Something is wrong with the boys.
Doug Willms noticed it in New Brunswick. It wasn't just their poor scores on reading and writing tests. It went deeper. Many boys believed that school held nothing for them.
"There's a growing percentage of boys who don't see bright prospects for themselves for the future," said Prof. Willms, an international literacy researcher based at the University of New Brunswick.
It is the same story in British Columbia, where educators are concerned that 30 per cent of boys don't finish high school, compared with 20 per cent of girls. Or in Saskatchewan, where surveys of high-school boys and girls reveal that girls, long thought to be suffering self-esteem problems in school, now have higher career ambitions than boys.
All this flies in the face of the truism of the nineties, that schools shortchange girls. Across Canada, the evidence is mounting that the boys are falling seriously behind. And educators are now wondering whether the time has come to give the boys extra attention.
In fact, some school districts have begun targeting boys for special help, particularly in reading. In Fredericton, educators are hunting for books boys will like -- on bees or frogs or hockey, for instance. In Durham Region, just east of Toronto, hundreds of teachers from kindergarten and Grade 1 received special training this summer in boy-friendly reading instruction.
"We have to think about whether we need different approaches for boys, which is the question we asked ourselves about girls 10 years ago," Penny Priddy, B.C.'s Education Minister, said in an interview.
A literacy gap in the early years is not new.
But the gap used to be closed by high school. Now, as the children grow up, the gap stays the same or gets wider. The most recent nationwide reading tests of 13-year-olds in 1998 revealed a gap of 16 percentage points between girls and boys who had achieved a basic level or better; among 16-year-olds, the gap was 22 percentage points. Among those who could read at a sophisticated level, the gap of 18 percentage points in 1994 grew to 22 points by 1998.
When girls lagged behind boys in mathematics and sciences, concerned governments helped close the gap last decade with a flurry of intensive efforts -- changes to curriculums, special training for teachers, mentoring programs and university science scholarships, according to Paul Cappon, the director-general of the Council of Ministers of Education, a body representing the provincial and territorial education ministers. Now, he said, boys are falling behind in literacy skills. Partly as a result, they make up just 44 per cent of undergraduates in Canadian universities.
Something unintended happened when nationwide tests began in the nineties, prompted by fear Canadian children were slipping: the results put a spotlight on boys. In reading, for instance, 55 per cent of 13-year-old girls in the 1998 results were at an advanced level, compared to 33 per cent for boys.
The gaps show up in every province, at all ages between kindergarten and Grade 12, in reading and writing. But they are wider in some provinces than others. Saskatchewan has found that, since 1987, girls have outscored boys in all subject areas in their final results in Grade 12. In Ontario, 62 per cent of Grade 6 boys failed to meet the provincial standard last year for writing (next to 41 per cent of girls).
The stark numbers present a clear challenge to educators.
"We'd always accepted that in elementary school, girls are smarter than boys," said Dianne Wilkins, an official with School District 18 in Fredericton. "But then when we started up provincial assessments, we realized we need to work on this area."
Newfoundland's Education Department says it is making a research priority of finding out how to close the gap between boys and girls. In other parts of the country, school districts that try to find answers to boys' learning problems are on their own. Some provincial education departments will not address boys as boys but rather as undifferentiated students, or see the gender disparities as less urgent than differences between the rich and poor, or whites and natives.
