys drop out at much higher rates, get into more trouble, and are more prone to depression and suicide. Today, “women are earning 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 59 percent of master’s.” Many colleges have even had to institute what amount to male affirmative-action programs. There’s only one reason the AAUW wants to wish these statistics away, said Carrie Lukas in National Review Online. If society acknowledges that the boy crisis is real, it would lose its “monopoly on gender grievance.”

We’d also have to face the reality that boys and girls aren’t the same, said Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel. It’s not politically correct to admit it, but boys and girls do have different learning styles and inborn preferences. If men tend to dominate in math and science, that’s not necessarily the product of sexism; it might be that most women do not gravitate toward those fields. “Data show, for instance, that women prefer to work with organic or living things while men prefer inorganic matter.” As we learn ever more about what makes the sexes tick, schools should seek to help both boys and girls develop their full potential—rather than compete to be the bigger victim.

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