Boys being left behind

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 6th of December, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up on The World and Everything in It: boys in education.

More people are earning college degrees today than fifty years ago, and statistics show a majority of them are women.

BROWN: Over the last few decades, many educators and analysts focused on girls’ academic success. But in light of the new numbers, they’re saying it’s time to check on the boys.

WORLD reporter Lauren Dunn has our story.

LAUREN DUNN, REPORTER: Emily Pulsifer is the dean of academics at Christ School, an all-boys school in Arden, North Carolina. She also teaches English.

PULSIFER: The community is built around the way boys move, act, learn. It is a very active community.

The school serves almost 300 male students in eighth to 12th grades. Most of the boys live at the school. When Pulsifer first heard about Christ School, she wasn’t sure she wanted to work with only male students. But then she visited the campus.

Pulsifer met boys leading student clubs and theater projects. At her previous co-ed school, girls more often led in those areas.

PULSIFER: Coming here, it's wonderful to see and be part of a community where the boys are doing all those things, by virtue of otherwise they won't happen. But also, they're freed up of some of the inhibitions that they might have about taking those leadership roles. And that's really exciting.

With only boys in each class, teachers can adapt their curriculum and teaching strategies to fit how boys often learn best.

PULSIFER: We are always looking for ways to get the boys up and moving around in the classroom. So there tends to be a little more commotion in the classroom. For our boys, it's a really good way to keep them engaged.

Only about 30 states submit sex-specific data about students who graduate from high school on time. But of the states that do report this, all of them show more girls than boys graduate on schedule.

Luciano Cid is the interim director of the elementary education major at Biola University. He says there could be many factors. But one possibility? Developmental differences between boys and girls.

CID: Boys tend to have less of an ability, on average, to be self-regulated. So have we created a structure in the system that lends itself to the success of one over the other? That's something we should definitely investigate, I think that's something that we have to dive into.

That lagging self-regulation could contribute to difficulty sitting still in class. Cid is quick to point out that boys still need to learn developmental skills like self-regulation. But maybe, he says, teachers should also use strategies that meet boys where they are now. Boys—and girls—can act out reading passages or have dress-up days in history class.

CID: You can do walk-arounds or walkathons, or, you know, they have different names for it, but it’s when you learn history by competing in a game. That is a pedagogy that tends to gravitate towards the needs of boys. The girls love it, too, though, and they learn from it, too.

Some educators say all-boys schools may be the best fit for some students. Cid attended an all-boys Catholic school as a student, but he cautions that both boys and girls can miss out when they are isolated from each other.

Another reason boys often trail behind? Not enough male teachers.

Nearly 90 percent of elementary teachers are female. In high school, women make up about two-thirds of the teaching staff. To better meet male students’ needs, it makes sense for school administrators to prioritize hiring male teachers. But that’s easier said than done.

Kevin M. Jones is the dean of the school of education at Cedarville University. He began his education career as a first-grade teacher.

JONES: I understood, being trained in education, that I was going to set a trajectory for those students. Either they were going to love school and love engaging their peers, or they were not going to like school at all.

Jones worries that boys have few solid role models, especially in education. He wants to see more schools recruit male teachers, encourage fathers to set examples for their sons, and help single mothers raise their sons. Now that he works in higher education, Jones still makes time to volunteer as a reader in a local second-grade class.

JONES: Now I'm reading 15 or 20 minutes to these kids in school, just engaging them in a book in some base-level literacy instruction. And then I leave. But the idea of me consistently coming back, engaging them and encouraging them, saying “You can do it, you can do this. You're smart, you're brilliant.” You know, it's the first time some of those young men – some of those boys in second grade – have heard that.

So why aren’t there more men in education? Studies show that men are more likely to take risks, seeking out careers that are highly competitive.

Cid once considered writing a paper titled “Is it time to pay male teachers more?”

CID: We give bonuses to hard-to-staff teachers, like science, or math, or special education. But nobody's ever talked about, hey, let's give bonuses to males for signing a contract, for being willing to enter into a system that is hard to staff.

Back in North Carolina, Emily Pulsifer says she is grateful for female students’ advancement in the last few decades. But at the same time, she worries about the messages boys hear about manhood and leadership.

PULSIFER: The boys in our midst are growing up in, you know, a world that is not the same world that the people who are teaching them grew up in. I think that the messages that they get are very confusing. And we can't assume that they will sort it out for themselves.

Cid says that despite differences between the sexes and staffing challenges, schools can help boys and girls succeed. But we may need to consider new ways to reach some students.

CID: What worries me is that people are not talking [about]…Wait, why is it that boys have been left behind, and are we okay with that? Because if we are okay with that, then there's a secret agenda somewhere. And that's what, as an educator, that's what I'm not okay with. What I'm okay with as an educator is to bring everybody up. We bring the tide up and everybody comes up. And if anyone's left behind, then we ask questions as to, well, why is it that we're not successfully bringing this person along as well."

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lauren Dunn.

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