"Dude, where ARE the dudes?"
Last night I was at Cooper High School to give out an AFS award to a student who ended up being a no-show on Senior Honors Night. To think that I was ALL dressed up-I was able to fit into some pants I had not been able to fit into in about 7 years, so that part of the evening was positive. I did have a nice conversation with the utterly charming and devestatingly pretty head of the foriegn language department.( a young woman from Colombia...hell, ALL of the teachers at Cooper are looking young-I really am getting older). All I know is that If she had been around back when I was first studying French, I might have changed my emphasis to Spanish.
One good trend that I noticed was that there were more African American kids who were getting academic honors and recognition. Cooper has been a diverse high school for a long time, and most years, whenever there was a black student getting an award on Senior Honors night, it was usually a kid whose parents had immigrated to the US from Africa or the West Indies. It was a positive development, because the growing gap in achievement between African American kids and everybody else is becoming a real concern in this country.
One not-so-subtle trend has continued. I would say that easily 3/4 of the students getting high academic honors and recognition were young women-meaning that very few boys were getting honors. This is a growing trend not just at Cooper, but at other schools. And it's not just young black men-it was young men, irregardless of ethnic origin. I think it has become very clear that the education system is not just failing African American men, it is failing men, period. Boys now represent an inordinate number of kids who are diagnosed with ADHD, are in Special Education and in programs related to behavior problems. They are also dropping out in serious numbers. Now maybe hardened feminists, like the late Betty Friedan would dancing a jig at these developments, but I think that the numbers of boys who are failing in the system has long range problems for us as a society as these boys become unemployable young men who are either going to be unemployed, doing menial work or in the penal system.
I think you can come up with myriad reasons why the system is letting boys down. I think for a start, the majority of teachers are women, and boys really do learn differently than girls. I think girls are going to get more subtle strokes because of their more passive learning style. Boys are less likely to thrive in a static enviornment. When you think about it, back when I was a kid, we got recess and/or PE every day. We had a chance to blow off steam. These poor kids now are lucky to get recess or PE 3 times a week. In this era of placement testing and school districts worrying so much about how the kids are testing, "Non essiential" items like recess and physical education are being thrown under the bus, so to speak.
I think that parents and educators need to look at this disparity of achievement between boys and girls and we need to come up with some more concrete ways to get some level of equilibrium in the achievement numbers. If these numbers continue the way they are, it bodes very poorly for boys, the men they will grow to be, and us as a nation.
