You are here: Home / Archives for boys

Schools try separate classes for boys, girls

August 12, 2010 By

More schools are dividing classes by gender, reports the Washington Post, looking at Imagine Southeast Public Charter School, a D.C. elementary school that separates boys and girls starting in first grade.

“I need the cleanup crew here,” shouts (Soheila) Ahmad, a 23-year-old first-time teacher, sweeping her arm around the central area of the class, where a few books lie scattered on the blue rug, and six blue beanbag chairs are arranged in a reading circle. Three boys hop to it, hoisting and heaving the beanbags into a pile against the far wall. A fourth boy collects the books and reshelves them. It is 10:30 a.m. and time for math.

“Let’s practice counting by 10s to 100,” Ahmad says.

The boys, standing behind their chairs, begin to chant, jumping in place as they say each number: “Ten, 20, 30, 40, … ” they sing, as their jumps and hops get bigger.

“Now let’s count by 2s to 100.”

The boys find their rhythm. Some do scissor jumps. Some do jumping jacks. One pounds his thighs. Another dances wildly, huffing out the numbers as a breathy backbeat. Yet another channels Michael Jackson, moonwalking backward, each sliding step punctuated by his counting. The decibels rise — a stampeding herd of elephants racing toward 100 — and the pace quickens. Ahmad doesn’t blink an eye.

She quizzes them for 15 minutes on their addition facts and divides them into their math groups: Persevering Penguins, Ferocious Foxes, Eager Eagles. The Penguins test each other with addition flashcards. The Foxes play math games on three computer terminals in the corner. The Eagles sit on the floor and have a math lesson with Ahmad. When it is time for the groups to trade places, Ahmad asks, “All set?”

“You bet!” the boys shout, swapping places in a raucous bustle.

Ginene Pointer’s first-grade girls sit quietly at their desks till their math group is called.

“Strawberry Shortcake House,” she says, as four girls stand quietly, push their chairs in and walk to the carpet, where they sit in tidy rows at her feet. “Unicorn House. SpongeBob House …”

When all the girls are seated, Pointer, 31, who has taught for nine years, gives three of them plastic baggies with their supplies: small white boards, construction paper and markers. The leaders distribute the materials and return to their spots on the floor, crossing their legs with military precision. The girls carefully arrange scraps of construction paper on one corner of their slates, sock erasers on their laps and markers in their hands. They are ready for the game.

“Six plus unknown partner equals 15?” Pointer asks.

The girls scribble furiously on their boards. A student named MaKayla raises her hand.

“Nine!” she says softly when the teacher calls on her.

“What?” Pointer asks. “Use your big girl voice, please.”

“Six plus nine equals 15,” MaKayla responds firmly.

“Yes,” Pointer says. “Let’s give her a round of applause.”

The girls clap.

“You go, girl! You go, girl!” one chants.

The boys are allowed to move around during lessons and teachers introduce competition through games. The atmosphere for girls is more relaxing, though they like games too.

Like students nationally, Imagine’s girls do better than the boys in reading and about the same in math.

According to the DC Benchmark Assessment System (DC BAS), which measures students’ progress annually in reading and math, 100 percent of Pointer’s girls scored “advanced” in reading, compared with 50 percent of Ahmad’s boys. Almost the same percentage of girls and boys scored “advanced” in math (40 percent and 38 percent, respectively), but 60 percent of the girls were “proficient” in math (the next step down from “advanced”), compared with 38 percent of the boys.

I’m not persuaded that single-sex classes are more effective. Once the boutique effect wears off, kids seem to do about the same. And the research on boys’ and girls’ brains is sketchy, as the story indicates. But it’s the sort of option that may work well for some students in some schools. If the parents want it, why not try it?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Do boys need single-sex schools?

June 26, 2010 By

Boys are more likely to be labeled disabled, less likely to be in gifted classes and much less likely to earn a high school diploma, New York City schools have found. The city is looking for ways to help boys succeed in school that probably will include “more single-sex schools, as well as mentoring, tutoring and other after-school programs,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

“A high level of physical energy and impulsivity tends to be devalued or even punished in schools,” says Steve Nelson, head of the progressive Calhoun School, a private school.

Charter schools are opening boys-only schools in low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

The Eagle Academy, which started in the Bronx in 2004, was aimed to combat citywide graduation rates of 30% or lower for African-American males. Although the school has an 83% graduation rate this year, up from 80% in 2009, citywide numbers for African-American men are in the mid-40s, and are still “very, very troubling,” said (David) Banks, Eagle’s president and founding Principal of Eagle Academy.

. . . Young men who want to attend the school are selected by lottery. Mr. Banks — whose schools feature mandatory parental involvement, longer school days and Saturday classes — wants to open four more schools in the next five years.

“All-boys schools create safe environments in which boys can learn,” concludes a recent report on single-sex schools (pdf) serving black and Latino boys, notes Susan Sawyers on HechingerEd.  “An emphasis on building strong relationships among the boys, teachers, and staff proved important to engaging the boys in the learning process,” said New York University professor Pedro Noguera, an author of the Black and Latino Male Schools Intervention Study, at a conference in April. The study looked at seven schools that were traditional public, public charters and private schools.

The authors found that all-boys schools nurtured their students social and emotional development; challenged stereotypes about African-American and Latino male identity; infused strong academic expectations and college preparation as part of the boys’ social identity; and made strong efforts to shore up basic academic skills before moving on to more challenging offerings.

However, Noguera also said that the push toward single-sex schools for low-income boys is “an intervention in search of a theory” and named the report just that. Unlike all-girls schools, which are based on the theory of expanding gender role options for girls, all-boys schools are not based on a “shared understanding” of what boys actually need.

But it’s clear they need something more than they’re getting now.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

Cross-dressing show was 'misunderstanding'

April 13, 2010 By

Third-grade boys won’t have to wear women’s clothing as a class assignment: Maude Wilkins Elementary in Maple Shade Township, New Jersey has canceled the Women’s History Month fashion show. It was a “misunderstanding,” says the superintendent.

Teacher Tonya Uibel sent home a 16-page packet with suggested fashions such as “bellbottoms, poodle skirts and cheerleader outfits” and photos of Twiggy and Madonna. She explained the assignment was mandatory.

“If your child is a young man, he does not have to wear a dress or skirt, as there are many time periods where women wore jeans, pants and trousers. However, each child must be able to express what time period their outfit is from. Most of all, your child should have fun creating their outfit and learning about how women’s clothing has changed!”

Excluding the modern era, what are the many time periods in which women wore jeans, pants and trousers?

Creating an outfit isn’t fun for everyone. Janine Giandomenico said her son begged her not to make him dress as a woman. He was afraid of being ridiculed, which made his mother wonder why the fashion show was on the same day as the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network’s “Day of Silence.”  Students are encouraged to remain mute “to call attention to verbal and physical abuse of gay students.”

The fashion show would have presented a challenge, even if the third-grade boys had claimed to be wearing “Rosie the Riveter jeans” or a “Hillary Clinton pantsuit.”

In a letter to parents, Principal Beth Narcia claimed boys weren’t asked to dress up as women.

There are many different time periods that had women and men dressing in pants, suits, and even sweat suits. Students were just asked to dress as a time period, not as a woman.

Dressing as a pants-wearing male in the early 21st century would have been earned an A, I assume, just like wearing a Madonna outfit from her wear-the-bra-outside period.

Instead of the fashion show, students will draw a picture of a person dressed in clothing from a specific time period as the end-of-unit project. So now the history assignment favors kids who can draw instead of kids who have mothers who can sew.

If kindergartners can analyze George Washington’s financial, class and racial values, surely third graders could learn something more substantive about women’s history than the fact that fashions change over time.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

The boy gap

February 20, 2010 By

My column on The Boy Gap is up on Pajamas Media. I look at two new books that ask why so many boys are doing poorly in school.

As reading and writing are pushed down to earlier ages, boys are struggling harder to meet higher expectations, writes Richard Whitmire, a former USA Today reporter, in Why Boys Fail.

“Each year since 1988 the gap between boys’ and girls’ reading skills has widened a bit more,” Whitmire writes. Boys aren’t wired for early verbal skills — and teachers aren’t trained in “boy-friendly” techniques to help them catch up.

Boys are asked to do too much too soon — and labeled hyperactive or bipolar or autistic if they act like little boys, writes psychologist Anthony Rao in The Way of Boys. “Girls use more words; they cooperate with others; they use social skills effectively. A boy’s brain by contrast, is working on other tasks that are equally important but not always valued as highly in schools, such as learning through touching and exploration, developing motor skills and engaging in spatial tasks. Boys also engage in normal aggression, and they have a healthy interest in challenging rules to test the limits of their power.”

Boy-friendly schools need not be hostile to girls. Teaching phonics and intervening to help kids with reading problems turns out to help boys quite a bit.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

9th grade: dropout year

February 20, 2010 By

Ninth-grade gridlock is keeping boys out of college, writes Richard Whitmire of Why Boys Fail. Boys who fall behind and repeat ninth grade never catch up. For many, ninth grade is now the “dropout year.”

Nationally there were 113 boys for every 100 girls in ninth grade in 2007, according to the Southern Regional Education Board. A Johns Hopkins study finds 12 percent of boys and 9 percent of girls repeated ninth grade in 2006-07.

. . . Baltimore’s Patterson High School, located in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. If you showed up to recruit the Class of 2009 on graduation day, you would have found 164 female and 107 male students. A quirk of birthrates? Not exactly. Had you checked on the ninth-grade class there in September 2008, you would have found 278 girls and 400 boys.

. . . In the highest-poverty school districts, as few as 15 percent of students held back in the ninth grade make it to graduation day, according to other research from Johns Hopkins.

Of course, passing those failing boys (and girls) on to 10th grade is no guarantee of success. I think we need catch-up middle schools that prepare kids for high school. And we need a vocational alternative for kids who lack the skills and motivation to pass college-prep classes.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Carnival of Homeschooling

February 9, 2010 By

Raising Real Men has dedicated the pre-Valentine Carnival of Homeschooling to Things Homeschoolers Love.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , ,

Gender gap

January 16, 2010 By

Schools aren’t well suited to boys, says Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, in Gender Gap, an Education Next interview.  Gender roles still limit girls, especially in math and science, responds Susan McGee Bailey of the Wellesley Centers for Women, principal author of the 1992 AAUW report How Schools Shortchange Girls.

Dropout and graduation rates, grades, and many test scores show boys are lagging, says Whitmire.

(Males) go to college at lower rates and then graduate at lower rates. . . . As of fall 2007 (in Minnesota), degrees earned by gender were bachelor’s: 58 percent female; master’s: 69 percent female; PhD: 53 percent female. Nationally, 58 percent of those earning bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of those earning associate’s degrees are female.

Both Whitmire and Bailey agree that male and female students do best in schools that provide extra help immediately when students slip behind, instead of assuming that they’ll catch up later.

The research is clear, Bailey says.

Schools that set high standards for all, involve parents, provide firm discipline and an orderly, encouraging environment, and where teachers are respected and engaged are more successful. Such schools do not as easily fall into the black hole of differential expectations for girls and boys, or one racial or ethnic group over another.

Women earn less than men at every educational level, Baily points out.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Boys can learn without male teachers

January 6, 2010 By

To help boys succeed, elementary schools are trying to hire more male teachers, writes Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post.

That’s not the strategy used by schools that do a good job of educating boys, writes Richard Whitmire, now blogging on Why Boys Fail in Education Week.  In his new book, also Why Boys Fail, he profiles a Delaware elementary school and a KIPP charter school in Washington DC that educate low-income minority boys.

Neither school paid much attention to the gender of the teachers. Rather, they had teaching staffs infused with a sports fanatic-like devotion to ensuring no child was just passed along without learning what needed to be learned.

Reading is being taught at earlier ages. Whitmire thinks teachers are passing boys along with poor reading skills, telling parents the boys will catch up. But some never do.

My travels suggest that rethinking how to teach boys literacy skills in the very early grades would be a far more effective remedy than vacuuming up more male teachers.

Male teachers “can make a character-building difference” in urban schools, he adds.

Whitmire’s book is out next week. While you’re ordering a copy, stock up on my book. (If you want an autographed copy of the hardcover, e-mail me at joanne at joannejacobs dot com.)

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

Books for boys

July 9, 2009 By

Children’s authors and illustrators — mostly male — told 300 teachers and librarians — mostly female — how to hook boys on books, reports Mary Ann Zehr in Education Week.

Boys like to read books about trucks, boys who get into trouble, sports, animals, and war. More than girls, they lean toward nonfiction. And don’t forget the humor or action in stories.

Boys like a mixture of action and emotion, said Jack Gantos, who specializes in “books about bad boys,” such as the Rotten Ralph and Joey Pigza series.

A theme in his books is that the characters are loved unconditionally, even if they mess up a lot, which he said is something that children can identify with.

A British teacher may have gone a bit too far, when she tried to encourage teen-age boys to read by writing a sexy novel featuring herself and her male students. It was all for a good cause, writes Richard Whitmire of Why Boys Fail.

Leonora Rustamova was suspended for her racy novel, Stop! Don’t Read This!, which “includes underage drinking, hints of drug use and “pupil fantasies” about sex with the teacher.

Five 15- and 16-year-old boys had asked for a story about themselves, she told the BBC.

“In their being a difficult audience, the material had to be quite risque to give them an excuse to listen to it — to 16-year-old boys that are disaffected, story time is for small children.”

One of the boys, 17-year-old Travis, told BBC Radio 5 Live the novel was the first book he had ever read on his own and that he had now read other books.

The principal supported the idea — until the book was published on the Internet.  Rustamova’s husband had wanted to print copies of the book for the five boys; by mistake, it was published online for everyone to read. This led to charges of unprofessional conduct.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

It’s the boys, stupid

March 10, 2009 By

The U.S. education system posts poor high school and college graduation rates because “the schools are failing boys,” writes Richard Whitmire, who blogs on Why Boys Fail, on Inside Higher Ed.

Given that men are far more likely to major in math and science – a special worry for the technical industries — the chamber should be particularly concerned about men falling behind.

Education reformers aren’t willing to focus on boys’ needs, Whitmire complains. Britain and Australia are doing it.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts
Newer Posts »