Education trends explain 'where the boys are'

[Brent]

Education trends explain 'where the boys are'

Wed May 18, 6:25 AM ET

Harvard President Lawrence Summers, still doing damage control over some ill-chosen comments about women in the sciences, dug into his university's deep pockets this week and found $50 million to spend on improving the lives of women on his campus. Those 10-year investments in mentoring and child care are to be applauded.

But don't come away from Summers' gifting with the wrong idea: On most campuses, the problem is with men, not women.

More than 57% of the freshly robed graduates parading across podiums this graduation season will be female, up from 43% in 1970. In Minnesota this year, women outperformed men in every degree category, earning more than two-thirds of the master's degrees and more than half the doctorates.

That's good for the girls, but what about the boys?

The trends are almost universally grim. A Yale University report released this week shows that boys are getting expelled from preschools at more than four times the rate girls are. Given the impressive benefits that high quality preschools bestow on students, that's a problem.

Nothing seems to improve much in elementary school, where boys quickly fall behind girls, especially in verbal skills. Not all boys, to be sure, but a disproportionate ratio. When boys are slow to pick up reading skills,educators are quick to conclude they suffer from some medical deficiency. Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and four times as likely to be put on attention-deficit medication.

In middle school, that modest verbal gap from elementary school doubles in size. By ninth grade, the problem can't be hidden. That's when students begin a college-preparation sequence of courses that demand high verbal skills. No surprise that boys are a third more likely to drop out of high school.

Many boys rally by the junior and senior years of high school. But by then girls have won most of the academic awards and school leadership roles. All that makes the girls attractive recruits for colleges.

Fixing the missing-male problem will take effort - something akin to the effort undertaken by parents and educators to make girls more successful in the classroom. Until that happens, audiences can only look up at the graduates promenading across the platform to receive their diplomas and wonder: Where are the men?

http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/educationtrendsexplainwheretheboysare