Our nation’s public schools are failing black boys and men, and that’s a “national catastrophe,” says a new report from the Council of the Great City Schools, “A Call for Change: The Social and Educational Factors Contributing to the Outcomes of Black Males in Urban Schools.”

Just 9 percent of African-American boys in eighth grade are proficient readers (compared to about a third of white males), according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress statistics. The average black boy whose family is not poor has reading and math scores similar to or lower than the average white boy who comes from a low- income family.

These grim educational statistics prefigure even worse things to come: In 2008, black men over age 18 were just 5 percent of the college-student population but 36 percent of the prison population. But it’s not just race. Black girls consistently outperform their male peers. That means it can’t be just genetics or family: Black boys and girls come from the same families.

Maybe African-American boys are canaries in the coal mine. As the most vulnerable boys, they are bearing the brunt of a larger problem — schools that fail boys and men in general.

In 2006, Beverly M. Klecker published an analysis of the gender gap in NAEP test scores. She found something remarkable: A gender gap favoring girls — visible in the fourth grade — grows worse with each passing year.

Teen boys now study less, get lower grades, get in trouble more and drop out of high school more often than girls. The decline in male high-school-graduation rates explains about half of another huge gender gap: college degrees.

An October report by the American Council on Education found that women earned 62 percent of all associate’s degrees and 57 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 2007.

For women, the American dream (each generation better off than the last) holds true: 49 percent of 25- to 34-year-old women have at least a two-year college degree, compared to 37 percent of their mothers’ generation (55- to 64-year-olds). But young men are losing ground: Just 39 percent of men age 25 to 34 have at least a two-year college degree, compared to 43 percent of their fathers’ generation.

Why are schools failing boys so badly? No one knows for sure, but a simple answer may lie in the books we ask boys to read.

In 2003, Beverley Freedmon conducted focus groups with boys to try to find out why they were slipping behind. The boys complained that they hated not being given a choice about what to read, and they wanted more action stories and science fiction.

Like other males, boys are intensely status-conscious, aware of who is “on top” and who is “one down,” and they’re acutely anxious to avoid being the latter.

They hunger for achievements that signal successful maleness (and will find it in violence and misbehavior if that’s all the maleness society provides), and they avoid activities that get labeled as “female” because, well you can’t achieve status among boys by excelling at girly things.

Let’s face it, reading has become a “girly thing” in our schools. It’s taught at earlier and earlier ages, when girls start out with certain developmental advantages. The girls start out ahead, and the boys are then given books that bore them and are encouraged to read by overwhelmingly female teachers (and by families that overwhelmingly lack fathers in low-income communities).

We have a gendered problem; we need to abandon genderless ideologies to find new solutions.

Here’s a simple idea for a teacher (or a parent) to try: Create “boys” and “girls” bookshelves. (Put the same books on each, just make sure each shelf includes adventure stories, sports and science fiction.) Here’s another bigger step: Separate the boys and girls into separate reading groups. Let the boys compete against other boys to see who reads the best out loud, or who reads the most books in a month.

Don’t neglect the girls, whose success we can all be proud of. But right now we have an educational emergency for boys, especially African-American boys.

What we are doing isn’t working, so let’s try something new: letting boys be boys.