I'm a former editorial writer for USA Today with a long career covering three things: local issues at several newspapers in upstate New York, the Pentagon (after arriving in Washington) and then education. Defense issues, in contrast to education problems, were relatively clean and straight-forward.
Of all the education issues I've written about, the boys dilemma may be the most perplexing. I first came across gender learning issues long ago when writing about national reports which concluded that girls were discriminated against in school, as in teachers calling on aggressive boys and paying little attention to girls in math and science.
As the father of two girls, I was outraged and wrote those reports absent critical comment. I was wrong about that. Even at that time it was clear boys were in academic trouble. The search for the cause behind those boy troubles led to Why Boys Fail.
Former DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee wrote the foreword for Why Boys Fail, and soon after the book came out I approached her about cooperating for a biography. After a lengthy deliberation -- for Rhee, national publicity has often backfired -- she agreed, giving a green light for me to talk to her family, friends and work associates. The result is The Bee Eater. The book's title comes from from an incident when Rhee was teaching in Baltimore (see the Introduction for full details).
