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9486 in the collection
Good News: The Boys' Crisis Is a Myth! A Reporter's Methods
This excerpt from Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, Basic Books 2007, reveals Jay Mathews' method for dealing with dissident views: put them in his online column, where nobody but other dissidents will notice. Dr. Sax, a family physician and research psychologist, includes a long url for the online column in his book, but the url no longer functions, nor is the column retrievable in an archive search. But if one enters "Leonard Sax" and the date in Google, the article does pop up. You'll see that Mathews blames his slant on "lack of space":
But sometimes having an online column like this one can help us be even more balanced and comprehensive than we could otherwise be. . . .To test the practicality of that insight, I am going to do something that I have not done before: cite a story I just wrote for The Post and provide here some of the intriguing material I would have put in the story if they had given me two or three times more space, like I deserve.
Yep. Mathews would be more balanced if he only had more space.
Mathews calls Education Sector a "a Washington-based think tank"; Sax refers to it as "an obscure nonprofit group calling itself Education Sector." Each of us will choose our preference.
by Leonard Sax, M. D., Ph.D.
On Sunday, June 15, 2006, I received a call on my cell phone from Jay Mathews, the lead education reporter for the Washington Post. Mr. Mathews wanted my opinion of a study that had just been released by an obscure nonprofit group calling itself Education Sector.[Founded by Andrew Rotherham and Thomas Toch, Gates and Broad lead off their funders' lists.] He explained that his story on the study would appear the next morning on the front page of the Washington Post.* He wanted my opinion for a follow-up column that he planned to post online.
Mr. Mathews' front-page article announced "that widespread reports of U. S. boys being in crisis are greatly overstated and that young males in school are in many ways doing better than ever. . . . the pessimism about young males seems to derive from inadequate research, sloppy analysis and discomfort with the fact that although the average boy is doing better, the average girl has gotten ahead of him."
The article was picked up by many of the nation's largest-circulation newspapers. The Miami News, Baltimore Sun, Buffalo News, Detroit News, Seattle Times, San Diego Union Tribune, and dozens of other papers ran the story verbatim. New York Times columnist Judith Warner, in a column entitled "What Boy Crisis?" wrote that the study confirmed that the "boys' crisis" is a myth, after all. The facts, wrote Warner--echoing the Washington Post--are that boys are "doing better than ever on most measures of academic performance," with the possible exception of black and Hispanic boys from low-income households. Within twenty-four hours of Mathews' article in the Post, the story was featured on the CBS Evening News, with the headline "It's a Myth That Boys Are Falling Behind in School."
But is it true? Is the boys' crisis really a myth? . . .
[in the next two pages--36-38--Sax explains what is happening, concluding with] In order for high school kids to understand many of the topics we expect them to grasp, they have to be reading a wide range of material. Kids need to be reading in their spare time. Kids need to read for fun. . . .
The gender gap did not widen because girls are reading more; they're not. In fact girls are slightly less likely to read in their spare time today than they were in 1980. But roughly nine out of ten boys have stopped reading altogether. Why?
When I present this research to parents and ask them that question, a few raise their hands, confident that they know the answer: "Video games," they usually say. "Boys who might have read books twenty or thirty years ago are playing video games today." But the evidence suggests otherwise. Boys who play lots of video games are no less likely to read for fun than boys who don't play lots of video games. (Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Riverhead 2005)
Video games have displaced a major activity in the lives of teenage boys, but that activity isn't reading; it's playing outdoors. In 1980, many boys spent lots of time playing outdoors. Today, those boys are more likely spend that time indoors with the GameCube or the PlayStation or the Xbox. That may be one reason why boys today are four times more likely to be obese compared with boys a generation ago.
So video games aren't the explanation. But there's a more plausible explanation: namely, that changes in education over thee past thirty years have created a negative attitude toward education among many boys. Boys are less likely to read today simply because they don't want to. And that change in motivation is, at least in part, a consequence of the gender-blind changes in education over the past thirty years.
Let's return now to that cell phone call from Jay Mathews, the Washington Post reporter who wanted to talk about the study that purported to disprove the idea that boys are having problems in school. That study, like the reporter's article, rested very heavily on test scores of nine-year-old nationwide, in fact, on scores on just one particular test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The authors of the study showed that on this test, nine-year-old boys are doing better today than they were doing thirty years ago; on this test, the gender gap in the scores (girls doing better than boys) has been narrowing. White boys--particularly white boys with college-educated parents--are doing fine, according to the report. The real problems in American education are problems of race and social class, not gender, according to the report--a position echoed by the Washington Post.
Mr. Mathews had called to ask for my opinion of the study. "You don't need my opinion, Mr. Mathews," I told him. "You know how biased that study is. They focused on improvements in the scores of nine-year-olds, but they neglected what's happening to seventeen-year-olds! You know very well that the gender gap in reading is getting larger among seventeen-year-olds," I pointed out. "This study emphasizes the improvements among fourth-graders but completely ignores the decline in reading scores among twelfth-grade boys over the past twenty years. You know that one in four white boys with college-educated parents can't read proficiently. That means one in four white boys in high school won't be able to read your article saying how well white boys are doing."
Mr. Mathews thanked me and promised to include my remarks in his online column on Tuesday, June 27, the day after his front-page article would appear. And he was true to his word: that Tuesday, he did indeed post an online column that continued his coverage of the Education Sector report. He apologized for the one-sided coverage in the previous day’s paper. To give a more “balanced and comprehensive” coverage, he included not only my comments but also those of other researchers who pointed to the glaring shortcomings in the Education Sector report.
Unfortunately, though, the readership for Mr. Mathews’ personal online column is trivial compared to the coverage afforded to a front-page above-the-fold news article in the Washington Post. Mathews’ front-page article was widely picked up by the media. His online column wasn’t picked up by anybody, wasn’t featured anywhere, and hasn’t been read by anybody, as far as I can tell.
*"Study Casts Doubt on the Boy Crisis: Improving test scores cut into girls' lead," published on the front page of the Washington Post, June 26, 2006.
— Laonard Sax, M. D., Ph.D.
Boys Adrift
2007-08-12
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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