In many schools, males’ interests are ignored or dismissed

As readers of this column know, I have plenty of opinions on the subject of boys and reading. But recently, as I was preparing to address the New Jersey Reading Association on that topic, I figured I’d better take a look at what the research has to say. For starters, I turned to Sara Mead’s “The Truth about Boys and Girls”. When Mead, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Education Sector, examined the disparity in reading achievement between males and females, she discovered that race and class were much more significant predictors of success than gender. That means that if we want to turn kids into readers, we need to pay attention to the underlying social problems they face—and not necessarily the latest brain-wave research. Mead argues that boys’ reading scores are, in fact, improving—they’re just not increasing as quickly as girls’.

Another paper that makes some interesting points is Peter West’s “It Ain’t Cool to Like School: Why Are Boys Underachieving Around the World? And What Can We Do About It?”. West, an expert on men and families at the University of Western Sydney, found that middle- and upper-middle-class boys were doing quite well in school, thank you. It was the working-class boys who were really floundering.

A study by the Chinese University of Hong Kong is also revealing. Guess what? After surveying 199,097 15-years-olds in 43 countries, researchers found that girls were nine percent more likely to be good readers than boys. Not surprisingly, males who attended wealthier schools did significantly better than those in poorer schools.

Which brings me to the most interesting article of them all, Thomas Dee’s “The Why Chromosome: How a Teacher’s Gender Affects Boys and Girls”. Dee, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Swarthmore College, analyzed the results of the National Education Longitudinal Survey, which looked at nearly 25,000 eighth graders. He found that students who had a teacher of the same sex scored four percent above average in reading, while those with a teacher of the opposite sex scored four percent below average. So if a sixth-grade boy has a female reading teacher (which, by Dee’s calculations, more than 90 percent of boys do), that puts him eight percent behind the girl across the classroom aisle—more or less the same finding as the Hong Kong survey.

Since male reading teachers are role models to those rare boys who happen to be in their classes, it’s tough to tell exactly why boys do better. In fact, their improved performance may not have anything to do with how well males teach or the type of books they choose. But I can’t help suspecting there’s something else here. The mismatch between boys and their female teachers may be a matter of genre. Boys who think of themselves as nonreaders, or as readers who don’t like to read, may be curious about all sorts of things—how to build an invention, feed a wolf, or win at rock-paper-scissors (apparently there’s an international competition). If boys’ female teachers find these interests disappointing, if they feel young males really ought to be reading fiction instead of nonfiction, if they think that this kind of reading is just instrumental, then we have a problem. And it’s a problem that may land in your lap, when boys are sent to the library. To be really unfair and provocative, I suspect our schools are treating boys as defective girls and regarding their reading interests as inferior choices. In the ’60s, we had a name for that sort of treatment: we called it prejudice.