Educating boys: Bridging gaps, building futures (ANNALS Volume 716)

Boys lag girls on several important measures of educational achievement and engagement. They begin school with weaker early literacy and self-regulation skills, perform worse in reading but not in math, and are more likely to exhibit behavioral problems and to drop out. These patterns are durable, widespread across countries, and largest among students with the greatest learning and behavioral challenges. This article synthesizes findings from major U.S. and international assessments—the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class; the National Assessment of Educational Progress; and the Program for International Student Assessment—to document where gender gaps are largest and how they have changed over time.

Geary elucidates the educational and occupational struggles of boys and men using an evolutionary framework. This perspective is useful in explaining boys’ relative disadvantage in language and reading development and their advantage in visuospatial and mechanical abilities. He shows that classroom settings and the behavioral expectations of formal schooling are more of an evolutionary mismatch for boys than girls because of sex differences in physical activity levels and social relations. This results in boys being disproportionately identified as having behavioral difficulties. Further, there are universal preferences that influence occupational choices: More men than women, for example, show an interest in working with things, and these interests align with boys’ and men’s relative strengths. He argues that secondary schooling does not fully capitalize on boys’ evolved capacities to help prepare them for the modern workforce, and suggest how schools can adapt to better accommodate boys’ strengths.

Attempts to explain gender differences in postsecondary enrollment and completion have focused almost exclusively on students’ academic performance and experiences in middle school and high school. Goldhaber and Liddle’s analysis shows that elementary-grade test scores are also an early indicator of postsecondary outcomes. They examine the relationship between third-grade test performance and students’ college outcomes, focusing on variations by gender, race/ethnicity, and free/reduced-price lunch eligibility. They establish how the gender gaps in college outcomes that favor females relate to early-grade academic performance and show the extent to which third-grade test scores are predictive of college enrollment and degree completion.

Boys, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, increasingly trail their female peers across key educational and economic milestones. One long-proposed policy intervention aimed at ameliorating this inequity is to increase the share of male teachers, especially in earlier grades where men comprise just a small fraction of the teaching workforce. Suter reviews the theoretical rationale for this policy approach and the empirical evidence on how teacher gender affects student outcomes. Male teachers could benefit boys in at least two ways: They could serve as same-gender role models, or they could employ distinct pedagogical or disciplinary approaches that are helpful to boys. The causal evidence supporting either of these ideas is mixed. Some studies find modest positive effects of same-gender teachers on grades and test scores, but others detect no benefits, and research on long-term outcomes is largely absent. She concludes by identifying potential directions for future research on the topic.

Male students graduate from high school and enroll in college at lower rates than females. Male participation in the workforce has also declined over the past several decades. Kistler and Dougherty present evidence on changing workforce demand and participation that highlights how opportunities for female-dominated employment have outstripped those for male-dominated occupations. They also show how several of the high-growth occupations that do not require a BA fall under the category of career and technical education (CTE), suggesting that CTE has a role to play in improving outcomes for males. They conclude with four implications for policy and practice: (1) scale successful models, (2) support areas shown to benefit male students, (3) use CTE to connect applied postsecondary education to employment, and (4) use CTE to connect males to occupations with high demand or strong compensation, including jobs in which males are not well represented, like education and health care.

A couple years ago, I was asked to take part in a fireside chat with Richard Reeves, who had recently published Of Boys and Men. This was an interesting ask because (1) I am a mom of twin girls and (2) most of the previous national education initiatives focused on increasing girls’ interest in STEM. I accepted the invitation because I wanted to learn more about the topic. I became even more intrigued when, in preparation for the chat, I took the opportunity to read Of Boys and Men and started digging into related data.

I’ll risk starting with a cliché that is nevertheless true: There is good news and bad news regarding efforts in improving educational outcomes for boys. The good news is that the awareness of the challenges that boys and young men face has broken through in both scholarly and public discourse in a way that makes the current moment feel like an inflection point. Scholars working on this issue, many of whom are represented in this volume, are met less frequently with incredulous looks when they state, plainly and directly, that males face significant challenges in academic domains. Furthermore, the descriptive analyses of these challenges are now quite good (see for example, Smith, this volume). We can, at minimum, strongly defend the proposition that there is a problem here, and we can now define that problem with both precision and nuance.