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Sunday, April 9, 2006
Report: Push schools to help boys, poor students
Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||
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Also on this page: The New Gender Gap | |||||
Schools need to do more to motivate boys, give both boys and poor girls special help in writing and encourage girls to go into male-dominated professions. Those recommendations are part of a draft report by the Department of Education's Task Force on Gender Equity in Education. The panel was appointed two years ago to study why boys are falling behind girls in school, a trend examined in a four-day series published last month by the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. The task force concludes in its draft report that boys are in fact falling behind girls on test scores and college enrollment. But it also finds that both gender and poverty play significant roles in determining a student's academic success. The report was made public after the newspaper requested it under Maine's right-to-know law. The report makes detailed recommendations about what schools should do to raise achievement levels for both boys and girls, such as studying sexual harassment and making boys' reading choices more appealing. The author of the report said the task force tried to look at the big picture, not just focus on one gender. "There was this framing initially that boys were in trouble and all of girls' problems are solved," said Mary Madden, a University of Maine education professor who specializes in adolescent girls. "We did not want to exclude the possibility that there were groups of girls that also needed additional supports in order to be successful in school." But critics say that by focusing on both boys and girls, the draft report waters down the importance of the gender gap in education. "Their major argument is that gender is not the issue we are making it," said Chuck Morrison, who teaches sexuality in Portland schools and is a board member of Boys to Men, an advocacy group for boys. The 69-page report was researched by about a dozen people from private and public schools and agencies. It concludes that gender stereotypes have a big impact on academic achievement. It argues that if boys no longer aspired to tough guy ideals, and girls moved beyond the compliant feminine ideal, both sexes would reacher higher levels of academic achievement. The report also concludes that: n Students' mental health, and whether they are bullied or sexually harassed at school, impacts how they do academically; n Girls plan to attend college and graduate in greater numbers than boys; n Girls cluster in fields of study associated with women, such as education, social services and health, even though they do as well as boys in high school math and science. The task force noted that more study is needed to determine which boys and girls go on to college and why boys are opting out of college in larger numbers than girls. Lyn Brown, a task force member and associate professor of education and human development at Colby College, said the panel tried to look at how socioeconomic background intersects with gender in impacting students' academic achievement. "Poor boys experience masculinity in a different ways than rich boys, and the same for girls. Our recommendations need to reflect that," she said. David Vaughan, a marine biology teacher at Waynflete School in Portland and president of Boys to Men, said the report accurately pinpoints gender and socioeconomics as significant impacts on academic achievement. "They both require our attention," he said. Others said they were disappointed that the task force had strayed from its original focus on just boys. Stephen Andrew, a social worker and co-founder of the Men's Resource Center of Southern Maine, said the report blames the media for sensationalizing the achievement gap between boys and girls. "It stops the whole conversation," he said. Lynne Miller, an education professor at the University of Southern Maine, said the report tries to do too much. "Because it takes up gender equity instead of what is happening to boys, you don't get any clarity on any of the issues," she said. She said she would have liked the task force to focus on the social and economic issues of boys and how they are tied to academic performance. Deputy Education Commissioner Patrick Phillips said the panel struggled to reach a balance between the different political views surrounding the gender gap issue. He said the report is being reviewed by people outside of the task force and may be substantially altered when it is published in the next few months. "This issue is not controversy-free," Phillips said. "There were different perspectives on the significance of either doing a report on just boys or just on girls or doing both boys and girls. Everyone has a take on that." Staff Writer Beth Quimby can be contacted at 791-6363 or at:
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