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Is there a "boy crisis" in American education today? After a quarter-century of efforts to improve girls' achievement, a growing chorus of authors, educators, and the media say boys are falling behind in school and college. But are boys really in trouble?  In September 2006, Education Sector brought together experts on all sides to discuss this timely topic.

The discussion featured:

Thomas Toch, Co-director, Education Sector (introductions)
Ruth Wattenberg, Editor, American Educator and American Federation of Teachers (as moderator)
Harry Holzer, Professor of Public Policy, Georgetown University
Sara Mead, Senior Policy Analyst, Education Sector
Richard Whitmire, Editorial Writer, USA Today, and author of the article "Boy Trouble"

Transcript

Tom Toch: I was walking my dog this morning, past a polling place, where an election worker was putting a sign in the ground for Ben Cardin, a Democratic senatorial candidate from Maryland. My dog, who's a very friendly guy, growled at her fairly aggressively and she responded by asking "Is that a Republican dog?"

In fact, Education Sector has no dogs in partisan political fights, but we do have one in the debate that has been raging over the so-called "boy crisis." Over the last nine months or so, there have been articles in Esquire, Newsweek, and other national publications suggesting that, in fact, boys are in academic crisis in America. True to our goal at Education Sector of shedding light on controversy—more light than heat—we embarked on a study that was published in June that attempted to look at the evidence as carefully and as fairly as possible, and came to the conclusion that, in fact, boys are behind in some measures, but the notion that a crisis exists around school age boys in America is perhaps overdrawn. That report, "The Truth About Boys and Girls," not surprisingly attracted much praise and considerable criticism and we are fortunate today to have a number of thoughtful voices in that debate with us to shed more light on this important and albeit controversial issue. What we will do today is have a moderated conversation for about an hour and then we will have hopefully generated enough enthusiastic interest on the part of all of you in the audience to have a conversation with the panelists.

We are very fortunate to have Harry Holzer with us. He is a professor and associate dean of public policy at Georgetown here in Washington, where he will be the acting dean this fall if he isn't already. He is also a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute and he has served as Chief Economist for the U.S. Department of Labor. He has written widely on young and adolescent boys of color. His most recent book is Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men, which he coauthored with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner.

Sara Mead is Senior Policy Analyst at Education Sector and she is the person who has incited all of this controversy. She writes widely on a wide range of topics including federal education policy, school choice, charter schools, and early-childhood education. She is the author of our June report, which as I said before, is entitled "The Truth About Boys and Girls."

To Sara's left is Richard Whitmire. Richard is an editorial writer for USA Today where he writes widely on education issues. Earlier this year, he contributed one of the articles I had alluded to earlier in The New Republic called "Boy Trouble." He is currently working on a book, on leave from USA Today, to write a book by the same title which will be published by Doubleday.

To moderate today's debate is Ruth Wattenberg, the highly regarded editor of American Educator, which, as you probably all know, is the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers. Ruth has had a long and distinguished career at the AFT. Among other things she has been the organization's Director of Educational Issues, the arm of the AFT responsible for helping teachers and their unions improve teaching and schools. With that, I will turn the program over to Ruth and wish you good luck.

Ruth Wattenberg: By way of introducing myself just a bit more and the issue as well, I want to start with two anecdotes. One is, I have a boy, and I don't want him to be in crisis. Two, actually I have three anecdotes, I have a girl and I don't want her to be upset by her brother in crisis. More uniquely, my husband was involved about 15 years ago in producing the report that I'm sure many of you have read and heard about called "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America" which was put out by the AEW about 15 years ago. The call on that report was, as I recall, was that boys were so disruptive and, shall I say, unpleasant if they were neglected in class that there was a tendency among teachers to call on them and to neglect the girls, and so girls were getting neglected. Second, that schools, with their focus on competition on facts, were not well organized to tap girls' special talent and collaboration and so on, and then least controversially, that girls were not being encouraged to enter math, science and technology professions. There was a lot of attention to this and to similar reports and the issue of girls really did rise on the policy agenda.

Most recently, I think John Glenn just chaired a report on how can we continue to help women to enter these fields of math, science, and so on. I know from my work with teachers that this issue of not neglecting girls and calling on them really is something that has entered the bloodstream; I mean teachers work on it. I say all this not just to get a laugh, but because I think these kinds of conversations really do end up having an impact. There is a bit of a tendency in Washington, with the back and forth of reports, to think that these are interesting debates—they're fun to have and not a lot actually happens because of our words, but I think on this issue things do happen because of our words. People are very interested in it, it gets picked up, as everybody here has discovered, when you talk about it, people listen. So, this should be fun, interesting, and I expect it will have some impact.

On logistics, what I'm going to do is throw out a few opening questions to get us started. As the conversation takes off and picks up momentum, I will pull back out of it and let the panelists talk to each other. I retain the right to re-enter whenever I feel like it, especially if they are not moving along or not being civil. And I promise, that no matter how aggressive or disruptive Richard and Harry get, I will not neglect Sara.

I'm going to start with Sara and just ask you to quickly tell us what drew you to this problem and explain yourselves with regards to this issue before we get into more of the meat.

Sara Mead: Sure, and I hope I'm not being called on first because you don't think I can hold my own against Harry and Richard, hopefully I can prove that's not the case. The reason I got into this was really a result of all the news articles and coverage we saw earlier this year about how there's a boy crisis in education, about how boys aren't doing well in school. The reason I got into it actually wasn't so much around the gender issues, as the fact that there were things related to other issues of education policy that I knew more about that came across as inaccurate to me in terms of some comments about changes in class size over time or the impact of testing on children. So I started thinking that some of these facts don't seem right to square with my knowledge and experience and I wonder what the evidence in general about some of these other conclusions are being made said, so sort of really on a lark. One of the nice things about working for a place like Education Sector is that you get to follow your larks. I started looking at some of the data that was out there about boys' achievement and girls' achievement. I was actually really surprised because I didn't see a lot of areas where it looked like boys' achievement was actually falling. I saw a lot of areas where both boys and girls were improving and girls were improving faster than boys, but I didn't see a lot of areas where boys' achievement was falling.

That sort of struck me as surprising because the tone that I definitely thought was coming across if I had just sort of been reading this and not looking into the data, was this idea that boys were falling behind, so that surprised me. I also noticed that there seemed to be a lot of contradictions in some of the conversation about why this was happening and what we should do about it. One person would say the real problem is that there's lack of structure and we need to have more structure and discipline in our classrooms for boys, and another person would say that the problem is that boys really can't be forced to sit still all day and they need to move around. While those things aren't inherently contradictory, there seem to be some contradictions there and they seemed, probably not surprisingly, to match with some other broader educational and philosophical and political views, in some cases of the people presenting them, and so I decided to look more into this data.

Wattenberg: We'll come back to those contradictions. Richard?

Richard Whitmire: Well, this issue of a gender gap is really an international issue. The OECD keeps something of a report card on this; you can actually compare the United States to other Western countries. If you look at the list, we're roughly in the middle; there are a lot of countries with larger gaps and some with smaller gaps. What seems unique about the United States is that we're just getting around to even having this discussion about whether there's a problem. I think if you had an educator from England, New Zealand, Australia or Canada walk in here and saw what's on our agenda, they would be baffled because they're several years beyond this. Why are we in the infancy? I really don't know, but I do know that I have to have an answer for that by the time I turn in my chapters, maybe some of the people in the audience can help me during the Q and A.

I suspect it's just a matter of educators are not aware of it, and I don't really fault them for that. Walk into any principal's office and you can see that principal has a pretty full plate. They've got state accountability, federal accountability; they're primarily trying to close racial learning gaps, which is the right priority. My concern about that would be, based on what I'm learning about gender gaps is that you've got to work on the gender gaps to close the racial gap. I noticed an article in the Chicago Tribune just this past week about a suburban Chicago district that decided to look at the gender gaps in its district. They put together an impressive task force, turned out a 107 page report—we're talking about every grade, every grade earned, and every subject. As part of that, they surveyed 270 teachers in this district and asked, "Do you see a gender gap?" 85 percent said, "no gender gap." Only three teachers said that they thought maybe girls were doing better than boys. Then they released the report, in their view, in their words they said there was a "surprising gender gap," that they found. Girls were earning better grades in every single subject and in every grade. In the three years they were able to look at this, there was a widening of the gap in each year.

I raise this study for two reasons, one, to give an example that teachers are generally not aware of it. The other is that this school district is Wilmette, which may sound familiar to some of you, because Wilmette feeds New Triere High School, which is probably in the top 10 of the most accomplished high schools in the entire country, as far as how students do, funding, average household income ($124,000 in the Wilmette district). If this is happening in Wilmette, I can pretty much guarantee that this is happening in everybody's hometown. I think they're just not looking. So I think Sara is right in her report to say that focus should be on minority and poor kids, where the gaps are the most severe, but I think it's a mistake to try and limit it to that. Because a) it's not limited to that and b) it's school districts such as Wilmette that have the resources to dig into this, see what's happening, experiment with solutions, which they're already doing, and the people most in need of those solutions are 15 miles away in Chicago Public Schools, where the gender gaps are far more serious. I feel like I also have to answer the "so what" question, the gender gap is there, does it really matter?

Wattenberg: But can we come back to that?

Whitmire: Sure.

Wattenberg: Harry, what brings you into this?

Harry Holzer: Well, my focus has been predominantly, not exclusively, but predominantly on young minority men, especially young African-American men, and the difficulties they have in the job market. Of course, the difficulties they have in the job market relate to things that happen earlier on and that don't happen earlier on in school and in terms of getting into the job market.

What really caught my attention about five or six years ago we've known for a long time—some of the terrible numbers that are out there. Probably some of you have heard the statistic that one out of every three young black men in the United States total is involved in the criminal justice system, about 12 percent are incarcerated. That's between the ages of 16 and 34. About 12 percent are incarcerated, about twice that number are on parole or probation. About one-third of all young black men will do time. Of course, if you're looking at the young men who don't go on to college, the young men from lower income families, those numbers are much higher. That's very disturbing. We've known that, though, for awhile. We know that young black men lag dramatically behind in terms of employment rates compared to young white men, young Latino men, even with same education levels.

What really caught my attention maybe five or six years ago, was what the trend lines looked like for young black men and how much worse they are for young black men than young black women and for all other groups. In the 1990s, a lot of us were focused on welfare reform. That was really the most controversial issue on the labor market. As a result of welfare reform—and it was very controversial and a lot of people, including me, predicted much worse outcomes than occurred—other policies ended up pushing and pulling a lot of young black women into the labor market—their employment rates improved dramatically, their schooling rates were improving. The same time you look for young black men, you saw downward trends over time—downward trends even in the 1990s. In the 1990s we had the strongest labor market in 30 years, dramatic demand for labor in many sectors, and it looked like black men were sharing in those improvements. I was at the Labor Department at the time, part of my job, every month when the numbers came out at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was to crow about these incredible numbers and how great they were and every demographic group you can think of had the lowest unemployment rates on record, all that was true. What a lot of us didn't notice was that the fraction of men showing up in these numbers was declining, pretty dramatically. Number one, because so many were incarcerated, they didn't show up in the population numbers. Number two, because so many of them were dropping out of the labor force altogether. You drop out of the labor force, you don't show up in the unemployment rates. There were some improvements in the '90s, but if you take a longer look the peak number at the end of the '70s compared to the peak in '80s compared to the peak in the '90s, that long term decline continued to occur in spite of these positive labor market conditions and in spite of the progress you saw for young black women. That was what caught me and said: "This is really stunning. These trend lines are going in the wrong directions." Black men have been behind for awhile but they are falling worse and worse behind along all these critical dimensions and we really have to focus on this and make it more of a national discussion and priority than it has been.

Wattenberg:  Let me go back to Sara and say, what are the facts as you see them? You said there weren't too many differences when you looked at them, Richard clearly disagrees. What do you see that shows boys are doing fine? Is it particular an African-American boy problem or a minority boy problem? Or to what extent is it both?

Mead: I think one of the things that is dangerous when you have a conversation like this is that there are multiple questions involved when you ask about how boys and girls are doing, and whether boys are doing better than girls or girls are doing better than boys.

One question you need to ask is how has each group done relative to their performance over time? How are boys doing today relative to boys 20 or 30 years ago? That's particularly important if you want to understand why something is happening. The second question you want to ask is how are boys and girls today doing, relative to each other? The third question you want to ask is how the gap or non-gap between boys and girls has changed over time. Finally you want to ask how do all these things relate to where we want boys and girls to be, as we want all youngsters to have the skills they need to compete in the economy. Then, within that, you want to look at particular subgroups such as African-American men, who are a group that I think we do need to be very concerned about academically.

So I went in that order in terms of looking at the different data, and there are a lot of academic measures where boys have improved relative to where they were 20 or 30 years ago. NAEP long-term test scores, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is a federal assessment that's used to measure nationally how we're doing educationally. I think that for measuring long-term trends and how boys and girls are doing academically, it's probably the best measure because it's been consistent for over 30 years, it's applied to a national sample, it's not anecdotal like the data Richard was talking about, it's a national sample, and it's the same test. Looking at that, we find that the youngest groups of boys have improved their reading considerably, particularly since the late '80s. Also, across the board boys, as well as girls, have improved substantially in math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress during that time. So those are areas where boys are improving.

Other positive indicators: more boys are taking advanced college-preparatory classes in school, pre-calculus, calculus, science classes. About four times as many boys are taking AP tests than were taking them 20 years ago. Crime and substance abuse rates are down, relatively speaking. More boys are planning to attend some sort of post-secondary instruction—from vocational school through four-year college through graduate degrees—than were about 20 years ago. A bigger percentage of boys, although this is a smaller change over time, are actually going straight into college from graduating from high school than they were in the early '70s. There are a lot of ups and downs in that particular statistic over time in terms of the percentage of boys who go from high school right into college, but there are a clearly greater percentage of boys doing that than in the early '70s. These are all sort of positive changes where boys are doing better than they were in the past.

When you try to look at an area where boys are doing worse than the past, there are very few things that you actually find in terms of these big national data samples. The major one that you find is that high school aged boys are doing less well in reading than they were in the mid-'80s when they were doing the best on the NAEP. They're doing about the same as they were in the '70s. There's also an increase in boys diagnosed with special education needs. So when we're talking about this notion of a boy crisis, what we're really talking about is that there are gaps between boys and girls that may not have existed in the past.

We can find a lot of areas where both boys and girls are improving, but girls are improving much more rapidly. For example, four times as many boys are now taking AP tests, but five times as many girls are compared to 20 years ago—so while fewer girls used to take AP tests, now more girls are taking AP tests. Similarly, you've got more boys going into college right out of high school, but you've got many more girls going into college right out of high school and girls have surpassed boys on that measure. I think it's important to realize that these are gaps that are emerging because of improvements for both genders and specifically improvements for girls, not because the situation of boys has gotten worse relative to where it was in the past. That's a different kind of problem. Yes, we can say that the economy has changed and that we want boys to be doing as well as girls are doing because of these economic factors that make education more important for both genders. But, girls increasing faster than boys is a different problem.

Wattenberg: Sara, do you dispute what Richard has said about the finding in Wilmette and are you saying that that is actually a non-representative sample, or would you say that what he's finding in Wilmette is true—that boys are falling behind but they're behind because girls have moved faster?

Mead: I think Wilmette is clearly, for many reasons, a non-representative sample of public schools in the United States, but I do think there are areas where boys are not doing as well as girls. Some of these things are very longstanding, though, so that's one of the things that I worry about when we talk about this idea of a "boy crisis." If you go back to the earliest NAEP data from 1973, you have about the same sized gaps in reading achievement between boys and girls as you do today for middle and high school students. There's a much bigger gap for elementary school students. Elementary school boys in the 1970s were about 13 points behind girls on the NAEP and now they're about five points behind, and both boys and girls are doing much better in elementary school reading than they were in the 1970s. Cognitive scientists and social psychologists have been studying gender gaps and different cognitive skills for a long time. This history of a literacy gap or a verbal skills gap between men and women is something that's existed for a long time, including in a context where men were doing much better than women economically, in terms of life outcomes. I think that's a factor that's very important to keep in mind when we consider what these gaps mean for us.

Wattenberg: Richard, what's wrong with that?

Whitmire: Well, in a way, nothing. I mean, Sara has the data in her report. There are bumps up in fourth grade reading performance. I come by this gray hair naturally—I can remember 10 years ago reading the reports saying that we've got these test score bump-ups in fourth grade, this is fantastic, when these kids get to middle school and high school, there's going to be no problem! Well, these kids have got to middle school and they have got to high school and it doesn't look all that good. You don't apply to college from fourth grade. If you did, education reformers would be on the edge of victory here. The only place you can look is high school seniors.

Let me give you one quick fact on high school seniors, from the NAEP, which I don't even think is the best indicator here. This is the Federal NAEP, high school boys, who grew up in a family that had at least one parent with a college education, 23 percent of those boys score below basic in reading. Almost a quarter from these better-off families score below basic in reading. These gender gaps primarily are verbal gender gaps. We can look at, for example, are they getting bigger for 17 year olds on the NAEP? Yes, modestly. Is that relevant? I don't think it is and I'll tell you why. Because I think our society has changed so much. If you go back 15 or 20 years and look at what a first-grader was supposed to be able to absorb in verbal skills, it is now what a four-year-old is supposed to be able to absorb at the end of Head Start year. Everything has been accelerated in verbal skills and this has had a huge impact on boys, whose verbal skills, on average, develop about four years later than girls. By the time you get to, say, fourth or fifth grade, these boys are feeling impossibly behind. It's something that accelerates.

These little clues about society getting more verbally oriented are littered everywhere. We've gotten so used to them. For example, look at the math questions on the SAT. When I took the SAT, there was a sheet of calculations. Today, they're all word problems. A professor at the University of Maryland did a study of the Maryland State Algebra Exam and found that the verbal context of these questions was more difficult than the algebra question itself. I could go on and on, but the point is that what's happening in the U.S. and the reason that it's happening internationally is that the world around boys has changed. It didn't used to matter that there was a gap, and now there is. Whether this gap is up or down one or two points, to me, it's not relevant.

Wattenberg: Because, absolutely, there is a substantial difference?

Whitmire: Oh, there's a huge difference between them. On that figure that I just gave you about high school seniors scoring below basic on high school reading; 23 percent boys, it's 7 percent girls.

Wattenberg: And you would agree with that Sara? That's a fact? That it may not be new, and trend lines may not be different, but that's a fact there is a big difference and maybe it matters a lot more now.

Mead: Yes.

Wattenberg: For black boys, new, old, same, they're also being affected by the rise in standards. Because that's part of what you're saying—the rise in academic standards and the rise of standards in the economy creates a new problem.

Holzer: Before I get to the issue of black boys, I want to position myself in the debate between Sara and Richard. I'm going to position myself somewhere in between—which probably means I'm going to catch fire from both of them. That's okay.

I'm a little reluctant to use the word "crisis" just yet. If you put black boys and low-income boys in a separate category, what is the situation for white boys, Latino boys, or middle-income boys of any racial group, how are they doing compared to girls? I'm a little reluctant to use the word crisis because I think we don't fully understand the causes or the consequences. On the other hand, I think there is plenty of cause for concern for the boys. The numbers that Sara and Richard kicked around are all accurate. The one that sticks out in my mind is what fraction of kids going to any college are female versus male. Among whites, about 57 percent or 58 percent of freshmen entering college are girls, about 43 percent are boys. In the black community, it's almost 2-to-1. Now, these are very large gaps, but even for whites and for the middle-class these are big gaps. Now if you said, well it doesn't matter because maybe boys can do something else. That's why a couple generations ago, we didn't worry that much that girls weren't going to college, because the view was—that we no longer hold—the view was that girls do other things: they get married, they stay home, they have kids in the post-war baby boom period. We no longer hold that view.

You might say that maybe it doesn't matter that much for the boys; maybe there are plenty of jobs out there that they can get that don't require college for them to do well. That's simply not true anymore. Now, I don't believe that everybody has to go to a four-year college, but I do believe that if you want to be part of the U.S. middle class, it's harder and harder to do that if you don't get some sort of post-secondary education and boys aren't getting it. These jobs by which males historically entered the middle class without higher education, there still are some—construction sector, high-end manufacturing, and transportation—as the baby boomers retire, there will be some demand there, but overall, there aren't enough of those jobs to lift people up. The fact that there's such a large developing gap between the fraction of boys and girls going on to college and even finishing college, that is a cause for concern that needs to be on the table as we explore it more and understand the causes and the consequences of it.

For black boys, these gaps are all magnified. I mentioned the incarceration numbers—one-third of all young black men are involved with the criminal justice system. That's just so stunning, compared to any other demographic group, compared to low-income, young whites or Latinos. If you look at the employment rates—if you're out of school, high school education or less, about 40 percent to 50 percent of black men work. If you include the men that are incarcerated, it's at about 40 percent. The same numbers for young white and Latino men are about 80 percent. These are just stunningly large gaps, and as I said, the trends go in the wrong direction. If you said, "How much of this is starting earlier, in the school years, which is what this conversation is really about?" I think it does. For example, I just looked at the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the NLSY, there's a 1979 cohort they followed over time and another cohort 20 years later. Every demographic group shows improvements in high school graduation rates, much more so for the girls than the boys, but the rates are flat for the young black men. Thirty percent dropping out rates in these data sets, and that's probably an understatement because some of the numbers coming out of the administrative data look much worse than that. So, the trends are either stagnant or going in the wrong direction for these young boys. They look down the road, they see what's happening to their fathers, brothers, and uncles in the labor market or with incarceration. It seems like these young men disconnect from school and from work at very early ages, at 10 or 12, they see a very bleak future and they disconnect and go an alternative route, which we can talk about later.

Wattenberg: Richard, you wanted to get in?

Whitmire: Yeah, I wanted mostly to agree with Harry, but then expand on it. It's not just inner-city kids that we're talking about here who need those degrees. I think if you want to look at this subject you have to get out of Washington and set aside the NAEP. Go look at states and cities and individual schools and towns, that's where they test kids every year. They know their kids, they're testing all their kids and they have local concerns. Go to Maine—it couldn't be more opposite from what you're talking about, almost entirely white. States like Maine are having some of the biggest concerns and they've devoted almost a year-and-a-half to studying what's going on with their boys. Well, why are they concerned? I called the head of labor market statistics for the Maine Department of Labor. He said, well, look at towns like Millinocket. Millinocket had Northern Paper Company up there, employing 5,000 people and it's now down to 500. They're losing their youth up there, but they're not just losing it in Millinocket, they're losing it in Maine, and Maine's concerned about their population drain. So, what's the connection to education? They did a study of what happens to graduates who go through the University of Maine system, an incredible number of graduates stayed in the state of Maine. So, are they concerned that the University of Maine population is about 65 or 66 percent female? Yes, because they're losing their males. It's the kids that Harry was talking about, but it's not just them.

Mead: I want to make a comment about the percentages of college enrollment because I think that's a huge issue that gets brought up time and time again in the debate. This issue that 58 percent of the students enrolled in college are women and 42 percent of them are men, I think we need to be a little bit careful of how we look at that, partly because of non-traditional age students, people who are older students going back to college, those are very predominantly women. That skews the ratio a little bit, it doesn't skew the ratio enough to cancel out reasons for concern, but it's something to keep in mind. The other piece, particularly since Richard is making an argument that this problem doesn't just affect minority students, that it doesn't just affect low-income students, if you look at Jackie King from the American Council on Education's data, if you look at the data where she takes out minority and low-income boys, you're basically at parity in terms of college enrollment. So if you want to hang the argument on concerns about college enrollment and you want to then say that we do need to be worried about white, middle-class boys, I would argue Jackie's data contradicts that. But, it does very much support this notion that we need to be concerned about low-income boys and African-American boys.

Holzer: Sara, I don't understand that, if I could jump in. As I said, the numbers show the 57 percent to 43 percent number is for whites, not for all groups. But, white boys and white girls are coming out of the same families, so if you control for family income, none of that should go away. I don't see how that gap could be explained because the family backgrounds are the same. The numbers I've seen do suggest that even among whites and Latinos, there is that gap. And it's real, within specific age groups for college enrollment and then college completion.

Mead: There is still a gap, but when she takes out low-income students, it goes down to parity. And I think that makes sense.

Whitmire: I wonder how many people in this room could name the state that two years ago became the first state to have more associate's, bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. graduates who were female than were male: Minnesota, a predominantly white state. Yes, this problem is far worse in the minority community, but it is not limited to that. I don't understand the insistence of saying it's that and only that. I just don't understand that. The school districts that I see who are looking at this, once again, like Wilmette, really have a lot to offer to the kinds of kids that Harry's studying here. There is a connection. I think the real tragedy here with inner-city black kids who are referred to special ed programs because of learning disabilities, because the teachers there haven't taught them how to read. And they don't make it out. It's a verbal skills gap, those kids get discouraged and they don't make it. Is there a connection between those kids and especially, white kids from blue-collar communities who are having so much trouble getting into and graduating from college? I can draw a direct line between those two things; I think you can learn from those two.

Wattenberg: Let me pose a question. It seems where there is agreement on the reality is that maybe it's not the trend lines going down, maybe it's not new, but what is new is that we have this new economy and you can't get far without a college degree or some post-secondary work that requires doing well in school earlier than ever before. That is a real problem, whether it's the tip of the iceberg or it's already a crisis, we can agree that's a new problem. The schools have been trying to alter themselves to relate to this new economy, so academic requirements are moving down, that's going to leave these less verbal boys behind a bit. So, what should we do? What should the schools be doing about that? Are the solutions gender specific? Gender/race specific? There are girls behind as well. Let me start with Sara, but that's the question I want to put to everybody.

Mead: I think there are two things that are important in terms of talking about solutions here. If you look at the work that Michael Holzman has done, he's a consultant for the Schott Foundation, looking specifically at the gaps that affect African-American boys in terms of high-school promotion and graduation, you see a huge correlation between the areas where these African-American boys are doing the least well and the states and cities that have lower performing educational systems. The suggestion that comes across from his data is that perhaps these boys who are African-American, which also may likely apply to low-income boys, are somehow more vulnerable to the generalized failure of the school systems they're in. I think that is something worth looking into, and I think when you look across the data more broadly in terms of the areas where we have the indicators to be the most concerned about boys in terms of special education, as Richard mentioned, and in terms of high school more generally. Those are areas where also, there is by no means reason to boast about how our schools are serving girls. Boys seem to be particularly affected by these areas where our schools are having problems anyway, so it seems that it would be reasonable and beneficial to put some energy into focusing on these areas where our schools are not doing as well as we'd like them to be. I think when you look at the fact that these younger boys are improving in reading and we've put lots of resources and reform efforts into improving reading instruction across the board in the lower grades, which we haven't done in the high school grades yet, that suggests success.

Wattenberg: Richard, let me go back to you for a minute. She's saying that one of the very successful efforts in education was to focus on reading for everybody, which has in fact brought everybody forward, but not enough for boys. Do you want to look at a gender-specific way to keep the trajectory of boys going up more steeply?

Whitmire: Well, it's part of my book. I try to find schools where boys and girls are doing equally well, and then I see why—a little reverse engineering. Now, I'm just starting out in this. These are the skills that I bring to this as a reporter; I just get out there and see these schools. I see three different kinds of schools that are doing this. I see some single gender classes being successful, like Woodward Avenue Elementary in DeLand, Fla. It's absolutely amazing. You walk into the kindergarten there—this is optional—there are all-boys, all-girls, and mixed classes there. You walk into the all-boys kindergarten and you see these boys walking a balance beam, while trying to throw a beanbag, while at the same time reciting their vocabulary lessons. This is just amazing. This is just one example of the pace this class moves. The improvement these kids made, the high scores they got out of this kindergarten are absolutely amazing. Does this mean that single-gender classes are the answer? No. There are a lot of them that are closing, experiments that don't do well. If you don't know what you're doing with single gender classes, if you just divide the subject—you're not going anywhere. Are there any traditional school districts that are doing this? Yes. How do they do it? Just ruthless attention to verbal skills. Every single kid in that school has an IEP, which normally is only done for special education kids. They don't let the boys slide, they just stick with it, and everything is verbal. It's total focus on verbal skills, and they do it. The boys actually are doing a little better than the girls, nothing statistically significant but that's still pretty amazing. The third one, I just visited a KIPP school—KEY Academy here in Washington. This turns everything upside down. If you think there's one formula that works for boys, KIPP will just demolish that whole myth. We're talking inner-city, middle school kids here who come out of DC public schools scoring very low. This is co-ed, they don't allow the boys to run around, this is nothing like the Florida school; it's very rigid, very disciplined, long hours and they're very successful. They're taking kids like the ones Harry writes about and performing educational miracles for them.

Wattenberg: So what's the lesson for schools? Do for every child what they need? If they need to throw beanbags, let them throw beanbags? If they need to be in a disciplined environment, let them be in a disciplined environment?

Whitmire: I would say recognize that the world has changed. Recognize that verbal skills matter now in a way that they didn't and they have to be incorporated in every subject. I followed this seventh grade boy around from subject to subject. We got to science class and at the end of class the teacher was explaining the homework. The homework was graded on a 16 point scale. Out of the 16 points, only four of those points were actually based on the science. The other 12 were sentence construction, vocabulary, it was all verbal skills. It saturates everything there.

Wattenberg: Harry—verbal skills and saturation?

Holzer: A couple of points. I want to interject a note of caution because I think our knowledge for what works for these kids is limited. I find a lot of the examples Richard mentioned promising and encouraging but many of them have not been rigorously evaluated. There've been many, many programs which look on the surface to make big gains, but then when you do it rigorously with random assignment methodology, all those miracles or silver bullets disappear or don't turn out as effective. Again, they're promising and we need to pursue them, but a note of caution before we have results. Also, in terms of verbal skills, I think the data actually suggests that the math skills are stronger predictors of later success in the job market. Verbal stuff clearly matters in a service economy, but math skills are an even stronger predictor of the kinds of analytics that matter in a wide variety of occupations, so I want those on the table as well.

Since my focus is about race, ethnicity, and class as well as gender, and we know that there are these very large achievement gaps between the races and the classes that open up very, very early, most of these gaps open up before kids first set foot in kindergarten and then they widen a little bit in the first few years. I'm not in favor of any real gender-specific remedies, although there are remedies that would disproportionately benefit some groups over others. I'm in favor, certainly, of very strong Pre-K programs to try to close those gaps early between black boys and white boys, between black girls and white girls, and between low-income kids and middle-income kids. I think strong Pre-K programs are a way to do that. We've learned in this country that programs aimed at poor people are never popular politically and never survive during a budget crunch, so universal programs like those in Georgia and Oklahoma, you wouldn't necessarily look to Georgia and Oklahoma in our stereotypes to find progressive solutions and yet there are universal Pre-K programs that are being evaluated and are showing real positive gains for young kids, so those are promising.

I think the gender thing for me, and the data starts to support this, is really in the adolescent and teen years where this divergence really starts to occur. So at those points in time, you need remedies that will disproportionately deal with the problems that boys face. On my list, what I like, and this is just to say that these are the ones that caught my attention: youth development, positive youth development efforts, mentoring, Big Brothers Big Sisters programs, those kinds of approaches I think will disproportionately help the boys, because they're disproportionately missing those positive adults in their middle school years. Then when they get to high school, I think it is very important that, during high school years, people perceive a range of avenues to success. I think these boys are pulling away because they don't think they're going to make it. They don't know anyone from their race and gender who has made it and they don't see the pathways to success. So we need to see multiple pathways to success. Some of those are going to lead to four-year colleges, some to two-year colleges, some of them are going to lead to apprenticeships or quicker movement into the labor market, and maybe sometime later people will return to a community college. I look at some of the career academies and vocational education. Voc. ed has a terrible reputation, some which is well deserved. People worry about tracking; we're going to track the minority kids at voc. ed.…I'm not in favor of old fashioned vocational education. I'm in favor of high quality career and technical education as one among many options kids face in high school, where they can see those pathways leading into the labor market. The career academies have managed to do that, they've been rigorously evaluated. The benefits for disadvantaged young boys are much greater in these evaluations than for disadvantaged young girls. They don't dramatically change performance in school, but they do dramatically change performance in the labor market. I think this could help change the perceptions that these boys have at age 10 or 12, because they'll start to see different pathways to success, one of which might be appropriate for them. I think it's that mindset that has to be changed to start to prevent some of the early disconnection that happens for these kids.

Whitmire: Just a quick add here—looking at the issue of the disappearance of male teachers, especially in middle school. This Wilmette survey, they found 18 male teachers. They started looking at how they recruited male teachers. It's pretty interesting especially I would say reading teachers at seventh grade, to have a male figure there, I think could make a huge difference.

Mead: I just want to go back a little bit into what Harry said. I agree with everything he said in terms of what are some of these issues and what we can do to address them and where these problems actually emerge in terms of boys in middle school and high school.

One of the areas where we don't know enough and that we need to support is research that will give us a better understanding as to what extent we know there are developmental things going on with kids at that age—we know there are also school things going on at that age, and there are social and cultural things impacting kids at that age—and there's a real need for research to help us untangle some of those different factors. One thing in terms of the issues that are impacting younger boys is that in addition to not seeing good prospects for themselves going ahead, we see a lot of boys getting to that position, and girls as well, without the skills developed in elementary school that are necessary for them to do well in the middle school curriculum and the high school curriculum and that's also a huge factor in pushing them out of the schools. I think the elementary school results that we have seen are much more important than Richard would argue. I also think in your Indian River example, based on your New Republic article, what's going on there is much more prominent in the elementary school and the results that are in the high school really aren't that impressive relative to what's going on in the elementary school.

Whitmire: I'll find out when I visit there next week. I know that applying those standards to the middle school, the scores look pretty good there. I'll have to look at the high school scores.

Wattenberg: When you think about the gaps, what is the actual gap between black boys and black girls as you head through the trajectory?

Holzer: I don't know all the test score numbers and I'll defer to the other panelists who know better. I know that high school graduation rates among the boys lag seriously behind girls. In labor right now, of course, historically, men always worked more than women. What's particularly shocking is that a lot of the young women that are African-American become single moms at a very early age; usually that takes them out of the labor force. Yet, even given that fact, they're still working more than men at early ages.

Wattenberg: One of your proposals, at the high school level, is to help boys get focused on other ways to succeed than just going to four-year colleges. I want to contrast that to something Sara said in her paper which is that we've succeeded in sending some positive messages to women over the past few years saying that the job market has opened up, discrimination is going away, if you want to succeed the thing you should do is go to college and to get an education. One of the problems we're seeing with young men is that they're not getting this message that the labor market has changed and that they need to really work hard and do well academically if they want to succeed. I want to know if you can send that message while also pushing the more career oriented education. Are those contradictory or complimentary?

Holzer: I think part of the message we want to send is that some kind of post-secondary education is good for almost everybody. Whether that post-secondary might be a two-year college or a trade school or an apprenticeship, some kind of post-secondary training is necessary if not sufficient to have a chance at achieving a middle class lifestyle. The other thing is that even in a lot of these good paying blue-collar jobs: machinist jobs, construction jobs, a lot of the better paying jobs in the healthcare sector, they also require good basics. You hear stories of apprenticeship programs in the construction crafts and other fields opening up in some of our major areas, and they can't fill them. They can't find the job applicants, partly because kids aren't applying for them—too many kids are in prison or substance abuse problems—or partly because when they do apply, they can't meet the basic standards. So even for those good-paying, non-four-year college jobs, the basics are more important than they used to be, and that needs to be part of the message as well to prevent that contradiction.

Whitmire: You can even put numbers behind that. If you go to the National Association of Manufacturers, they do a critical skill report. They survey employers then ask, "Over the next three years, what are the skills that you are going to demand?" The top one is tech skills, but just a hair underneath is reading and writing. Now, keep in mind, this is for manufacturing jobs, and this is what they're not seeing in people applying for these jobs. Like it or not, college is the new high school. When you go to the airport, is it really necessary for the person behind the Enterprise counter to have a bachelor's degree? Maybe not, but that's where Enterprise has found it useful to set a threshold. Because that's where they're going to get the kind of person who has the verbal skills that they need. Like it or not, the world has changed around here.

Holzer: Just to follow up on that, in manufacturing, and it's more true there than in other sectors, the good paying jobs that used to pay well for unskilled work, either they've been replaced by technology or they've been shipped overseas. The ones that have stayed are the ones requiring higher analytical requirements than they might have even 10 years ago, much less 20 years ago. That's a trend you see in lots of places.

Mead: Part of the issue that we're talking about is a more general high school performance issue; that kids, regardless of gender, who have graduated from high school don't have the level of skills that they need. We have these very high remediation rates in college and there's concern that high school doesn't have the rigor it should have.

In terms of the arguments about what messages women have gotten about college, I think it's important to say that women have gotten both a positive and negative message. They've gotten a positive message about what options are open to them, but also a danger message about how the social safety net is much less strong than it used to be. There is a big expectation that you may have to support a family on your own and you can't expect someone else to help you. I think there's an increasing number of young women—particularly if you look at the study with the women in Baltimore—especially in disadvantaged communities, where they realize it's fairly improbable that they'll be in a traditional arrangement, and if they want to have children it may have to be something to do on their own. I think all those things put a message across to young women that it's dangerous for them not to get a high level of education and high level of education quality, and I don't know that young men get the same messages about the risks of not doing well, particularly young men who are not from the white middle-class background.

Whitmire: I agree. I found the same thing; I was at a high school in Oregon where they have these multiple valedictorians, of course, in this case they were all girls. But they had lined up interviews, I had about 20 minutes with each one and the message came through very strong. They had gotten it even from women's magazines and their moms and their neighbors that: "You can't count on a man. You're going to have to make it on your own." I was surprised how strong that came through.

What we did with [Ruth's] husband's report 10 years ago… the data behind that report is a little controversial, and the urgency of the time was also controversial. I wrote that report with complete vigor—I have two girls and I wanted those girls to have equal opportunity here! But my point is that boys now, today, look far worse than we thought girls looked at the time. To me, it's a fairness issue. It seems like boys deserve a shot here. We've got to look at why they're not getting this message, because they're not getting this message and it's directly contrary to their economic interests.

Mead: I do think, though, that there's a difference between saying they're not getting this message and saying they're not getting the same quality of education as girls, or that schools are somehow mis-serving boys educationally, which in some ways is not particularly helpful because it sends the notion that somehow schools are discriminating against boys and leads people towards buying into some of these solutions, which, as Harry mentioned, are not rigorously evaluated or are not necessarily based on a sound interpretation of the neuroscience research and could be a very bad way for schools to be spending a lot of time and energy.

Whitmire: See, you and I are polar opposites here. I think the schools are mis-serving these boys. If you look at the percent of boys, especially in inner-city schools, who end up labeled with learning disabilities simply because the teachers, the schools, and the families failed to teach them to read, they're being mis-served. I don't know how else you could look at this.

Mead: I agree with you on that. I agree with you completely on the special education issue, but I don't think it does anybody a great service to look at it purely as a boys' issue because we're also misdiagnosing lots and lots of girls. If you go into D.C., there are lots of girls who are mislabeled as having learning disabilities, too. There are also issues in terms of mislabeling, for example, girls with ADD, diagnosing them with depression and things like that. Talking about these as a gender issue, when they're really just a bad job of educating our special education students more generally—this is an issue we've done some work on—is really a travesty nationwide, I don't think it's particularly helpful to talk about it this way.

Holzer: Can I get one more comment?

Wattenberg: You'll get one more chance to comment before I go to the audience for questions. I'm going to frame it a little bit, and if you want to ignore my framing and deliver your final comments, you can do that. I was saying to the panelists that I was at a panel the other day and at the end of it, the moderator asked if anyone had changed their mind and I think one person out of 90 had changed their mind. But I wanted to say that I did actually learned something from this and that's what I want to posit. We've talked a lot about this in education, that the needs of kids and the needs of the job market have changed so dramatically, schools have really tried to upgrade what they demand of kids. What I'm struck by is that that effort to upgrade has been fairly successful, but there are a lot of kids who aren't reaching it, and it seems to be quite disproportionate that boys aren't reaching it. Whether that's the schools' fault or if it's a social message fault, what can schools do about it? It does fall to the schools one way or another to try to deal with it. So my closing question, if that's true that boys and girls need to be pushed and lifted more toward these higher standards, what specifically would each of you say that schools ought to be doing, and would you say they be doing that specifically with boys or should they be doing them with everybody, but you think boys would have a disproportionately positive impact?

Whitmire: Well, since I already laid out three school types that I thought were succeeding, I'll use my time to deliver a bit of a screed against the Department of Education. Harry pointed out that there is limited research on this, well, why is there limited research on this? The Department of Education is about to release final regulations on how public schools can do single gender education, we're about to launch this massive experiment into single gender classes, but try to find any Department of Education research out there, especially high quality research, that tells schools how to do this. They're going to be doing it all on their own. What is the Department of Education doing? They're telling us, well, here is the average public school compared to the average charter school, here's the average public school compared to the average private school. This is a massive, expensive research project that tells us absolutely nothing. Where is any quality research that tells us how to bring these boys along? Where is it?

Wattenberg: Good question. We could ask that question on a lot of educational issues. Sara?

Mead: I'm not going to disagree with Richard about the quality of educational research. I tend to see this as a broader question about how can we achieve student achievement generally, from the perspective that we know kids are different and we know they have different needs. I think with standards and using scientifically based approaches to reading instruction and things like that, that we've seen having impacts in the elementary grades; I think that's a part of it. I think figuring out how to do something different from high schools because what we're doing now because it's clearly not working is a part of it. I think the other piece of it is, and this will surprise nobody who knows me, is expanding choice for parents and students, because children are really different, and I think that's part of what is happening when people talk about single sex schools, but I think it's broader that. The variation within each gender is much bigger than the variation between the two genders. There are probably little girls who would do much better in Richard's balance beam, bean-bag throwing classroom as well. I have concerns about accountability with choice and I have concerns with legal issues there, but I think that's a big piece of what we need to do to better serve each individual child's needs.

Holzer: I'll again embrace the position I said before, that Pre-K is very important for K-8 reforms, some of which Sara has mentioned, and they remain very important, if not perfectly understood, but we need to continue to experiment to find out what works for all kids at that age. Adolescent and high school years, as I just said, need some combination of mentoring and youth development and higher quality career and technical education pathways.

But the other thing I want to put on the table, besides all this education stuff is that not only do we have to be concerned about boys and low-income boys, but we have to also be concerned, on the policy end, with low-income men. What happens to low-income men as adults filters back to low-income boys' behavior because of what they see, because of what they see as their life chances. What happened in the 1990s was that we put low-income women and their children very high on the policy agenda, sometimes in ways that a lot of us at the time didn't necessarily think were good. Not only did we have welfare reform that pushed a lot of these women into the job market, we also had a whole range of new supports for working moms or working parents with custody of their children, dramatic expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which was a huge subsidy for low-income working moms. Child care, health care, things like that. We were subsidizing low-income moms to enter the labor market in a very appropriate way. What we were doing with the dads? Not only did we not subsidize the dads because if you don't have custody of the kids you get no Earned Income Tax Credit, but on top of that we were penalizing them and taxing them. The child support system is very punitive, especially for these men who fall in arrears when they go to prison, by definition they're going to be in arrears—behind on their payments, the tax rates are enormous. They come out of jail, it's very hard to find a job that pays more than $6 or $7 an hour. Then they pay two-thirds of that to child support and the child support doesn't even end up going to the family. Talk about something that hurts incentives for these men to stay above water and to participate. We're driving these low-income men out of the labor market through this set of child support and incarceration policies and practices. I think that also affects what these young boys see and how they approach life. More broadly, it was very good what we did to help young moms and their kids in the '90s, let's put dads on the table as well as non-custodial dads and low-income men and have a broad range of solutions that target the boys, as well as the men.

Audience Question and Answer

Q: I have to agree with you with what you just said. As being one of the products of Jimmy Carter's program of helping my single mom so I could get to college that was true. But with the African-Americans in the city it doesn't start there, it starts in the house, it starts in the media, and the biggest step is that male role-models in the school systems are gone. After being an African-American teacher, I totally understand, the simple fact is—nothing personal against gender here, I'm married—with so many female teachers in the system, males are hard to deal with at times. So normally, they're pushed off, because if they're considered a trouble student or ADD, that's not true, but they're often labeled that and a lot of them are African-American. They're not given the ample time or ample tools they need in the system. We need to get more African-American male teachers back in the system, we need to get rid of the stigma that single parent, you've got to raise your kid, we've got to get back to the family-oriented system. The educational system needs to put money into fixing the reading, because reading and writing is what makes everything work. I'm sorry, you can do math and whatever, but you have to be able to read and write to do math.

Q: Sara briefly mentioned this. While the NAEP scores that you frequently address are higher in fourth grade, they dip right away in eighth grade for both boys and girls, which corresponds to the federal investment, federal investment in reading and writing for kids stops in the third grade. In our middle schools and our high schools, they're not given the comprehension skills, they're not given those kinds of things after third grade.

Unfortunately, this investment is mirrored in the states. The state development and state resources also slack off. So when you're trying to look at boys and girls and those kinds of things, can you talk a little bit more about that? As far as what role that plays since you emphasize reading and writing so much. In Philadelphia, Johns Hopkins did some research that sixth grade reading scores is indicative of high school graduation, you only have a 60 percent chance of graduating if you pass English in the sixth grade, if you don't, your shot of graduating is significantly diminished for both boys and girls. Can you speak more to that?

Mead: I can speak generally. We know that high school is not an area that we've made the kind of improvements that we've seen in elementary school and we know there's also something going on in middle school. Middle school is a field which we haven't looked into very much, it's an area where there's not a lot of high quality curriculum and curricular rigor for kids. It was designed to be that way, in some ways, if you look at its origins earlier in the last century. It's also something that gets complicated because it's happening at the same time as all these developmental things that are going on with kids. A lot of time that gets blamed for why we can't have good curriculum and discipline and why we, in some cases, use middle school as a holding pen for kids. I think there is a need to focus on middle school reform: How do we improve rigor and how do we use that as a time to get kids who are behind caught up and get kids ready for high school and to move all the kids ahead instead of letting them stagnate as the test data seems to indicate is happening? I think there are some good examples of schools that are doing that; KIPP is a good example, schools like SEED here in D.C. that starts with the kids in grade 5 then move them up, those are good examples. I think the other thing is that it would be useful to understand, from a research perspective, how much of what's happening, in terms of these gaps for kids in middle school, is related to things that are going on with them developmentally, that eventually will end up in the same place and how much is based on poor quality curriculum and structure in the school.

Wattenberg: Back on this research question, there's very little research on adolescent reading and how to improve it, regardless of race and regardless of gender.

Q:  There is some research, though, that shows that if adolescent learning standards are integrated across the curriculum that students will achieve at higher levels in math, science, or whatever.

Wattenberg: Let me put it this way, there are not a lot of good models that can replicate and generate considerable data.

Q: But that's coming through though, with the … [illegible]

Q: To the point that this may not be a systemic problem or this may not be a crisis, if you look at the period in which we call the girl's situation a crisis, the numbers weren't anywhere near as bad as what we're talking about for boys today, and that was a crisis back then, so I think that would qualify what we're talking about now as a crisis. When you start talking about things like worrying about the girls in special ed. Special ed is about 80 to 85 percent boys, so the girls in special ed are just such a minute amount in what we're talking about in education, so that's not the issue. The issue is this: we need to create schools that have a mandate to educate the kids that walk in the door. When we start talking about things like middle school curriculum and how there's no model for it, then have to work on it, you have to do it yourself. In a charter school, where kids don't come if you're not successful, they have to do that kind of stuff. In government-run public education, where everything has to be even, that kind of stuff isn't done, the mentality's not there. The mentality's not there to figure out that maybe this year we need to spend a little more on boys than girls. The mentality's not there that if somebody's consistently failing with a group of students, they have to go. I think this is a systemic educational problem, I think the boys are the ones that are the victims of that problem, but I think we, as the adults and as the taxpayers, are sitting around and watching a system that is dysfunctional and that isn't serving a lot of our children well, and we're not doing anything about it. I'd like to know what your comments are on that.

Mead: I couldn't agree more with you that we need schools that are going to educate the students that walk in the door and that that's an issue that we've had a lot of problems with excuses and a lot of conversations about why we can't educate this group of students, whoever this group of students might be. There are schools, particularly some of the charter schools that I've spent time in, in D.C. and in other places, that are working to address that, also public schools and private schools are doing the same thing. I think that it is something that works very differently in a lot of those schools, but there are a lot of those schools that are working at doing that.  

Holzer: You make it sound as if it were really clear what to do if we had the will and the resources, and maybe in some context it is. As a researcher, and again, my focus is more labor market than education, those answers that you can scale up and replicate are just not as clear to me. The other thing I would say is that in the research, what comes through awfully clearly, is that given the segregation by race and class that we have in this country, it's a real challenge for the schools, which is not to say that in low-income neighborhoods and predominantly minority neighborhoods there aren't good schools and good models, there are. But it's a much tougher challenge to consistently predict—I mean there's a huge literature on whether spending more money in K-8 works or doesn't work, of course it's a silly literature, what matters is how you spend the money, if it's well-spent or not—what consistently comes through very strongly are the effects of race and class segregation on these outcomes. When you have kids that are going to predominantly African-American and predominantly low-income schools, because they live in those neighborhoods, it's not impossible for those places to achieve, but it's a much tougher challenge for those schools, and maybe that ought to be on the table too for this discussion.

Q: I think it's a danger to talk about anything in the aggregate, and I'm interested in whether or not you have statistics on a group that's never looked at; high-income white students, and what the gender issues are there, because that's where we know there is a mandate to educate kids.

Mead: I don't have the statistics with me. We don't look at that group as much. I think probably the most in-depth analysis of this is some of the stuff that Judith Kleinfeld has done that you mentioned earlier, in terms of how it relates specifically to boys. She does find some fairly big gaps, I think there are some reasons to be a little skeptical about some of that stuff, but those are the specifics as far as I know. I think the other thing is that we spend a lot of time in public education policy talking about these groups, I mean, the Newsweek's of the world and the US News College Rankings are all targeted to that specific group, and I think it does skew the debate away from some of the concerns of the kids that we do need to be the most concerned about, the young men that Harry is talking about and the young women in the same communities that I think largely, in the national media at least, go unnoticed.

Whitmire: It's hard to do real research on that, because on the surface, on the major national reports you look at, they look alike. I'm profiling a district much like the one you're describing, a wealthy school district in Minneapolis that's started taking a look at this and found huge gaps. On the surface, it looks like any other wealthy school district. Ninety-nine percent of their kids go to college, so where are the gaps? It's pretty intriguing, I'm not going to say that it's a major problem for these groups, but it's intriguing that it's there. Another reason it's hidden is because of the gender weighting that colleges practice, which is unspoken but very common. So a lot of these boys get into selective colleges despite having GPA's far lower than the girls. You can do your own amateur sleuthing here, just pay the 15 bucks to US News for their more elaborate data and go through there and see percent of boys applied, percent of boys accepted, and average GPA of freshman class broken down by gender, and you'll see this is very common, it's just hidden and harder to get at. Is it significant? I just don't know the answer to that.

Holzer: I would say the advantages of class are so enormous for these kids. My college room mate Dan Golden just wrote a book called The Price of Admission that points out the enormous advantages of coming from a high income family if you are a boy or a girl, and that goes a long way, so even if the boys are lagging behind, it probably not a big problem for them. There are also more rigorous academic studies of these same issues.

Q: I think it's interesting to hear the semantics here and I think we need to be mindful of is that we've got a global economy that we need to be thinking of, particularly here in the United States. We're talking about how if we look at the data at the national level, boys are doing fine, but as we're talking about the disaggregations, boys in general are not doing fine. Because we do have these pockets, these groups that are not doing fine. If we're looking at the economy, the work force, and the potential labor market, we have to be mindful of the national trends and all the little pockets within the national trends. This is the same issue that I have with the study that Jackie King did, my colleague at ACE, because if all of your citizens are not preparing for the labor market at the same rate as white males and as white females, then we've got an issue and these issues need to be addressed. I think this is heading toward a point of crisis, if we're not at that point already. I think we need to be mindful of these issues. If you hear the language, it's sometimes, "well, that's just an issue for that group," well, it's our country and these are our citizens. We need to be careful about pushing it off; "ghettoizing" is what some academics call it. We need to be mindful of that.

Mead: I think that's a really important point and I really appreciate you bringing that up. And I am aware now that it does come across that way sometimes when I talk about it. What I think is important is that these are already groups of students that we know are in trouble. We know that our schools are not going a good job of serving minority students and they are not doing a good job of serving low-income students and we've known that for quite some time. This boys issue is an issue on top of it. My concern is that in some way this boys issue is a distraction from these other issues which are much bigger. If you look at a state level data chart, you'll see white girls and white boys near the top, Hispanic boys and girls in the middle, and black girls and boys lower down. This gap between the white students, regardless of gender, and the minority students is a much bigger gap. There's very clear evidence that we need to have concentrated attention addressing some of the achievement problems that are affecting these groups of kids. I think it speaks to the kids Harry is talking about who are predominantly not in the same schools as the kids at the top of the achievement charts and they're not receiving as good of an education, there's evidence that schools are mis-serving these students.

I think sometimes, when we bring discussion of a broad "boy crisis" into the picture it distracts our attention, partly because the boy issue is a thing that happens within schools. So then we start talking about if our individual schools are treating boys and girls in the same place differently, when there is a very clear difference between how the school serving predominantly low-income children of color is serving its kids with how the school that has white middle-class kids is serving them. I think that from a policy perspective, in terms of the ability of policymakers to take action there, it's a more tractable issue because those differences are between schools and we know the quality of services we're providing is not good, but I think it's also a much more serious social justice issue. I very much apologize to you for speaking carelessly in a tone that makes it come across that I do think this is just a pocket issue. My concern is more that if we just talk about a boy issue, we can distract ourselves from a much more serious issue in terms of the quality of education we're providing to low-income students and students of color.

Whitmire: Not only should it be viewed in terms of the global economy, but also in the context of social issues, like the so-called "marriageable mate issue" which has been such a huge issue in the African-American community. If it hasn't spilled out already, I think it will. To me, it's not a trivial issue. There are all kinds of aspects to this issue that we're going to start dealing with in the coming years. The New York Times has been doing some great reporting on this recently, if you take a look at their gender series. They took a perspective on this that I hadn't even thought of. Most of the time you think of this "marriageable mate issue" you think of a woman with a bachelor's degree who can't find a mate who's equally educated. They went at it from the other point of view, of a white male lacking a bachelor's degree who couldn't find anyone who wanted to marry him. There are all sorts of implications that will start spilling out.

Q: The more that we talk about numbers of boys here and numbers of girls here, we avoid another part of the discussion which really needs to emerge which is, what are the dynamics between boys and girls, men and women, in the classrooms in our schools and in our society, that perpetuates this kind of behavior on one hand that can be detrimental on the one hand to girls and on the other hand to boys. I pose this as a question, are we not stepping out of the box and trying to move this discussion. Can we not move it further so that it goes beyond the question of boys and girls, while contextually within it, and also race?

Whitmire: I'm all in favor of separating the two. It's frustrating comparing boys to girls, I think you can only go so far with that. I think you have to take boys, isolate them, and say, are they, by their senior year in high school, are they in shape to aspire to go to college and are they qualified to go to college? The answer is no. Regardless of what the girls are doing, are the boys where they need to be? The answer is no, from my perspective.

Mead: I agree with Richard, I think that's exactly the way we need to look at it for both genders. Are these groups of kids where they need to be? For any group of kids, that's the way we want to look at it. My concern is that it moves so quickly into comparisons and a lot of times the comparisons become a focal point in themselves and distract from that question. I think that getting a national consensus on what that means, because I don't think we have a consensus on what that means. Socially, I think there are pockets of it, but it doesn't exist everywhere and I think that's important.

Wattenberg: I want to thank everybody because your questions ended right when they were supposed to end. I want to thank all of our panelists; I want to thank the men for not being disruptive and Sara for participating and me for not neglecting her.

Toch: And thank you to Ruth for doing a great job.