Time for boys to get more attention?

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Schools face equity issues

TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 1999

By B.W. ROSE
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THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA

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    As the eighth anniversary of "Take Our Daughters to Work Day'' approaches on Thursday, there's debate simmering in the schools where some educators feel it's time boys got equal attention.

    Concern whether the needs of boys are being addressed in primary and secondary education have, in recent years, been popping up in national studies and the national media. That issue is only beginning to filter down to local school districts and into classrooms, according to area educators and gender specialists. Early in the recent history of equity programs, the focus was on issues affecting education of girls, and later it shifted to cultural diversity.

    Now, there is a small but vocal chorus calling for educators to pay more attention to how boys may also be shortchanged in the classroom. That concern is driven by statistics, both nationally and in Sonoma County, showing boys trailing girls in many key educational areas.

    In Sonoma County, girls are more likely than boys to be enrolled in advanced science and math courses, to have passed Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests and to have scored above the national average on SAT and ACT tests.

    The only performance categories in which boys are ahead is that they are more likely than girls to be enrolled in vocational courses and are more likely to attend community colleges, while girls are more often bound for University of California or California State University campuses.

    "Unfortunately, we are still in the period of arguing who is hurting the most and that is not a productive debate,'' said Duncan MacInnes, an education professor at Sonoma State University. "That debate has not translated into programs for boys yet, like it did for concerted programs for girls."

    "The first "Take Our Daughters to Work Day'' in 1992 coincided with release of a study by the American Association of University Women that concluded girls were being under served by the education system." Its findings were regarded as instrumental in setting the tone for gender equity programs in schools that included training teachers on equal treatment and reviewing course books for gender balance.

    In Sonoma County, programs instructing teachers on how to be gender-equitable in the classroom have largely been left up to individual school districts, said George Romero, the county Office of Education's assistant superintendent for instruction. Over the years, the office has set up a number of staff development seminars dealing with gender differences, but he said they are not currently aimed at redressing some imbalance in attention to gender issues.

    "The best way to deal with the past inequities is to make sure that we provide opportunities to each of our kids,'' Romero said. "Right now our focus is on reading, language arts and math and assisting districts to provide that kind of training for them.'' Rob Campbell, an English teacher at Elsie Allen High School in Santa Rosa, said he's been adjusting his classroom curriculum to reflect different learning styles of boys and girls despite initial hesitation because it ran counter to prevailing sentiment in education circles.

    "At first I felt nervous that it was not politically correct,'' said Campbell, who has been to several district seminars. "But I dropped that after finding that different strategies reach boys than girls." "Girls can get into cooperative learning about plot and character development, but guys don't get into introspection, they don't read literature and see a character like themselves. Girls can deal with the fuzzy stuff, but boys are pretty simple and don't like complications, so I have to present plot and character as a progression that goes from one thing to another, in black and white."

    Cindy Pilar, communication director for the Santa Rosa School District and former Montgomery High School principal, said "gender awareness instruction has generally occurred in special ongoing classes for teachers and staff." For about a decade, the Santa Rosa district has been one of the few in the county to conduct "teacher expectation and student achievement'' and "gender equity and student achievement'' classes, which are 15-hour courses over five months.

    One teaching strategy taught in the classes is "equitable response distribution,'' which is aimed at giving girls as much opportunity as boys to call out answers in class. One of the major conclusions of the AAUW study was that teachers called upon boys to give answers far more often than girls. "We don't have sessions that deal specifically with boys, but there are discussions about gender differences,'' Pilar said. "We look at how teachers subtly treat boys and girls differently and how teacher expectations and student achievement are different."

    Joe Manthey, a substitute teacher and a vocal advocate on boys' issues, has been calling for increased attention to the manner in which boys learn. Manthey, a leader in the group Men and Women for Gender Justice, said that in his county Office of Education seminars for teachers and school administrators he stresses the need to understand differing learning styles in order to be able to reach boys.

    It has long been an article of faith among educators that girls learn best in cooperative learning groups, while boys tend to be more stimulated by competition such as tests and academic decathlons. Manthey and other boy-issue supporters contend too much classroom emphasis on cooperative learning and group workings has been detrimental to boys.

    "There are biological and neurological differences in boys that make them rowdy, rambunctious and competitive,'' Manthey said. "But if we are defining our classroom learning structures in terms of the females, then we are truly shortchanging boys."

    SSU's MacInnes said "it may be too early to conclude girls are no longer being shortchanged, but that education performance indicators do show girls have caught up and surpassed boys on many fronts."

    MacInnes said Sonoma County's statistics are in line with national performance results that he said indicate it may be time to "rightly focus some attention on boys." He views the problem of boys' academic performance as having its roots in a lack of role models, something akin to the underlying reason for "Take Our Daughters to Work Day.'' "Boys' role models used to be their father, their uncle or Joe Dimaggio. But what has happened is that boys don't have any attachment to male figures,'' MacInnes said. "Practically all the people involved in a boy's education are female."

    Minority groups have been saying the same thing, that there is nobody who is like them, and we've made concerted efforts to take care of their concerns. For some reason, we treat boys and boys issues differently.''