The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card On Our Sons, Their Problems At School, And What Parents And Educators Must Do

The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card On Our Sons, Their Problems At School, And What Parents And Educators Must Do

Product Description From the moment they step into the classroom, boys begin to struggle. They get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls; in elementary school, theyre diagnosed with learning disorders four times as often. By eighth grade huge numbers are reading below basic level. And by high school, theyre heavily outnumbered in AP classes and, save for the realm of athletics, show indifference to most extracurricular activities. Perhaps most alarmingly, boys now account for less than 43 percent of those enrolled in college, and the gap widens every semester! The imbalance in higher education isnt just a boy problem, though. Boys decreasing college attendance is bad news for girls, too, because admissions officers seeking balanced student bodies pass over girls in favor of boys. The growing gender imbalance in education portends massive shifts for the next generation: how much they make and whom they marry. Interviewing hundreds of parents, kids, teachers, and experts, award-winning journalist Peg Tyre drills below the eye-catching statistics to examine how the educational system is failing our sons. She explores the convergence of culprits, from the emphasis on high-stress academics in preschool and kindergarten, when most boys just cant tolerate sitting still, to the outright banning of recess, from the demands of No Child Left Behind, with its rigid emphasis on test-taking, to the boy-unfriendly modern curriculum with its focus on writing about feelings and its purging of high-action reading material, from the rise of video gaming and schools unease with technology to the lack of male teachers as role models. But this passionate, clearheaded book isnt an exercise in finger-pointing. Tyre, the mother of two sons, offers notes from the front linesthe testimony of teachers and other school officials who are trying new techniques to motivate boys to learn again, one classroom at a time. The Trouble with Boys gives parents, educators, and anyone concerned about the state of education a manifesto for changeone we must undertake right away lest school be-come, for millions of boys, unalterably a girl thing. From Publishers Weekly In a spinoff from her 2006 cover story for Newsweek, The Boy Crisis, Tyre delivers a cogent, reasoned overview of the current national debate about why boys are falling behind girls achievement in school and not attending college in the same numbers. While the education emphasis in the 1990s was on helping girls succeed, especially in areas of math and science, boys are lagging behind, particularly in reading and writing; parents and educators, meanwhile, are scrambling to address the problems, from questioning teaching methods in preschool to rethinking single-sex schools. Tyre neatly sums up the information for palatable parental consumption: although boys tend to be active and noisy, and come to verbal skills later than girls, early-education teachers, mostly female, have little tolerance for the way boys express themselves. The accelerated curriculum and de-emphasis on recess do not render the classroom boy friendly, and already set boys up for failure that grows more entrenched with each grade. Tyre touches on important concerns about the lack of male role models in many boys lives, the perils of video-game obsession and the slippery dialogue over boys brains versus girls brains. Tyre treads carefully, offering a terrifically useful synthesis of information. (Sept.) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist While the nations schools worked diligently to improve the academic performance of girlsincluding closing the achievement gap in math and science between girls and boysfew noticed the slow and steady decline in the academic performance of boys. The reading and writing achievement gap between girls and boys continues as boys also stack up unfavorably