Title IX for our boys: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USATODAY

In The K-12 Implosion, an Encounter books "broadside", I suggest that public education may be in trouble. The problem is not so much that public schools are getting worse -- overall, they're more or less stagnant. We've been putting more money in and not getting better results out.

The problem for public schools, instead, is that the alternatives are getting better. Not long ago, there weren't many other choices: You could send your kids to a traditional private school (either religious, or socially upscale, usually) but that was about it.

Now there are other choices. Large urban school districts are losing students at an alarming pace. They're going to charter schools, to online schools and to home-schooling. But now there's another reason for parents to think about moving their children out of public schools -- the boys. It seems that teachers -- overwhelmingly female -- just might be prejudiced against boys and it's hurting their grades.

Stereotyped as "naughty," boys quickly learn that they are thought of as dumber and more trouble than girls. And that has consequences. "When boys aged seven to eight were told that they tend to do worse at school than girls, they scored more poorly in reading, writing and mathematics tests than those who were not primed for failure. And telling children aged six to nine before a test that both sexes were expected to do equally well improved the boys' performance." But the message that boys get is that they're not as smart.

The way boys are treated in K-12 also impacts how they do with regard to college. According to a recent study of male college enrollment, it's not academic performance, but discipline that holds boys back. "Controlling for these non-cognitive behavioral factors can explain virtually the entire female advantage in college attendance for the high school graduating class of 1992, after adjusting for family background, test scores and high school achievement." Boys are disciplined more because teachers -- overwhelmingly female -- find stereotypically male behavior objectionable. Girls are quieter, more orderly, and have better handwriting. The boys get disciplined more, suspended more and are turned off of education earlier.

Female teachers also give boys lower grades, according to research in Britain. Female teachers grade boys more harshly than girls, though, interestingly, male teachers are seen by girls as treating everyone the same regardless of gender. More and more, it's looking like schools are a hostile environment for boys.

One solution, as William Gormley, a professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, has suggested here in the past, is to hire more male teachers. As Gormley notes, Stanford University professor Thomas Dee found that "boys perform better when they have a male teacher, and girls perform better when they have a female teacher." Yet our K-12 teachers are overwhelmingly female -- only 2% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers are male and only 18% of elementary and middle-school teachers are.

As parents become more and more concerned about their children's futures and educations -- public schools that want to hold on to students or new-model schools that want to lure them away -- may want to boost the number of male teachers on staff. Doing so may be crucial not only to their students' futures, but to their own.

And if they don't, it may be time for state and federal officials to look into this gender imbalance. If schoolteachers were overwhelmingly male and girls were suffering as a result, there would be a national outcry and Title IX-style gender equity legislation would be touted. Why should we do less when boys are the ones suffering?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

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