Are the schools failing boys?

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.

When he was starting out in school, Daniel Berry, now 10, of Whitby, Ont., loved books -- not for reading but for making castles.

Daniel was a typical boy. Across Canada, his young male peers have said in surveys that they do not care for reading or writing, the linchpins of academic success.

But school officials in Durham region did not accept that boys and reading don't mix. They sat down with several groups of boys and asked them what was going on.

"They defined reading as what they were given in school," said Beverley Freedman, a superintendent with the Durham District School Board. "And what we're giving boys to read in school they don't enjoy. Young boys like action, they like adventure stories, they like 60 people to be killed, preferably in the first few pages."

It is not necessarily that boys are doing worse than they were before (the evidence is inconclusive on that point) but that girls are doing much better.

In that, Barney Brawer -- a U.S. researcher who has worked at Harvard University alongside Dr. Carol Gilligan, who got the girls movement started in 1982 with her book In a Different Voice -- sees something wonderful and something sad.

"We say that's a success and a problem. It shows the success of what was done to offer a wider range of options for girls. And it's the price we're paying for not having done the same work with boys to expand their sense of possibilities."

Parents such as Pam Berry, Daniel's mother, never believed boys don't like to read. Her 15-year-old son's favourite book when he was younger was How Things Work. "That wasn't considered a book."

Her views are echoed by academics across the country. "Girls often love to hear about the prince and the queen and the castle. The boys want to know how they built the castle," Ms. Wilkins, the school-board official in Fredericton, said.

But schools stress gentle narratives over boys' love for hard information or action stories. And reading instruction starts at an age when many boys, who tend to mature later than girls, are not ready to sit still. One theory has it that learning progresses from touching and feeling to the visual and finally the auditory stage, and that some boys are still in the touching-and-feeling stage when reading instruction begins around the age of five.

Students who are still behind in reading by Grade 3 tend never to catch up, and for boys, the result is that they turn away from the idea that school has anything to offer. Some move on to jobs, and others get in trouble.

"At some point they decide they would rather be bad than dumb," Durham's Ms. Freedman said.

The need for role models, long a girls' issue, now belongs at least as much to the boys. A large majority of Canadian teachers from kindergarten to Grade 12 are women -- 63 per cent in 1996-97, up from 57 per cent a decade earlier. And in primary grades, male teachers are, as Ontario testing chief Joan Green puts it, "a rare beast."

Some educators suggest the little boys are lost in the sea of women. "It may be that because most of the teachers are women, they intuitively understand how to connect with little girls," said Liz Sandals, the head of the Ontario Public School Boards Association.

Prof. Brawer, who now teaches at Tufts University, near Boston, and who runs a consulting service that helps work with boys and girls, has found that boys in that state are now further behind in reading and writing than girls were behind in math and science 20 years ago.

He suggests programs of famous writing mentors for boys, much as female scientists were trucked to schools to encourage girls.

If previous studies found that girls begin to struggle with their identity and self-esteem from the age 11 to 15, today's studies are raising questions about how boys' inner feelings are suppressed between the ages of four and six. At the age of five, boys begin to cover up what they feel, shield themselves and take on a protective role, Dr. Gilligan found in her recent studies of four- to six-year-old boys.

"Fathers enjoy the openness of their sons until about age 5, when they begin to help them 'narrow their voices and become men in the world,' " fearing that, if they remain open and vulnerable, they will be teased or bullied or shamed, she has said.

In the stifling of their voices, they are stunted in their growth, not only emotionally but academically.

What would people hear in those voices? Something disturbing, as William Pollack, a Harvard psychotherapist, wrote in his recent book Real Boys. Pushed at a younger age than girls to be independent from their mothers, they must wear a mask of toughness that is at odds with their real selves. "Even boys who seem OK on the surface are suffering silently inside -- from confusion, alienation and despair," he wrote.

What's agreed is that the family and the broader culture of men must be engaged in order to help boys' school performance. "We men are where women were 30 years ago," says Prof. Brawer, who believes men have a culture of silence on important issues that leaves their sons to founder.

No surprise, then, that it was a group of mothers, who organized what they believe is the first boys' conference in Vancouver last spring, bringing together 70 boys at two elementary schools to discuss how they feel about making the leap to scary, grown-up Grade 8 -- the beginning of high school.

The mothers were concerned that all the conferences being held were for girls and they wanted to send a message to their male children "that they're just as important as girls, and that they should feel proud and happy that they're male," said Minty Thompson, who has two boys, ages 13 and 9.

Ms. Thompson's 13-year-old, Tristan Colcy, said the conference was good because it let boys speak among themselves. "I think boys communicate better with boys, and girls communicate better with girls."

In Tristan's observation, boys value "socializing over work, and maybe sports over work. Too many of the boys' role models are sports figures." Girls concentrate much more on their schoolwork, he said.

His views are echoed by researchers. Trevor Gambell, the assistant dean of student affairs at the University of Saskatchewan, said that teachers from rural areas tell him sports dominate boys' lives. "A lot of young males see themselves becoming the next Wayne Gretzky."

Daniel has a firm, clear goal. It may be only coincidental, but his career choice seems to echo what Dr. Gilligan has found about how boys develop means to shield themselves and take on protective roles.

"I want to be a cop. When I was little I was always afraid people would climb through my window into my room and steal things. So I'm trying to prevent that."

BY THE NUMBERS

Reading: Nationwide, 55 per cent of 13-year-old girls are at an advanced level, compared with just 33 per cent of boys. Writing: Fifty-nine per cent of girls in Grade 6 in Ontario are at or above the provincial standard, compared with 38 per cent of boys. Finishing high school: Nationally by age 18, 81 per cent of females have graduated, compared with 70 per cent of males, according to data from the country's schools. Problems and disabilities: Boys make up 65 per cent of those identified by teachers as requiring special education for learning disabilities, 83 per cent who need special classes for emotional or behaviour problems and 76 per cent who need help because of problems at home. Teacher expectations: Forty per cent of elementary-school girls are expected to obtain a university degree, compared with 33 per cent of boys, according to a nationally representative survey of their teachers. French immersion: About 60 per cent of French-immersion students in New Brunswick are girls, according to an estimate by Professor Doug Willms of the University of New Brunswick. Top students: In reading, writing and overall ability, teachers rate far more girls at the top of the class than boys. Only in mathematics do boys have a small edge at top, according to the nationally representative teachers' survey.