Boys are falling behind in school. What would help?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Dr. Leonard Sax highlights boys' academic struggles, noting girls now outperform boys.
• Sax attributes the gender gap to changes in educational practices disadvantaging boys.
• He warns of societal impacts, like educational assortative mating affecting marriage rates.

SALT LAKE CITY — Dr. Leonard Sax remembers being an Ohio high schooler and attending his school's end-of-year honors assembly.

All but one of the students being recognized on stage that day were boys. That was in 1976 — 50 years ago.

"At my own public high school, the highest achievers — the valedictorian, the editor of the school newspaper, the winner of the poetry award — were all boys.

"Not anymore. Things have changed profoundly," said Sax, a physician and psychologist who earlier this month presented at Utah's Show Up for Teachers Conference.

An author of several parenting books, including the recently updated "Boys Adrift," Sax spoke with the Deseret News regarding an educational question vexing Utah and the nation: Why are so many boys and young men struggling to succeed in school?

When Sax recently visited a middle school, he took a peek at the honor roll posted in the hallway. There were 22 names on the list. Only three were boys. While meeting with a group of students at that middle school, he asked the boys why there were so few males on the honor roll.

One of the boys raised his hand, offering this answer: Girls are smarter.

"And (he was) not joking," said Sax. "He believes this. He's grown up in a world of 'Girls rule — boys drool' and 'Girls go to college to get more knowledge — boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.'

"That's the world he lives in."

When asked what's behind such academic gender shifts over the past few decades, Sax references the 1994 book "Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls," which detailed gender bias in schools that left girls with classroom disadvantages.

Such research prompted changes in how instruction was formulated and delivered in American classrooms, and now it's the boys who are being underserved, asserted Sax.

Today, in every K-12 grade level, girls are earning higher marks than boys, and by a wide margin, he said.

"The American Institute of Boys and Men recently published the male-female ratio in each of the 10 percentiles of grade-point average," he said. "In the top 10 percentiles — the kids who are the top 10% of students in the United States — girls now outnumber boys by 2 to 1."

And that academic performance gap, he added, is seen across K-12 curricula, including math, science, and career and technical education.

"Now if the gender gap was growing because girls are doing better, I don't think that would be a problem. That would be cause for celebration," said Sax. "But the gender gap is growing not because girls are doing better, but because boys are doing worse."

Boys have little interest in picking up a book for fun

To illustrate his claim of dramatic slips in motivation for boys in the classroom, Sax points to surveys from 40 years ago asking American teenagers if they read for fun. The girls outnumbered the boys, but the difference was small.

But a recent national study showed the "reading-for-pleasure" gap between girls and boys is now a chasm. Reading for fun has become a gender identity marker.

But the recent survey also reveals that the reading gap isn't widening because girls are reading more, explained Sax.

"Girls are reading significantly less today than they were reading 40 years ago. But boys have stopped reading altogether."

No surprise, the differences between male and female educational engagement and motivation don't end with high school graduation. Women at four-year colleges in the United States now make up approximately 60% of enrollment.

That holds true for completing a bachelor's degree as well. Twenty years ago, the number of men and women 25 to 34 years old holding college degrees was even; now there's a 10-point gap favoring women, according to Pew Research Center.

Sax: The societal realities of 'educational assortative mating'

When Sax sounds the alarm about the growing gender gaps in the classroom to educators, their reaction, he said, is often hostility or indifference.

A common response: It's no big deal if the gender pendulum has swung the other way in recent decades. Men still control most of the money and most of the power. Why should it matter if boys are doing worse in schools than girls?

"The answer," responded Sax, "is educational assortative mating."

Those three words, educational assortative mating, basically mean a woman will typically choose a man whose educational level is equal or greater than her own.

"If a woman is going to marry a man, she's looking for a man who is as accomplished and as motivated as she is," asserted Sax. "And there are not enough good men to go around."

That tendency, he added, is not confined to women who have earned a college degree. And it's happening in countries far beyond the United States and is a major factor in declining marriage and fertility rates.

A call for 'snowball zones'

Schools have changed over the past several decades in ways that have had the unintended outcome of disengaging boys from school, said Sax. Classrooms have become "unfriendly to boys."

To illustrate, Sax points to K-12 schools in the U.S. that prohibit tossing snowballs. Designated "snowball zones" were once common on the American playground. But that's changed because of liability risks.

"But as I've shared with American schools, don't criminalize boyhood," he said. "Boys doing things that boys have always done, throwing snowballs, drawing pictures of weapons, writing stories where people get killed, now can get you a disciplinary referral."

Many of today's American educators, added Sax, have been taught that gender is a social construct and that teachers should not use the term "boys and girls" because it reinforces the heteronormative binary, or loosely, the view that one is either male or female.

The consequence of such beliefs, asserted Sax, are disengaged boys.

Read the full story at deseret.com.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

Related topics

Utah K-12 educationU.S.Science

Jason Swensen

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Jason Swensen is a Deseret News staff writer on the Politics and the West team. He has won multiple awards from the Utah Society of Professional Journalists. Swensen was raised in the Beehive State and graduated from the University of Utah. He is a husband and father — and has a stack of novels and sports biographies cluttering his nightstand.