The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do [Hardcover]

Peg Tyre (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 9, 2008

From the moment they step into the classroom, boys begin to struggle. They get expelled from preschool nearly five times more often than girls; in elementary school, they’re diagnosed with learning disorders four times as often. By eighth grade huge numbers are reading below basic level. And by high school, they’re heavily outnumbered in AP classes and, save for the realm of athletics, show indifference to most extra­curricular activities. Perhaps most alarmingly, boys now account for less than 43 percent of those enrolled in college, and the gap widens every semester!

The imbalance in higher education isn’t just a “boy problem,” though. Boys’ decreasing college attendance is bad news for girls, too, because ad­missions officers seeking balanced student bodies pass over girls in favor of boys. The growing gender imbalance in education portends massive shifts for the next generation: how much they make and whom they marry.

Interviewing hundreds of parents, kids, teachers, and experts, award-winning journalist Peg Tyre drills below the eye-catching statistics to examine how the educational system is failing our sons. She explores the convergence of culprits, from the emphasis on high-stress academics in preschool and kindergarten, when most boys just can’t tolerate sitting still, to the outright banning of recess, from the demands of No Child Left Behind, with its rigid emphasis on test-taking, to the boy-unfriendly modern curriculum with its focus on writing about “feelings” and its purging of “high-action” reading material, from the rise of video gaming and schools’ unease with technology to the lack of male teachers as role models.

But this passionate, clearheaded book isn’t an exercise in finger-pointing. Tyre, the mother of two sons, offers notes from the front lines—the testimony of teachers and other school officials who are trying new techniques to motivate boys to learn again, one classroom at a time. The Trouble with Boys gives parents, educators, and anyone concerned about the state of education a manifesto for change—one we must undertake right away lest school be-come, for millions of boys, unalterably a “girl thing.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a spinoff from her 2006 cover story for Newsweek, The Boy Crisis, Tyre delivers a cogent, reasoned overview of the current national debate about why boys are falling behind girls' achievement in school and not attending college in the same numbers. While the education emphasis in the 1990s was on helping girls succeed, especially in areas of math and science, boys are lagging behind, particularly in reading and writing; parents and educators, meanwhile, are scrambling to address the problems, from questioning teaching methods in preschool to rethinking single-sex schools. Tyre neatly sums up the information for palatable parental consumption: although boys tend to be active and noisy, and come to verbal skills later than girls, early-education teachers, mostly female, have little tolerance for the way boys express themselves. The accelerated curriculum and de-emphasis on recess do not render the classroom boy friendly, and already set boys up for failure that grows more entrenched with each grade. Tyre touches on important concerns about the lack of male role models in many boys' lives, the perils of video-game obsession and the slippery dialogue over boys' brains versus girls' brains. Tyre treads carefully, offering a terrifically useful synthesis of information. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

While the nation’s schools worked diligently to improve the academic performance of girls—including closing the achievement gap in math and science between girls and boys—few noticed the slow and steady decline in the academic performance of boys. The reading and writing achievement gap between girls and boys continues as boys also stack up unfavorably in every measure from school discipline, to graduation rates, to grades, to college admission. Newsweek reporter Tyre examines troubling statistics that detail the academic decline of boys and cites psychologists, sociologists, brain researchers, and others to explain the reasons behind the numbers. Tyre examines how schools—and broader society—have changed in ways that shortchange boys and how gender politics is affecting reactions to the dire statistics. She focuses on boys' specific problems—fidgeting in school, scattered attention, reading problems, and a shortage of male teachers. Through vignettes, Tyre offers advice to parents concerned about their sons. Most important, Tyre asks the ultimate question: how to help boys without jeopardizing the advances of girls. --Vanessa Bush

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Crown Archetype; 1 edition (September 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307381285
• ISBN-13: 978-0307381286
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #289,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

PEG TYRE was, until recently, a senior writer at Newsweek specializing in social trends and education. She has won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Clarion Award, and a National Education Writers Association Award. She lives in New York City with her husband, novelist Peter Blauner, and their two sons.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 72 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars If you have a boy in school, here's your next "must" read September 9, 2008

By Jesse Kornbluth TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Ever since women got the right to vote in 1920, they've been on the march. In less than a century, they've muscled their way into the same jobs traditionally reserved for men --- and they're already earning 70% of a man's salary for that work. Why, at this rate, they'll.....

Stop! Hold the presses! At this rate, girls will grow up to be a ruling class. And today's boys will grow up to work in auto-body shops (not that there's anything wrong with that) and dream of advancing to the manager slot at Burger King (ditto). Why? Because boys are falling behind in school --- and not just because they develop a little slower, read a little later, blah blah blah.

The system is failing boys, Peg Tyre says. A feminized curriculum, behavior norms that disadvantage boys, schools with few men on the faculty, a misguided belief that kids are ready to learn at an earlier age --- Tyre rolls out a laundry list of reasons.

I take Peg Tyre very seriously. First, because she's been there --- she is the mother of two boys. At Newsweek, where she covered education, she wrote a story about boys falling behind in school. It struck a nerve --- parents of boys tended to think only their lads were not doing well --- so she dug more and wrote this book.

I'm the father of a girl, and while I'd like her to have every advantage, what's happening now may not be good for anyone. Just one of Tyre's conclusions:

"At all but the very highest income levels, our country is bifurcating into two groups: educated women and less educated men. That division will have massive implications for the way our children live their lives --- their opportunities, their career choices, what they do, who they marry, how they raise their children, if they can afford to retire."

Strong stuff. You want to push back. Well, here are some facts:

-- Boys get expelled from preschool at nearly five times the rate of girls.

-- Boys are prescribed medicine for attention-related disorders at twice the rate of girls.

-- Kids no longer get to "play" in preschool. But "children who attend preschools that emphasize direct instruction experience more stress at school....[in one study] the boys who fell farthest behind girls were the ones who had attended the academic preschools."

-- Since 1992, girls have been taking more science and math courses and doing better in them than boys. "In most schools," Tyre writes, "classrooms where AP courses are taught look like a branch of a local sorority."

-- "39% of all first-graders get 20 minutes a day or less of recess....by fourth grade, nearly half of our students get less than twenty minutes a day." What replaces gym and music and art and free play? No Child Left Behind --- rote learning for a national test, arguably the most uncreative way of learning imaginable.

How does this play out? Boys revere sports, not school. And they pay the price of this sorry focus. The suicide rate for boys aged 5 to 14 is three times higher than the suicide rate for girls; between the ages of 15 to 19, it's four times greater.

Tyre steps back to explain why. Among her compelling observations: The mid-l980s saw a changed attitude about crime and safety. Parents wanted to protect their kids. Free, unsupervised play in public spaces --- the kind of unfettered free time that made childhood such fun for many of us --- became a thing of the past. More recently we have seen an expanding class of parents with money, and more competition to get kids into prestige colleges. Kids need to be "little Einsteins" --- so in a single year (2003 to 2004), sales of "learning" and "exploration" toys jumped 19%, to $510 million; in 2005, "Hooked on Phonics" sales doubled.

What do little boys need? "To get him ready for school, talk to him, rhyme with him, and sing with him," Tyre says. "After kicking the soccer ball, take him to the library for story hour." In other words: Boys need to be boys. And to be treated as boys.

And how will that happen?

Tyre couldn't be more blunt: It's your responsibility.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars As a former boy this book is disturbing. September 12, 2008

By Robert Busko TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Peg Tyre has written a revealing and somewhat alarming book on the condition of boys in our schools and society. The Trouble With Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School and What Parents and Educators Can Do is insightful. Quite simply, in society's rush in the 1980s and 1990s to support our girls both socially and educationally we have apparently put the boys at a disadvantage.

Among the many points Tyre makes, boys mature on a variety of scales later than girls. In our rush to improve standardized test grades, activities such as recess have been virtually cut from the daily school activities. Boys are genetically designed to run, throw, explore, and test their abilities. In modern America, this has normally been achieved through physical play some of which occurred at school. Among other things, this allowed the boys to burn off that abundant energy. In our current educational environment the morning and afternoon recesses have been scrapped so that additional study time could be found. The normal physical play at lunch has also been eliminated in most schools. This one factor has aggravated boys' natural restlessness and caused problems with their ability to pay attention. Our response has been to drug them. Insane!

But Peg Tyre also points out that male educators are in woefully short supply as teachers during the elementary grades. Boys may lack positive male role models in their personal lives due to the national plague of absentee fathers and this is aggravated when male role models are missing at school.

Peg Tyre isn't the only game in town on this subject though her book is quite good. If you're interested in additional materials on the plight of boys, checkout the following:

Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men by Leonard Sax
Bring Up Boys by James C. Dobson
The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life by Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens

Also, if you want information what little boys used to be interested in read The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden.

An editorial point. This is an intelligent country in which most teachers and principals are dedicated to the proper education of their students. Certainly we can find a way to meet the needs of both boys and girls without short changing anyone.

Peace always.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Boys are simply treated as defective girls." December 29, 2008

By Sam Sattler TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Peg Tyre has written a remarkable book about a problem that many of us have sensed (but failed to articulate and complain about) for years: our young boys are being shortchanged from the first day that they enter a school building. Not too many years ago the concern in public education was how to prepare girls to grow into women able to compete with their male counterparts in the work world. That was a legitimate concern and, much to the credit of this country, a tremendous, and very successful, effort was made to correct the problem. But as always seems to happen, the pendulum continued to swing their way long after females had achieved educational equality. The momentum created to correct the initial problem was so strong that it eventually placed male students at a disadvantage, a new problem just as serious as the one it corrected.

I have personally observed much of what Peg Tyre describes in "The Trouble with Boys." For what it is worth, I can offer anecdotal evidence of my own that the problem Tyre describes is a serious one. I am the father of two daughters, both elementary school teachers now, and the grandfather of one granddaughter and two grandsons, all of whom are elementary school students. Because I am convinced that learning to read well, and as soon as possible, is the key to anyone's future, I encouraged my daughters to become readers and have done the same for their children. It is in observation of their children that I first became aware of just how different so many little boys are from little girls when it comes to their early schooling.

According to Tyre, the problem for little boys begins as early as preschool because they are physically and mentally less mature than little girls their age. Boys at this age are less verbal than girls, a deficit that makes it more difficult for them to learn to read, and they have less well developed fine motor skills, making it more difficult for them to control a pencil or a paintbrush. But their biggest problem is the great difficulty they have in sitting still for long periods of time, a tendency that almost guarantees that they will be disciplined at a much higher rate than girls and that they will learn at a slower pace.

The physical disadvantage faced by young boys has become more and more exaggerated in recent years because of the emphasis on starting our children into preschool programs at younger and younger ages. Little boys find themselves labeled early on as troublemakers and poor students by teachers that simply do not recognize or understand the handicaps the boys are facing in the classroom. As a result, boys are almost five times as likely to be expelled from preschool and are twice as likely to be placed under medication for some type of attention deficit disorder.

And, of course, this makes them much more likely to hate school and learning. Too many of them tune out, barely skating by academically and staying in school mainly because of sports programs and the girls they meet there. These boys have subconsciously assimilated the message they received from preschool through elementary school that they are problem students whose behavior and study habits are not appreciated.

And the result is predictable. Boys and girls enter preschool at about the same level but around the fourth grade girls are noticeably pulling ahead of boys academically, a lead they never relinquish. By middle and high school girls make up a substantial majority of top-ranked students and today they outnumber male university students to such a degree that many schools have created a kind of affirmative action plan for boys in order to create some balance in their student enrollments.

In effect, the American education system has been over-feminized by its tendency to reward the behavior more common to girls and to punish that more likely to be shared by young male students. "The Trouble with Boys" offers solutions and possible corrective measures that need to be adopted before another generation of men is doomed to second class status.

As Tyre points out, this country simply cannot afford to write off half of the population if it is to successfully compete in the global economy of the future. Advocates of equality for women may be concerned by any new emphasis on the same for men, fearing that the infamous pendulum will once again swing too far before stopping. But, as Tyre emphasizes, that is not what anyone is proposing or expecting; this is simply a matter of true equality for both sexes, a goal that will benefit all of us.

"The Trouble with Boys" makes a strong case that something must be done quickly in order to correct the biggest problem now facing this country's school system. It should be read by parents (regardless of whether they have boys or girls), school teachers and administrators, and everyone concerned about the future. It is a good place at which to begin the conversation - read it and pass it on to others before we waste another generation of young men. It is time that we quit treating boys as "defective girls."